Rally For Sanity

While watching Deepika and Sonam Kapoor gossip about Ranbeer last Sunday on Koffee with karan, I suddenly was hit by a realization that whiling away my time in mundane things was making me intellectually drained. So to build up on my general knowledge I decided to check upon what is the news for the day, and switched onto the news channels. The first one I checked flashed breaking news and so I stopped by to check, only to find out that all the conundrum was being caused by a guy who had decided to do a Dharmendra and had climbed up a TV tower to call for his girlfriend. Breaking news…?? I wondered. Alright, I need some real news, I thought, and so I flipped the channels to stop on another one which had a heated debate going on about whether Rakhi Sawant should get the prime time slot, or should she be relegated to after 11. Bewildered at the dearth of news on these news channels, I decided to check the international networks in my quest for information, and so, I flipped to CNN. “Peering into the royal purse” was the headline, and what Her majesty carried in her purse, was what the panellists were arguing upon. Utterly disappointed, my urge to build upon my IQ went down the drain, and I flipped back to the only thing that I thought made sense on TV that night, Koffee wid karan, and was compelled to write this piece as my clarion cry for rationality.
24 hour news media, as we know it, has become known for its breaking news and developing stories. The 24 hours news cycle is built on one particular thing, generating viewership, but how to get stories to generate that? There is not much you can talk about for 24 hours, so how to keep the viewers, the TRPs and consequentially the advertising revenues coming? Well, the news media seem to have found a formula for that. They elevate the passion of everything that happens, mundane and irrelevant, to make it a “Breaking News”. As time speeds up in our text-and-Twitter culture, news is perpetually pressured to come out fresh, and nothing sticks out fresher than breaking sensationalism. Consequentially, as these breaking news and the developing stories flood the news network, the media is reduced to becoming a circus with everything exaggerated and packaged in flashy content.
The essence of the issue here lies in the fact that 24 hours news networks have lost all sense of proportionality. There is no proportion to how much coverage they give to any of the pieces they carry. The Kala Bandar case gets the same coverage space as the massacre in Dantewada does. As a result you begin to lose the lexicon, the essence of urgent stories and breaking news. The real stories then have to become louder to cut through the noise. Which is a shame really, because this is how media loses its purpose. The media should be a platform which serves to articulate and bring into focus, the intangible feeling of the common man whose voice is idealist but impotent. Instead, it today is serving to provide fodder to satirists who write hour long pieces gimmicking the fools errand that media has gone on to become.
For those who argue that media does debate upon real political issues as well, I have a question. Does a political debate only center around left and right wing, and dynamics of political alliances and disjoints?? We see news networks speculating about which party will win which constituency. But we hardly catch any stories voicing the issues and the troubles of the people in those constituencies. Things go beyond left and right for media to cover. Unfortunately, the media has become too polarised to see that. Instead of being ones with a point of view, they are fast becoming partisans of some of the political parties. The news media should represent a more balanced center, where journalists analyze the facts. But expecting analytical, independent, and objective reporting from the media today is fast becoming like living in Utopia.
So as the news channels sit and brood over the right concoction of sensation, sleaze and news to show, I sit and remember the good old DD days, where the sari clad news anchors were there to abreast the world with the latest, and not just to increase the glam quotient on TV, which seems to be the sole motive of the Reid and Tailor clad news anchors today. Ours is a nation of rallies, so what’s needed perhaps is a rally for rationality this time. A rally, which urges for the restoration of sanity in the media today. For it is as Jon Stewart puts it “The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus, illuminating issues here to for unseen. Or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire, and then, perhaps, host a week of shows on the sudden unexpected dangerous flaming ant epidemic. If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.”