Opinion Breaking down news: Hands up
Black money has left everyone red in the face
The pillorying of BJP spokesman Sambit Patra has begun. Remembering him on counting day, after the general election? “Our loin is roaring everywhere while their loin is skulking.” Times have changed. Now, the loin of Times Now is roaring over the government’s failure to bring back black money from the vaults under Zurich’s streets. “Terrible, terrible,” chided Arnab Goswami.
“Arnab, don’t question the intention of the government,” warned Patra.
“Why not, is it banned, censored?”
“I’m telling you why not, if you allow me…”
“Already, Gaurav Bhatia (of the SP) wants to rebut.”
“What does he want to rebut when I haven’t completed a simple sentence?”
“He raised his hand. It’s OK, don’t get upset,” said Goswami. And then, as Patra spluttered, he rubbed it in: “Mr Patra, one second — one of the more obvious ways of saying that you are on the defensive is to speak over everybody else so that you provide this constant audio…” It sounded dreadfully autobiographical.
The instant caffeinated nature of television news confused the black money issue somewhat. What exactly does “sharing” mean? Almost all channels took it to mean wide dissemination, like sticking it on Pastebin. And neither Goswami nor his viewer could understand why sharing with the Supreme Court was problematic but sharing with its SIT was not. In the midst of the din, Barkha Dutt snagged a surprise exclusive with Justices Shah and Pasayat of the SIT declared that the investigation would get to the bottom of everything, wherever it was. But when? These things go on forever.
“Rajnath rap gets top cop moving”, read the rocking headline in the print partner of Headlines Today, to go with a story about the home minister that its group and CNN-IBN played up. But it wasn’t about the police failures which led to the situation in Delhi’s Trilokpuri, which marked 30 years of its tryst with communal riots with the first serious bout of violence since the anti-Sikh riots. The Delhi Police report to the central home ministry, and Rajnath Singh could have been suitably outraged. But no, he had hauled up Delhi Police Commissioner BS Bassi for presiding over a filthy police HQ littered with dilapidated cars seized in remote antiquity. Really, in comparison to the sparkling new Swachh Bharat, non-violence looks so 20th century.
After the shakeups earlier this year, news television is rebranding itself. The relatively new Live India has its most visible faces do this soap-like head-turn and gaze into the camera, along with soap-like effects possibly sampled off SoundCloud. Everybody’s been there and done that, right from the days when NDTV discovered that people watch anchors, not TV. All that remains is to tinker with the exact slowness of the slo-mo. But IBN7 has gone beyond that meridian to sell the diversity of voices it offers through a network of 2,000 reporters on the ground. They may have counted hundreds of innocent bystanders. Honest mistake.
Meanwhile, the guys in ties on the business channels can’t get over the incredible rise of D-Street (no, that isn’t D-Company’s address) this week as both the Sensex and the Nifty breached new barriers. At 27,358 and 8,181, they weren’t psychologically arresting, though. The markets breach something every other week and the ties and suits still get orgasmic. And they usually forget to mention that markets generally fall before the close of trading.
This week, for once, the prime minister’s entertainment stock has slumped momentarily. Following the rather dated advice of the Ventures, he has walked. He could have run for unity to celebrate Sardar Patel, but he preferred to talk. And talk. But at least he made it clear that the nation’s “first pracharak” is still on the march.
pratik.kanjilal@expressindia.com
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