From the news theatres

The year began with another media extravaganza. In Jaipur, during the over crowded and over hyped Rajasthan Literary festival. Closing into Oprah Winfrey, the 24 hour television channels and their print counterparts, were sufficiently distracted from the Talk show queen by a bunch of mullahs demanding the head of author Salman Rushdie. The organisers who had announced his participation on their website, following a personal request from Rushdie, who did not want to be left out of the publicity, suddenly found that they had attracted the attention of a group of unemployed clerics. And before they could react, the media had got wind of it, and suddenly the Rushdie saga erupted on television screens as anchors took moralistic positions, and calibrated debates and discussions soon blew the entire affair out of proportion.

The result was that more and more clerics attached themselves to the free publicity they were getting, and soon it almost began to seem that mobs were collecting outside the festival venue to behead the author of Satanic Verses. By the time some level of sobriety sank in, and the media called off its cameras realising that the molehill was becoming a mountain of epic proportions, it was too late. The Congress, with an eye on the Assembly elections refused to come out in Rushdie’s support, the organisers backed off as they did not want the festival to be disrupted. The few who had dared to read from the banned book retreated under threat of law, and the mullahs realising that they had achieved far more than they could have hoped for, went back flexing newly developed muscles.

In the process, the media gave a beating to everything sane and sober. The literary festival was reduced to just Salman Rushdie and little else in the extended and often hysterical media coverage; the minorities  were done a great disservice as the same mullahs were paraded before the cameras with little to no effort to bring out the secular and liberal voices on camera; and in the black and white story that hogged the headlines for days, the nuances of good, sober reporting in a proper perspective were completely lost.

It is time that the electronic media stopped to introspect. And instead of chasing TRP ratings by sensationalising news, tried to bring back sober and honest and courageous reportage into journalism. Instead of turning news into drama, it would help if a sense of responsibility and accountability is exercised so that news gets the respect it deserves. The other day a woman addicted to soap operas named a prominent news channel as the only other competitor for her time, saying “they make news so exciting, it is like a drama.” She was serious in her compliment, but perhaps those managing news in television and also sections of the print media can draw a lesson from the naïve, yet telling observation.

Until next time, all the very best.