Opinion Guys,dont erupt
A Manish Tewari moment in news TV fragments
When India TV deploys two journalists to comprehensively report on water-logging in front of Amitabh Bachchans Mumbai house,you are not surprised. Thats what India TV does. When Star TVs on-screen captions brusquely and brutally summarises Bastille Day as the day when prisoners were freed from Bastille (a bit more happened,actually) and when those captions also say that July 14 was the day France won its freedom (from whom?),you are not surprised. When history is put through the mill of live news TV,Star TV is one of the places you would expect to see the most interesting outcomes of that process.
But you are surprised,stunned,as a matter of fact,when a Pakistani guest on Times Now he was referring to the Balochistan-related lines in the Indo-Pak joint statement says for every Hafiz Sayeed in Pakistan there are a dozen in India,and Times Now carries on as if this is just another TV chat. Cmon Times Now,or at least give us a fair warning.
How are we supposed to know that you have quit doing the news TV equivalent of flying the flag,manning the border and hunting the bad guys? Even those of us not in need of evening news version of patriotism turn to Times Now for a few minutes when its Indo-Pak time. Its fun. But on a channel where many sensible Pakistani points of view have been met with a rapid-fire indignation from the anchors,the one Pakistani intervention they have one Hafiz,we have many that deserved to be shot down went uncommented. Whats happening? Is lasting peace round the corner?
But thats not my QOTW (question of the week,but one that cant be answered by SMS poll) for CNN-IBN. My question is why does almost every edition of Face the Nation these days,irrespective of the issue the nation is made to face with,deliver terribly fragmented chatter. Theres grim predictability in this. May be,even by Indian news TV standards,there are too many anchor interventions. May be,some of the mid-discussion anchor summaries are puzzling. May be,the SMS poll question doesnt help. The questions are frequently silly,given the standard complexities of news in India,and seem to affect the quality of the chatter.
Has Mayawati been wronged,Face the Nation asked while chatting about UPs latest BSP versus Congress imbroglio. The answer is obviously yes,if the story was only about Rita Bahugunas speech. Do you need a half hour TV show to determine that? But was the story only about that speech? No. Then,why allow a silly question to frame the show?
The king of fragmentary TV talk,I reckon,is We the People (NDTV). Last Sunday,We the People asked we the viewers to contemplate whether feudalism lurks beneath democratic Indias surface. Many people spoke,some laughed,although no one cried,there were completely random observations and you couldnt remember one thing you heard ten seconds after the show ended. Even Manish Tewari of the Congress,who uses big words like filibustering in slightly inappropriate contexts,didnt look his usual self.
But to Tewari goes the prize this week for the best inadvertent comment: on Times Now,he told BSPs Satish Mishra,dont erupt. Yes,of course,he meant dont interrupt. But its just so beautifully apt for news TV: guys,dont erupt.
saubhik.chakrabarti@expressindia.com
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