Striking reflections in a vase

You channel-wallahs pay drivers only Rs 4,0008221;, CPM8217;s Dipankar Mukherjee said twice on Times Now8217;s evening news show; Thursday8217;s strike was the topic of the moment. I wish Time Now anchors had taken on Mukherjee on this point. The going rate for drivers8217; salaries in the organised sector in Delhi is most likely more than Rs 4,000, even when, as is the norm these days, drivers are not directly employed but are employees of a car hire agency. My personal experience suggests that the monthly salary for agency-recruited contract drivers employed in media organisations and call centres is between Rs 6,000-Rs 7,000. If that8217;s the case, Mukherjee should have been asked whether he defines an annual income of around Rs 84,000 as exploitative 8212; he was of course talking about reforms and exploitation 8212; in a country where the annual per capita income is less than Rs 30,000. Also, whether he thinks the huge increase in demand for skilled jobs at the lower end of the labour market would have been possible without reforms-related increase in economic activity. Would the young men who drive TV channel-hired vehicles been better off as unskilled manual workers?

Any or some of these questions would have pepped up an already-lively discussion. I liked Times Now8217;s discussion format. The anchors allowed the panelists to complete five or six sentences at a stretch. The panelists were not allowed to interrupt each other. I don8217;t know whether Times Now was paying a compliment to Suhel Seth8217;s television skills by pitting him against not one but two communist leaders Mukherjee and CPI8217;s Gurudas Dasgupta, looking angry and sleepy at the same time. Suhel was watchably combative and the communists were willing participants in the market for trading acceptable insults 8212; dinosaurial from Suhel to the communists, Page 3 from the communists to Suhel.

Mukherjee was less lively on CNN-IBN8217;s discussion on the same issue. Perhaps, that8217;s because CNN-IBN8217;s discussion was less lively. There8217;s arguably a couple of useful tips CNN-IBN and NDTV 8212; the two English language news channels I turn to first 8212; could take from Times Now8217;s handling of a panel. One of them is that panelists, not anchors, should define a discussion. During the Times Now discussion on strikes, it was possible to forget for some time that there were anchors, and that does credit to the Times Now journalists in charge. This pleasant illusion is an impossibility in CNN-IBN8217;s and NDTV8217;s prime time news-driven evening shows.

One-on-one interviews, of course, are different, and the journalist asking the questions necessarily needs to be more interventionist. There, NDTV and CNN-IBN do a lot better and Times Now8217;s heavily-promoted interview-based show can learn a lot. Times Now seems partial to extreme close-ups of the interviewer and interviewee. This mostly doesn8217;t work because the visual excess 8212; a two-full-faces-screen 8212; gets in the way of aural comprehension. Plus, there8217;s the crystal ? vase. The vase was a singularly intrusive third person singular when Times Now was interviewing Rajnath Singh. What8217;s it supposed to do 8212; catch the interviewee8217;s myriad reflections?