It ain’t so cute when hunters are hunted, is it?

“This is Sunidhi reporting! It’s Dr Prannoy Roy. He just got down from his Merc close to Khan Market. I can’t believe my luck. The aging ‘Father of Indian television’ is still so handsome! He has started walking towards Khan Market. Prannoy’s car is driving past the market. Wait! What do I see? A sweet little thing wearing a scarf and goggles has just got down around 100 metres past the market, crossed over to the other side, and is now walking  back. My God! Wait till you hear this! The curvaceious beauty waved to Prannoy who is already there waiting for her. They have gone inside. This is exciting stuff. A story is breaking right here! Over to you.”

Studio anchor: “It definitely is! Who is this mystery girl? Can you describe her to our viewers?”

Reporter:”It is already dark here and you know how the streetlights near Khan Market are!! She is wearing a pair of Levi’s Jeans and a Versace blue top. She looks like the Delhi socialite who was seen with the Roys last New Year Party. I am not sure. It’s possible she could be the Bengali Bollywood heroine. Only she has the guts to wave from a distance in public.”

Studio anchor: “Keep a watch and get back if you see anything interesting.”

After a few hours…

“Sunidhi again from the Sheraton parking lot. They have just entered the coffee shop. Still I can’t make out who she is. She is wearing a cashmere shawl now. She also looks like Maharani Gayatri Devi’s grand daughter- I am not sure though.”

Studio anchor: “Get the dope on all the three girls and check them out. Must beat other channels and splash it at 9 pm headlines.”

Reporter:”Okay. Meanwhile you can go ahead and splash it along. You can interpose some of Dr. PR ‘s earlier shots with coffee shop pictures and run it.”

Studio anchor:”We are already on air with Breaking News. Get us juicy stuff and some close-up shots.”

***

E.R. RAMACHANDRAN writes: How will this “juicy story” be if it is run, say on CNN-IBN and Times Now all day with headlines screaming ‘Father of Indian TV sowing wild oats’, interspersed with shots of his residence and family?

How will it sound if Vinod Mehta, Suhel Seth and Ramachandra Guha sit around in their Sunday best discussing it threadbare with Rajdeep Sardesai in ’Face the Nation’?

Will Roy & Co at least now understand how Rajesh Talwar and family felt when supposedly juicy details of the Aarushi-Hemraj murder were tapped by every half hour, for days and nights on end, with a scurrilous mixture of news, innuendo and insinuation?

Prannoy Roy’s name here is only for effect, and no offence is meant. Change it to Rajdeep Sardesai and run it on NDTV and Headlines Today. Or change it to Arnab Goswami walk and splash it on NDTV and Zee TV. The basic thrust of this fictitious story remains the same.

How will Radhika Roy or Sagarika Ghose feel if their husbands are tailed and ‘Breaking News’ stories made up and splashed in a hurry? Real and mostly imaginary tidbits discussed by a ‘panel of studio experts’?

Get the picture, gentlemen?

That is what is happening every hour by the hour for days and weeks at a stretch on Indian TV channels. You wear your TRPs on your sleeve and to get the magic numbers a combination of sex, sleaze, innuendo, trespassing, concoction is being whipped up.

When you are caught in the act of hurting innocent citizens, there’s not even an apology. There is just more discussion when the buck is passed on to the police bungling the case.

Is this journalism?

Why are the most prominent TV journalists in the country involved mostly in scoops and sensation-mongering? Have our TV whiz kids not heard of Darfur and Zimbabwe? Why are we always talking cinema, cricket and crime?

Can’t they come out with a couple of solutions for the Kashmir problem or the Maoist problem to solve it once and for all? Can’t they take up weightier issues of inflation and price rise that is affecting the common man? Etcetera.

Indian television are mostly busy with froth-in–mouth journalism chasing stars while the ordinary people are facing destiny’s cruel fate. Hunting has become a vicarious national game transgressing all borders of decency.

How would it be if the channel heads were the Hunted instead of being the Hunter? If their family members were hounded everywhere and life made impossible for them to live?

***

The real story behind the juicy story:

When the rookie correspondent finally got the juicy stuff, it wasn’t even overnight sadaa hua dal. Prannoy Roy was going to Khan Market to buy some household stuff. The new slipper of his cousin, , who was with him, was rubbing against her toe-nail causing discomfort and she drove past to see if it could be mended temporarily. Unfortunately the mochi who sits near Khan Market had packed off for the day and she walked back to Khan Market to meet Prannoy! They went to coffee shop for a bite. End of story.

Also read: Should the media apologise?

Give them what they want, even if it’s rubbish?

T.C.A. Srinivasa-Raghavan in Business Standard:

“The media business is the only one where, in the standard demand function comprising price, quality and taste, the last-mentioned plays the dominent role (after price which is, of course, always important).

“If consumer taste is predisposed towards rotten quality, should what constitutes good quality be re-examined? This, I think, is the central problem confronting the Indian media, where consumer preferences point, in the limit, only to the production of rubbish.”

Read the full column: The economics of bad media

Believe him, this is ‘Experiential Journalism’

“Experiential journalism” is a word that trips off the tongues of many Indian newspaper managers. Don’t just tell the story, bring alive the event “experientially” by becoming “a protagonist rather than a mere reporter”, they write in their jargon-filled memos to editors.

By this, the manager really means snap a few pictures of some havaldar taking a five-buck note rather than just write about how corrupt traffic constables are. Or get the sleazy conversations of some failed actor trying to taking a starlet to bed instead of just reporting the existence of a casting couch.

How’s “Waterboarding” for experiential journalism?

The aggressive torture technique being used by the United States to break down terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere has been reported ad nauseam by reporters, slammed by rights bodies, condmened by nations, and so on. But how does it really feel to be waterboarded?

Christopher Hitchens decided to find out first-hand. And reports his findings in the August issue of Vanity Fair.

Read the full story: Believe me, it’s torture

How the crude oil price spike spooked the media

Who’s to blame for the mounting crude oil prices? Oil producing countries? India and China for their voracious appetite? Speculators wanting to make a quick buck or ten?

In the latest episode of its media showThe Listening Post, hosted by Richard Gizbert, Al Jazeera English throws light on how the global media has failed to come to grips with a difficult but important issue.

Who decides what we should/shouldn’t watch?

News has not been in short supply in the global village in the satellite age.

There are the “Indian” English news channels: NDTV 24×7, CNN-IBN, Times Now, Headlines Today. And the Hindi news channels: Aaj Tak, Star News, NDTV India, IBN 7, DD News, India TV. And the language news channels: Udaya, Sun, Suvarna, TV9, Teja, IBN Lokmat. And the business news channels: CNBC-TV18, NDTV Profit, UTVi. And the “foreign” English news channels: CNN, BBC, Fox.

Why, in this veritable welter of vaartha, do we not receive Al Jazeera?

The ground-breaking Qatar-based Arabic channel launched an English version more than a year-and-a-half ago. Staffed with big names, not short of resources, and not short of good ideas, “Al-Jazeera English” provides a much-needed respite from the stuffiness of its western competitors and from the itsy-bitsyness of their Indian counterparts. Yet, few Indian homes receive the Arab view of the world.

And so, it transpires, don’t homes in the land of the free and the independent.

America’s ultra-patriotic cable networks have steadfastly refused to carry “Al Jazeera English”. Result: the channel is only available to those who choose to sample its fare online on YouTube, or buy a dish antenna.

The channel has been accused of “hate-mongering” towards Americans; of inciting “violence, hatred and murder” against Israelis and Jews; of waging a “soft, subtle, cultural jihad”; of being a propaganda tool—charges that could be flung on those making them with equal efficacy. Nonetheless, the manner in which Al Jazeera English has been blacked out in the United States raises the simple question: who decides what we should watch, and what we shouldn’t?

The tiny town of Burlington (population 39,000) in “liberal” Vermont is an exception (along with Toledo, Ohio). There, the City owns the cable network, and has been offering subscribers “Al Jazeera English”. After complaints from pro-Israeli groups, public hearings have been held, where those in favour of the channel outnumbered those against 6-1 and a decision will soon be made.

“Al Jazeera is an opportunity for us to learn more. If anyone doesn’t want to learn more, there is a simple solution: they can switch to a different channel.”

“There is a cable news network that I personally think if full of hatred, full of propaganda, full of half-truths, and that is Fox News.”

Cross-posted on churumuri

A comedian who was more than just a comedian

sans serif records with regret the demise of George Carlin, the gold standard for standup comedians in Santa Monica, California, on Sunday. He was 71.

Irreverent and strangely philosophical, Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words” comedy routine were central to the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court case F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation, in which a narrow 5-4 decision by the justices affirmed the government’s right to regulate Carlin’s act on the public airwaves.

Also read: George Carlin quotes

New York Times’ obituary

‘Seven words you can never say on TV’

‘Indian journalists take themselves too seriously’

‘A case of exploding mangoes,’ the fictional account of the mysterious death of Pakistani president General Zia-ul-Haq by Mohammed Hanif (in picture), the air force man turned journalist who now heads the BBC’s Urdu service in London, has been acclaimed as the fiction debut of the year. So far.

In an interview with Nikhil Lakshman, editor-in-chief of rediff.com and India Abroad, Hanif handles a series of email questions, including one on journalists, with aplomb:

Nikhil Lakshman: Unlike Indian writers who, to my mind, are incapable of achieving the heights of Swiftian satire which you have scaled, I am always amazed by the breathtaking verve with which Pakistani writers use satire to unveil the deficiencies and foibles of the Pakistani system. Do you think working within the limits enforced by military dictatorships and intolerant regimes like [Benazir] Bhutto’s and [Nawaz] Sharif’s have spawned a grand tradition of satire, to bypass censorship and the limits on free speech? Do you believe democracy is a deterrent to great satire?

Mohammed Hanif: I’ll happily swap this so-called grand tradition of satire for a semblance of democracy. But I think you are being unfair to Indian writers by suggesting they have no sense of humour. I think Vikram Chandra is very funny. I think Nayyar Masud has probably written the funniest and saddest stories I have read in any language.

I think more than fiction writers, it’s the Indian media, journalists like you and me, who take themselves very seriously, and try to do their nationalistic duty. We have got Manmohan Singh and Yousuf Raza Gillani for that purpose. We should let them get on with their jobs.

I also think equating dictatorships with the Bhutto and Sharif regimes is a bit unfair. It might look the same from the outside but there is a slight difference which we journalist tend to forget.

Read the full interview: ‘A mullah general can only happen in a Bollywood film’

Photograph: courtesy Random House

How media went overboard in Padmapriya case

A. NARAYANA writes from London: Enough and more has been said about the media’s overzealousness in the Padmapriya Bhat case.(The wife of a law-maker in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, Padmapriya went missing for three days and was later found dead in the national capital, New Delhi, 2500 km away.)

More than the overreach what also stood exposed was the regressive thinking—and the immaturity of men and women in the media—in their understanding of human lives and relationships.

In some cases, it was not just the media’s drive to sell more copies or clock up more TRPs which seemed to have prompted them to put out what they did.

In question is their very motive.

Consider these:

# “He has got an MA in sociology but what has he chosen to do?” questioned a headline in the Manipal edition of Udayavani, referring to Atul Rao, the aide of Udupi MLA Raghupati Bhat, even when no one knew the facts behind his role in her death.

And Udayavani wrote as if it was an established case of ‘Kidnap’ even after home minister V.S. Acharya’s own admission that it was a ‘half-kidnap’ case. He is yet to clarify what that ‘half’ really is. What was Udayavani’s source or motive in pronouncing prematurely that it was a case of kidnap?

# A Kannada Prabha report summarily suggested that it was a murder. On what basis?

#Vijaya Karnataka’s reporter questioned Padmapriya’s decision to discard “a life in which she had wealth and prestige”. “Idella bekitte (was all this required?)” he asks. How did the reporter know that the woman was happy in her marriage?

# The Hindu, of all the newspapers, found it fit to publish every word that Padmapriya’s mother uttered while grieving in front of her young daughter’s body, that too with the wrong translation from Tulu. These are the words every bereaved parent in such a situation would utter. Should they be published verbatim? Et tu, Hindu?

# Deccan Herald and Praja Vani are sister publications produced in the same building but while the English paper said Atul was an engineering diploma holder who resigned from his government job and did civil contracts, the Kannada paper report said Atul did his MA, continued in his government job and did contracts in his wife’s name. (However, it is also a fact the best matter-of-fact reports were filed by the Delhi bureau of these two newspapers.)

# All Kannada newspapers in their esteemed judgment started addressing Atul in the singular from day one while the police still maintained that he was only a witness and not an accused.

There are many more things that could be said about the media coverage of Padmapriya, its ethics, its calibre and its self-righteousness. But, more importantly, there is something to be said about the role of the State.

From the statements of the police and the home minister, it becomes amply clear that they came to know from the second day, if not the first day itself, that it was a case of strained personal relationships and Padmapriya chose to go to Delhi on her on volition.

If this was the case (and there is nothing on record to suggest otherwise so far), the State had absolutely no role to play except making it clear to the public what it came to know.

Going by the facts of the case known as of today, it is also a case of the State exceeding its limits to save an MLA of the ruling party from what would have been considered in our society a loss of face for him.

(A. Narayana is a scholar at the Institute of Development Studies, UK)

Photograph: Karnataka Photo News

Also read: 20 unanswered questions in l’affaire Padmapriya

Cross-posted on churumuri

A voice, a face, a legend is gone: RIP

Tim Russert, the chubby but stern face of American political journalism, “the greatest political interviewer of our time and maybe all time,” has passed away after a “sudden heart attack”. He was 58.

Moderator of the flagship Sunday morning program Meet the Press and the Washington bureau chief of NBC, the proud son of a garbage-collector was recording voiceovers for tomorrow’s broadcast when he collapsed. Author of two best-selling books, Big Russ and me and Wisdom of our Fathers, Russert was on Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world this year, at No. 72.

Larry King, the host of CNN’s eponymous interview show, said in tribute:

“He had the ability to walk with kings, and to walk with the guy picking up your laundry. He was Tim the Irish guy.”

Read the New York Times obituary

Time magazine appreciation

James Fallows on Tim Russert

Jack Shafer on how to beat Tim Russert

‘Is abusing politicians the nation’s agenda?’

Harinder Baweja of Tehelka buttonholes Rajat Sharma, the editor-in-chief of India TV that sits on top of the heap of Hindi news channels, with its mix of sleaze, superstition, and “a host of other debatable tricks” that has left its seven competitors playing catch up:

# TV viewership is like a game of cricket. There was a time when Tests were a big hit… Now it is Twenty-20. The content has to change with time, even at the risk of being criticised by other colleagues in the media industry.

# We have changed the definition of news. If people still think that politicians cutting ribbons is news, those days are behind us. And (so are) speeches made in the parliament.

# We are in the business of news and only news. But today, entertainment has become big news.

# What is the agenda of the country? Is it only to keep abusing politicians? Is it only to show long speeches and ribbon cuttings? We have set the agenda.

# At my daily meeting with the editorial team, I tell them “go for the kill”. Don’t do a story that will make me or the chief producer or you happy; do one that will make the viewers happy. This is the formula. Go for the viewer. Speak for them.

Read the full interview: ‘I’ve a channel that tops the ratings. I’m not ashamed.’

Photograph: courtesy India TV