Trivialising news

IN Media Practice | 10/08/2005

Trivialising news

As if to do damage control, the same newspaper carried another report quoting Amitabh saying that he was annoyed with media reports.

S R Ramanujan

Do you know what was the most damaging fallout of the Mumbai rains that snuffed out at least one thousand lives in the state of Maharashtra? The demi-god of Bollywood, Amitabh Bachchan did not bathe for three days!! This was the bottom anchor story in the Deccan Chronicle during the time when Mumbai was undergoing nightmarish days with people dying within and outside their vehicles, in landslides and stampedes. The interesting part is that the Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper, Mr M J Akbar was listing out the sins of the print media in a recent seminar and one of them was trivialization of news. Thank God, the report did not go into the details as to how Bachchan tackled the water problem at his loo! Did he have a wash or not? Perhaps DC readers will not be able to sleep unless they are informed about it!!!

As if to do some sort of damage control, the same newspaper carried another report after 10 days quoting Amitabh saying that he was annoyed with media reports. An exercise in image makes over for both the paper and the actor. He said: "I am not comfortable with the ethics of my personal plight being written about, or used as material for commercial gain. Please don’t sell my misery in the papers." Then, how did the greatest revelation of the century that he did not take bath for three days come out in the open to be picked up by a Hyderabad newspaper?

Amitabh has the answer and attributes it to his wife Jaya Bachchan. In Amitabh’s words: "During the deluge, we were cut off from her, no phones, no mobiles, no connections, nothing for two days…After she finally did make contact with us, she was discussing, during an informal conversation with her colleagues, what we were going through. This was leaked or communicated to the press by some well-wisher. The press made it front page news. Why? Because it is good, saleable copy".

True, Bachchan! The press was at fault on this score. What about those occasions when anything and everything about you was "saleable copy" for the Press and you did not crib about it because you needed it for "commercial gain". Because of the negative publicity that the news brought you, you would like to say the boot is on the other leg!

The trivialization did not stop at Bachchan in the same daily edited by Akbar. The paper’s ace correspondent in Mumbai found out from an astrologer that it is "Amavasya" that was the villain for what Mumbai underwent in those trauamatic days. "Saturn and Sun are both transiting Cancer and occupy the same house. Saturn alone has a bad influence, but when it is with Sun in the same house the result is catastrophic. Cancer is a water sign hence flood-like situation in Mumbai." Will an average reader be able to make out anything from this gibberish?

The Chronicle’s foray into astrology continued further, all deserving page one prominent treatment. Its Hyderabad reporter found out that the solar eclipse on October 3 would trigger violence across "traditional hot spots". The movement for separate Telengana in Andhra Pradesh, and the movement for independent Tibet would turn violent and Kashmir would become more violent, according to the prediction.

Shockingly, even The Hindu, edited by a rationalist, was no exception. It had a three-column box story about a dead man (an octogenarian) coming to life after he was "sent back to earth from Yamapuri following the orders of Yamadharmaraja, the king of the hell". The old man, Malla Reddy, continued and the paper meticulously and faithfully reported thus: "He (Yama) was sporting a large moustache with curly ends but had a bald head. He rebuked the two soldiers, who mistakenly took me to hell. They dropped me at my home by a magic scooter." Reddy also narrated the ambience in Yama’s chamber. "The hall in which he (Yama) sat was full of shelves and long ledgers. He took one of the books and pulled up the soldiers for bringing the wrong person. He ordered them to drop me at my home"

The fact was the old man was in a state of coma for 20 hours or so and the villagers mistook it for his death. After he regained his consciousness when funeral procedures began, he started blabbering and that became a box item for the most respected daily of the South. Fortunately, the daily did not recall the Puranic story of Satyavan and Savitri and did not compare Reddy’s wife Kamalamma with Savitri who is reported to have rescued her husband from the clutches of Yama!