One blunders, another blusters

BY AMITABH SRIVASTAVA| IN Media Practice | 20/12/2015

 (Left) Arnab Goswami, anchor of Newshour debate, interviewed Nirbhaya's parents on  Dec 18.

In the current busy news environment, TV anchors and hosts are having a lot of fun with news chasing them instead of their having to manufacture ‘breaking’ news.

The slugfests between the Jaitleys and the Kejriwals on one hand and the Gandhis and their bête noire Subramanian Swamy provide for round the clock opportunities for TV anchors to show off their clairvoyance.

Interspersed among these jousts are serious issues such as the release of the juvenile involved in the Nirbhaya case (we have her mother’s permission to call her Jyoti Singh now) that have set off noisy and almost hysterical discussions on the various channels to warm up the wintry climate.

But in the rush to be present on every show and discuss every issue, anchors are exposing their ignorance of the subject they are handling, sometimes leading to ridiculous situations.

For instance, Nidhi Kulpati of NDTV India invited guests to discuss the DDCA  (Delhi and Districts Cricket Association) muddle. They included Surinder Khanna, a former cricketer whom she kept referring to as G.K. Khanna, and a DDCA official who is also under the scanner in the current fracas.

When Surinder Khanna’s turn to speak came, he kept a straight face and told her that she appeared not to know him although she had called him to the studio as a guest. He told an embarrassed Kulpati that he actually a lot of grudges against the other Khanna who, he said, had utilised his clout to ruin cricket.

Kulpati looked down at her papers and apologised profusely, giving a chance to the BJP’s Shahnawaz Hussain to rub it in. But she adroitly turned her blunder around and launched into an all out attack against Arun Jaitley while Surinder Khanna went on to compare Jaitley’s silence on the DDCA rot to the period when former prime minister Manmohan Singh used to maintain a ‘golden silence’ while corruption scandals raged around him.

One does not expect any similar humility from the fire-eating, sabre-rattling Arnab Goswami of Times Now and none was on display when he went about commanding his panelists to demand a special session of Parliament to pass the amendments to the Juvenile Justice Bill. These have been pending in the Rajya Sabha for over two years and failure to pass them has resulted in the release of the juvenile who has been allowed to go free by the Delhi High Court after having completed the mandatory three years in a reform home.

Goswami is probably not aware that the full name of the bill is the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection) Bill and it was intended basically to protect the rights of children from exploitation rather than hang them.

With his usual boisterous bluster, he shouted at the panelists from all the political parties for not changing the law which would have reduced the age of juveniles from 18 to 16 and blamed them for wasting the time of the people.

Had he done a little bit of homework before he began shouting, he would have known that the Bill could not possibly have had an easy passage because these amendments had been summarily rejected by a Standing Committee of Parliament which included members of all parties.

The Union Cabinet overruled the Standing Committee and got the amendment passed by the Lok Sabha where the BJP has majority but a lot of Rajya Sabha members have reservations about it. After all, laws are made for the good of the majority, not for aberrations and, in any case, juvenile offenders constitute barely 0.6 per cent of the country’s population, according to official data with the National Crime Records Bureau.

Hysterical anchors like Goswami, acting like the heads of lynch mobs, can get away with their behaviour given the present mood of the country. But if they think they can dictate to the Rajya Sabha or push the courts into acting on their whims, they are mistaken.

Today they want to reduce the age of children who can be tried in adult courts to 16. Tomorrow there could be a serious offender who is only 12 or 10. Will the law be changed again for one person? In any case, where in the world are laws made in television studios?

Yet another anchor who had egg on his face was Rahul Shivshankar , Editor in chief of NewsX because he had to talk to Subramanian Swamy, a nightmare for any anchor when in a bad mood.

But understanding the National Herald case is not easy for normal journalists. Rahul chose the best option by inviting P Chidambaram and Subramanian Swamy to give the respective point of views of the Congress and the BJP but interviewed Chidambaram first.

Irked by this or something else Swamy tuned hostile. Whenever Rahul tried to ask a question Swamy warned him not to interrupt because he did not understand the law. Rahul was very polite but Swamy kept on taunting him, once telling him “Don’t behave like a grasshopper jumping from one topic to another.”

But Rahul was at his best behaviour despite all provocation because these are professional hazards of journalism nowadays. Hats off to him!