Opinion Express View on Gitanjali Aiyar: Sepia-tinted news

In the late Sixties-early Seventies when the likes of Gitanjali Aiyar, Minu Talwar, Rini Simon, Neethi Ravindran, Tejeshwar Singh, JB Raman, Salma Sultan and Sunit Tandon appeared on state-owned Doordarshan, news from around the country — and slowly, the world — filtered into living rooms with a propriety that is now sepia-tinted in public memory. With their crisp attire, impeccable diction, modulated voices and a studied restraint on individual preferences and sympathies that would seem quite out of place today, this was an era when the 9 pm news was prime time in its true sense. The passing of Aiyar, 71, one of the country’s earliest news readers, on Wednesday, brought back memories of those gentler, even if more stolid, times when news was more information and less noise, when state control meant less diversity, but when social media had not yet made it into a drama of relentless one-upmanship and face-offs.

As the rise of a polarising politics and a partisan media feed off each other, and as social media amplifies the shrillness, there is no glory in mere information anymore. It is opinion that counts, and louder is better. Outrage is a tool kit that is good for TRPs, an us-vs-them narrative that can be bolstered by articulating leading rhetorical questions in deafening decibels to reel sympathisers and unsuspecting viewers in.

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This is what makes the sober ground achieved by Aiyar and her colleagues striking. In the absence of private players in the early days, a state-controlled newsroom came with its own restrictions but the compulsion of generating profit and getting ahead of competitors — the crucible of private channels — was not one of them. That sense of security, perhaps, was crucial to the grace that Aiyar and her contemporaries brought to news reading, setting up standards for what anchoring could be like — a place of calm where, at its best, contrarian views could also be parked without much ado. That legacy, of news without the showboating and jostling, will be missed.