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India’s most-watched TV news show at 9 pm is, pinch yourself, DD News!
Hindustan Times reports in its gossip columns that News Night:
“the primetime news show [on DD News] between 9 pm and 10 pm topped the TAM ratings last week with 66% market share, four times the channel which comes next.”
Interesting, if true.
And if true, the numbers below, which also use TAM ratings, become interesting.
Also read: Lots of people watch Lok Sabha TV. Surprised?
As news channels bend backwards to give flight to Narendra Modi‘s prime ministerial ambitions, the Indian Express‘ television critic, Pratik Kanjilal, writes on the Mukesh Ambani-controlled Network 18‘s unquestioning schmoozefest with the Gujarat chief minister:
“Modi also addressed a business forum in Kolkata, but the big one was the multimedia love-feast organised by Network 18.
“TV, blow by blow Web updates, social media, the works, with Modi hosted by Sanjay Pugalia, one of the first television journalists, and the discussion led by media entrepreneur Raghav Bahl.
“With no trace of journalistic scepticism, this was a promo. The guest was so much at ease that he asked after Sagarika Ghose and Rajdeep Sardesai. It’s sobering to recall that Sardesai had done excellent street-to-street reporting on the Gujarat violence of 2002.”
Read the full column: Twitter alert
Also read: ‘For cash-stuck TV, Modi fetches TRPs’
S.M.A. Kazmi, the Urdu and Persian journalist arrested in February 2012 for his alleged involvement in the attack on an Israeli embassy vehicle, and released on bail eight months later, is set to launch an Urdu daily titled Quami Salamati (national security).
In an interview in the latest issue of Tehelka magazine, Kazmi answers what is now a standard question for journalists held and released on “terror” charges:
What is your view of the current state of journalism in India?
The media, both in India and other countries, is full of non-issues to keep people from thinking. In India, we sit in front of TV news channels for hours without having heard any news. At least a Doordarshan or an AIR bulletin gives out information. There is a set of journalists I call ‘poultry eggs’. They do stories the way editors tell them to. Reading newspapers in custody, though, I still have hope for the print media. It is more responsible.
Photograph: courtesy Tehelka
Read the full interview: ‘My arrest was psychological warfare’
Also read: Nine lessons a terror-suspect journo learnt in jail
Shailaja Bajpai in the Indian Express:
“If it’s Saturday, it must be Narendra Modi. If it’s Sunday, it must be Modi. If it’s Monday, it must be Modi and even if it’s Tuesday, it must be Modi. You get the general drift?
“Every day is Modi-day on television news. One morning, they telecast his speech live from Ahmedabad, then it’s Delhi, followed by Kolkata. Boy, does the chief minister of Gujarat get around. Looks like he’s on a Bharat darshan and TV news is on Modi darshan.
“The media is, quite literally, the medium for his message….
“It suits the media to promote Modi, and not only because he’s the front-runner in BJP’s prime ministerial race. At a time when advertising is becoming a serious concern for many news channels and TRAI is trying to restrict advertising to 12-minutes per hour on TV, they need to keep costs down.
“And like every other malaise that afflicts the country, Modi seems to offer a cure: he’s charismatic but contentious and therefore generates conflict and strong reactions — ideal for TV. He offers high viewership at low cost for cash-strapped TV news.”
Read the full article: Much ado about Modi
The Congress-led UPA’s election-eve attempt—like the BJP-led NDA’s attempt in 2004—to revive Doordarshan News has come a cropper.
The Indian Express has an editorial:
“Less than two months after a splashy advertisement campaign championing Doordarshan’s new-look daily prime-time news bulletin, Ajai Shukla, the anchor/editor of its English-language segment, has put in his papers. The resignation follows recent circulars ordering that the content and guests for each bulletin be first run past Doordarshan officials, as clear a declaration of censorial intent as there can be.
“This unwillingness to walk even the first baby steps in allowing controlled autonomy to the national channel — in freeing it of daily interference — simply reinforces the popular distrust of any claim by Doordarsan to be neutral and free.
“The I&B ministry has a sport of choice, to keep inquiring into ways in which viewers can be attracted to Doordarshan, but its experiments will keep coming to naught till it reckons with the bottomline. It is this: when viewers fail to flock to the channel, it is not veracity of the news put out by the channel that is in question. It is their scepticism that the news is in any way whole, that what is being presented is the full picture.
“Whichever way the government may spin the current controversy from here, that scepticism has been shown to be proper caution. What an ironic end to an exercise intended to prove the very opposite.”
Read the full editorial: Very costly experiment
Times Now editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami has done the unthinkable.
After resisting the charms of social media for seven years, the social anthropologist from Oxford has joined his colleagues, competitors and compatriots in Twitterosophere, reports The UnReal Times.
Above is a screenshot of his first tweet; below is his second.
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Read the full story: Arnab Goswami on Twitter
Follow Arnab Goswami on Twitter: @arnabgoswami
Also read: What is sans serif?
Last week, Cobra Post, the website run by the investigative journalist Aniruddha Bahal made public “Operation Red Spider”, its sting operation into alleged money-laundering by HDFC, Axis and ICICI banks.
This week, in Open magazine, Bahal answers a couple of questions on the media treatment of the story.
The story is significant, but failed to create a furore, don’t you think?
We can’t say that. Most news channels took it live. There were live debates on every channel. However, the conduct of business papers and channels was disappointing. For them, this story should have been of overwhelming importance, which was apparently not the case. We need to examine the reasons for it.
It poses a question on the credibility of business journalism in India.
Not one journalist from a business paper or news channel contacted me for a detailed briefing on the scam. This tells you where their hearts and minds are. They are PR mouthpieces of establishment.
Photograph: courtesy The Hindu
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Aakar Patel: ‘Indian journalism is regularly second-rate’
SEBI chief: Business journalism or business of journalism?
Raju Narisetti: ‘Good journalists, poor journalism, zero standards’
The advertising share of television, radio and digital is growing, while it is shrinking rapidly for newspapers and magazines. That is the bottomline of these graphics from The Economic Times, partially explaining why the media is in its current shape.
Stunningly, the top advertising category in 2012, both in print and on TV, is “social advertisements”, in other words government advertisements extolling the virtues of one or the other social welfare scheme. In 2005, it used to be toilet soaps and two-wheelers.
Read the full story: Trends in ad world
In Open magazine, Madhavankutty Pillai continues his occassional poems on news anchors. This week, his ode is directed at Sagarika Ghose, the host of Face the Nation on CNN-IBN:
Salutations, mistress of the echo
Blest with the force
Of eyes widening
until they greet the other
Of eyebrows leaping
like trampoline artists together
Reveal to us thy secret
How do you make
An answer’s last line
The next question
In the exact same words
Without a moment’s break
Goddess of ceaseless blinks
Queen-consort
Of the nightly misgivings
Anguished liberal voice
—notched up somewhat—
Guiding us from the rink
Loudest of the loud
We offer thee our ear drums
Partake it as oblation
Be generous with thy mercies
Rain down quiet on us
Shanti (blink) Shanti (blink) Shanti (blink)
Also read: Poems on anchors: this week Karan Thapar
On international women’s day, the newspapers are replete with advertisements and supplements marking the occasion.
Rajya Sabha TV, however, takes the cake with an advertisement (above) in most newspapers that shows the faces of all 42 women employees of the channel, from peon to boss, from reporters to editors (and guest co-ordinators).
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In the Indian Express, Prasar Bharati Corporation chief Mrinal Pande (a former editor of the now-defunct Hindi magazine Vama and the Hindi daily Hindustan), writes :
“When I was about to launch a Hindi monthly for women, men in charge of the marketing section in a major publishing house explained to me between much clearing of throats and sideways glances that it was fine if I insisted my magazine would not promote Miss India contests but that a good and saleable women’s magazine must not give women disturbing notions about self-worth, etc.
“What women actually want from their magazines, they said, was readable and brightly illustrated material on food, child rearing, knitting, stitching and some romantic fiction. They also confirmed that since over three-quarters of women’s magazines were bought by men (they had better access to the vending joints and liked to vet what the mothers and sisters read at home), the faces on the covers must be fair and female.
“A cover story on rape experienced by girls in middle-class families was bitterly criticised as being fictional. These barbaric things, madam, I was told, happen only in the jhuggi-jhopris, not among people like us.”
Read the full article: Myth of bra-burning feminists
