When words spoke louder than action on TV

Reporting on an event featuring Manmohan Singh and Amartya Sen, CNN-IBN flashed a sentence: 8216;8216;Man bites Doc8217;8217;.

I chanced across a lot of quirky things on TV news last week. Some of them were funny. CNN8217;s story on an American husband on strike because his wife wouldn8217;t ask their children to sleep in a different bedroom. Aaj Tak8217;s story on cops in Bareilly, UP, presiding over the marriage of runaway lovers; the police had first arrested the man on complaints of abduction by the woman8217;s parents.

Some of the stories were intriguing. Aaj Tak visiting a village on the Bengal-Bangladesh border gated off by the BSF for security reasons, with the result that no politician ever goes to campaign there and nothing ever gets done. CNN-IBN tracking down a blind man in Bihar who seeks alms so that he can help poor women get married and build temples and mosques.

Even some of the political reporting was quirky. Atal Behari Vajpayee visited Lucknow around the same time as Sonia Gandhi demonstrated in Rae Bareli how easy re-election can be. Vajpayee was slugged 8216;8216;BJP leader8217;8217; in some TV news reports. 8216;8216;BJP leader8217;8217;8212;like Kalyan Singh or Lalji Tandon or Vijay Kumar Malhotra.

Competitive politics can be brutal. If your party keeps losing the plot after you have lost the election, if your party doesn8217;t know what to do with you, you may even lose an unexceptionable tag like 8216;8216;former prime minister8217;8217;. Sonia should probably be slugged 8216;8216;like a former prime minister8217;8217;. That should help news anchors make fewer excited references to how much she resembles her mother-in-law.

Quirky, too, was Varghese Kurien, interviewed on CNN-IBN. I never lost in any battle because I was always right, Kurien said with wonderful and slightly alarming self-assurance. The Kurien interview was good television. The reporter didn8217;t jump in during the pauses in Kurien8217;s answers. Some of the pauses, in fact, were an essential part of the answer: Asked about the quality of present political leadership, Kurien said the Finance Minister pause, he is a good man; the Prime Minister pause, he is good; the President slightly longer pause, he8217;s good.

So, who8217;s not good, is a question I thought was pleading to be asked. Knowing Kurien, the answer may have generated a couple of headlines.

But the quirkiest thing I saw was a sentence across the screen when CNN-IBN was reporting on an event attended by Manmohan Singh and Amartya Sen. 8216;8216;Man bites Doc8217;8217;, I read. I have a simple question. How did that get in? That punning is a low art doesn8217;t make it abhorrent for journalism. When, for example, the Economist some years back captioned a pro-Nafta demonstration, 8216;8216;Nafta we hafta, or have problems thereafta8217;8217;, only the most sadly conservative grammarians among its readers would not have chuckled.

Story continues below this ad

8216;8216;Man bites Doc8217;8217; is not only not funny, not only is it silly, it was stupendously irrelevant given the story, which was really about a prime minister and a celebrated intellectual saying a lot of nice, grave things in a nice, pleasant setting.

Appalled as I was, I still didn8217;t think if the 8216;8216;poor dears8217;8217; of TV journalism were 8216;8216;a little less shallow and8230;a little more thoughtful and educated, the cause of the media would be better served8217;8217;. These marvelously malevolent adjectives are courtesy a CNN-IBN journalist, whose letter on Express media columnists was published in this newspaper on March 29. Would that the critic had substantively critiqued what we try to do.