From News to Noise

Meanwhile,a media storm was raging out there in the world. We learned about it in 1992,when the skies opened up to baffle us with multiple choices. Dallas,Santa Barbara or Doogie Howser,MD? When Dr Howser met Krishi Darshan,Mr Darshan got the worst of the encounter and was banished to the obscure hell of shortwave radio,where he had always belonged. And our entertainment quotient spiralled. In the Indian race memory,the birth of cable TV is a simplistic creation myth in which the happening triumphs over the boring to refresh the world. Like all creation myths,it is fanciful. Because the real harbinger of cable was not entertainment. It was news.

India got its first taste of cable TV by proxy a year before Star launched in February 1992. Twelve months earlier,Cable News Network had rolled into Baghdad ahead of the myrmidons of Desert Storm,reached a billion viewers across the world and institutionalised 24215;7 news. Indias almost-billion population could not swell the figures because we still had no cable TV. We shared in the experience by proxy. Newspapers set up special bureaus in leading hotels which had CNN dishes,where journalists soaked up the worlds first war made for television. Their reports appeared on the front pages with the byline,CNN Monitoring Team. Its hard to believe these days,but they were avidly read.

That 24215;7 conflict coverage wartime reality porn created the CNN effect,an endless feedback loop in which Washington and news TV vied to control policymaking and drove it wider and wider off course. That ever-inconclusive contest was a curtain-raiser for other pathologies that were to follow,like trial by media.

In India,24215;7 news has enabled new flavours of politics,and even anti-politics,whose validity is yet untested. Justice for Jessica and candles at Wagah were each landmark movements,stirring the middle class out of the defeatist torpor of half a century and encouraging it to engage in democratic,issue-based politics. These proofs of concept fuelled the groundswell in favour of Anna Hazares movement,which was made for television. And which finally degenerated into an intolerant,peevish attack on all institutions,even parliamentary democracy itself,without offering any alternatives.

The other great pathology is invasive media,though it has not brought India as low as some of the Western countries. It was seen at its worst in the Aarushi murder case,in which Hindi news channels in particular played judge,jury and executioner. Some TV executives and editors are going to burn in hell for that. It was especially unexpected behaviour since Indian news media has generally respected privacy. We have no organised paparazzi culture. Let alone ordinary people,we do not pry into the family lives of our political and corporate leadership,unless it has a bearing on public life.

But perhaps we have pulled back from the edge of the Aarushi precipice. Because when privacy was requested for Sonia Gandhis recent visit to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre,everyone but Narendra Modi,who enjoys pushing the envelope of propriety,laid off.

But to return to the beginning,when did cable TV actually come to India? In a sense,the phenomenon predated the laying of cable,and Im not talking about the CNN monitoring teams here. The culture of cable news came to India with Newstrack,a video magazine created for Doordarshan in 1988. But the babus had reservations about some of the programming the very first issue speculated if VP Singh would make a good PM and carried reviews of Ensemble,Indias first haute couture store,and the film Bhayanak Mahal. Newstrack turned to videotape and lending libraries and became a hit.

In terms of format,Newstrack and Prannoy Roys The World This Week on Doordarshan laid the ground for contemporary TV news. And looking back,nothing much has changed in the last two decades,except that everyone has turned up the volume control all the way. We have forgotten that TV is primarily to be seen,not heard.