"Press"ing Issues

Off late I have been following Indian newspapers a lot less than I used to before. I blame my new web browser for this! I switched to google chrome recently because firefox started crashing on me a lot. Earlier, there used to be so many times during the day when I opened a firefox window and sat staring at the startup page wondering where to go. Then I dropped down the navigation toolbar and picked one of the recent websites I visited. Google chrome does not have the drop down on the navigation toolbar. So what I want to do on the internet is no more a multiple choice question.

Timesofindia.com and ibnlive.com used to be part of my daily routine. It is the second best thing to do when I am at work, in front of the computer and have nothing else to do (the first is checking my email! NOT google chat!) I always used to think of Timesofindia as my daily dose of tabloid. Being the No. 1 daily in India, it would have been suicide for them to miss Kareena Kapoor's latest comments on Shahid Kapoor and Saif Ali Khan. Ibnlive was different. Their business model was focussed more towards sensationalization. I used to really enjoy many of these articles everyday.

Inspite of all the print/TV media bashing that many "Urban, English Speaking, Mayawati hating Indians" have been exercising, the fact remains that we are all still glued to that news channel/website. We end up picking the news channel which is closest to our own views and spend the rest of the evening either agreeing or disagreeing with what they have to say. In a democracy, newspapers are supposedly the voice OF the general public FOR the general public.

When I was growing up, during the times of Doordarshan, I used to really dislike Karan Thapar who never let the person sitting across the table speak. He was the quintessential "put words into your mouth" journalist. Undoubtedly, his research in those talk shows was phenomenal. And he asked really pressing questions. But he was no Tim Russert (Meet the Press).

Now, in retrospective, Karan Thapar seems to be a very pleasant man. Today we have all the Rajdeep Sardesais, Sagarika Ghoses and Arnab Debs who like to maximize their own screen times during talk shows. In most of their talk shows, the focus seems to be on covering the maximum NUMBER of issues and not on putting any one issue closer to a resolution.

The recent incident that comes to my mind is the coverage on the Abdul Kalam incident. Sagarika Ghose conducted a talk show where she had three people on a Face the Nation program. What followed was fairly predictable stuff. Sagarika Ghose was fairly clear about what she wanted to hear. She was in the complete VIP culture bashing mode. And to this objective, she made sure she put enough words into people's mouths, gave generous screen time to the "liberal, true indian citizen" guy (T S R Subramanian) and gave just enough screen time to the congress leader (Manish Tewari) so he could make a fool out of himself without getting a chance to finish what he was saying.

Its actually quite entertaining to watch all these people jumping up and down on their seats trying to make sure they get heard. Of course I might find it super annoying if I saw all this on a day to day basis. But the direction the media is taking the public is scary. Ibnlive has this section called Citizen Journalist. And this is what I recently saw on that! I think these newspaper people really need to get together and decide whether they want to project themselves to be liberals or conservatives. Whatever happened to the days of Sukanya Balakrishnan at 9.00 pm on Doordarshan when newschannels didn't have to make that decision!