A very accurate viewpoint, according to me, was pinpointed by someone recently, “We don’t want the luxury of 24X7 reporting, we can to with a 6X7 class of quality news coverage.” Since the advent of 24 hour news channels, a different kind of news reporting has taken over the Indian scene. The very definition of news has undergone a sea change. In a bid to keep their 24X7 ventures alive, the news channels have started reporting events like the birth of the seventh child of the ninth son of the oldest village sarpanch in India as ‘exclusives’ and as ‘breaking news’. The euphoria that was whipped up by the media during the ‘Prince’ episode was an apt indicator of the state of journalism in India today. And to top it all, the amount of economic help and general response that was elicited out of the public left me flabbergasted. I have personally seen entire families sitting glued to their idiot boxes watching the rescue operation as if a watching reports of 9-11. Some newspapers have been almost completely converted from intellectual information dissipaters to glamorous P3P centric tabloids and multicoloured in-your-face advertisement collections. Maybe the business aspect of journalism has something (or everything!!) to do with this, but then there’s a certain elegance and respectability associated with journalism and that shouldn’t be compromised beyond a certain limit. The Supreme Court was absolutely spot on to observe that sting operations, so much the craze among news channels these days, were acceptable by themselves but only as long as they were not utilized by the ‘stingers’ for making a quick buck.
Real journalism is taking a big hit in this era of bland consumerism and gossip mongers are increasingly replacing journalists. The pen, it is said, is mightier than the sword. But if the pen is preoccupied perennially busy jotting down the vital stats of the richest porn queen in the world, it is weaker even weaker than Dubya’s hold on his vote bank!!!
