Media’s into the gasp quotient

In fact even here, in India, we have become a trifle immune to sordid tales of the rich and famous. Probably it is because of the barrage of stories we have been subjected to in recent years: a socialite jumping off a hotel terrace, a model committing suicide over thwarted matrimony, a tennis star cheating on his girlfriend, not to speak of film stars in brawls, running over people, shooting protected animals, liaising with gangsters, so on and so forth.

Fifteen years ago, it would have been hard to imagine any of these stories making it to the media. If at all they did, they would have graced the covers of Blitz, Stardust or other sensation-seeking publications. Today, of course, things are different. With even a film star’s wedding rating wall-to-wall coverage, it is but to be expected that news of a more tantalising nature would make the headlines. And stay there, weeks on end.

And, yet, despite the snowballing tabloidisation of the media there have been some unstated rules so far. Any canny reader/viewer would have noticed that the powerful in the country are not subject to the kind of scrutiny that many other sections of society (film stars and models, for example) are. We, in India, for unexplained reasons have always been coy about publicising the shenanigans and peccadilloes of our politicians. We may gossip about them, but we will not write about them. The same seems to apply to religious heads, corporate honchos and certain others.

Partly this is because the shift from the political to the personal is still a somewhat recent phenomenon here. The media is still somewhere between the old world of straight reporting and its priorities and the new one of gossip and relentless exposure. Many of these influential citizens, particularly those in the public sphere. have understood the present-day journalist’s queasy positioning. They have also, by actively courting the media, by a subtle reward strategy (interviews only for positive publicity), or just by virtue of their positions, managed to avoid criticism if not putting themselves across as perennially gush-worthy objects.

With our season of recent silliness, though, all this may be set to change. The media has tasted blood. It may not go back to the old ways that easily. Not when there is so much rich fodder for the picking. If I was an Indian politician, I would have reason to be very worried.

If I was an Indian politician, I would also be worried about a show that is making waves on television. Indian Idol may not yet be the big thing its producers are hyping it to be but, by all accounts, the show is catching on — not surprising given how easy it is to get any Indian to break into song. But ‘Indian Idol’ is no ordinary music contest. For those who are not familiar with the programme — based on a wildly popular international format — it is a competition in which contestants, with their singing ability and presentation vie to be the ‘Indian Idol’; there are judges in the early rounds, but winners are selected by home audiences phoning in their votes.

The show has the potential to showcase the vibrancy and wide appeal of our indigenous pop culture; it will also pit — and this will get clearer as the contest gets hotter — towns and states against each other through individual singers. More Americans vote for an Idol, it is said, than they do for a president. If this is true then the pundits and newscasters missed an intriguing contradiction in their analysis of the recent presidential election. If George Bush’s victory was a victory, as many suggested, of conservative, religious, family-oriented America, then how do they explain that the last American Idol was a Black, school dropout and teenage single mother?