Paani (Live): Give TV a break
Letter to the Hoot: Does a comment that highlights a Peepli (Live) like situation and critiques the electronic media deserve a front page display?
When will be fit enough to look over our shoulders and sight some slighted reportage in our own backyard, asks SHANTANU DATTA
Curiosity always carries a journalist to his/her next ‘enter mark’; hitting the ‘aye’ on the next website. So is Hoot for this journalist: 34 going on 35; 13 years in the profession in India, and more than half a lifetime trying to figure out why certain things are done in a certain way in certain part of print media.
The topic at hand is the Indian Express (September 11, 2010) story: “Paani (Live)”. It’s by Chinki Sinha, a first-grade journalist I have had the opportunity of working with; it was put as what in Indian newspaper jargon is called a “flyer”, on a weekend edition, which, for IE, counts for a lot.
Though slightly overwrought, a well-written piece it still is: good headline; well displayed. The question, though, is: was it a story worth putting on page 1?
This, however, is an ‘insider’ looking in from the outside (I work outside our geographical boundaries for now, and I am the first one to agree, if logically proved thereof, since I do not catch ALL Indian news channels, that I am wrong).
My points – in fact, objections to the story even finding a lot on a news page, let alone P1, are four-fold:
1. Oye, hello: does the print media not run such stories dime a dozen every day; the ones meant to catch the eyeballs, rather than the reader’s gray/white/yellow cells? (Please don't reply in the affirmative unless you want a few Hoot readers to commit suicide!)
2. Did any of the newspapers (in Delhi, as I am not taking into account papers from other stations) not carry a headline to that effect in Saturday morning’s edition?
Panic? Scare syndrome? Like Santa would say even in his off-season Autumn days: hoh hoh!
Aren’t those words par for the course for most Indian newspapers, every day on almost each page? As Santa would say in his broken English, "oye, hoye, think twice before being condescending and holier than thou).
3. Will we always have to wait for scary/panicky/alarming reportage on TV to get our antenna to work overboard? Or will we someday be (physically) fit enough to look over our shoulders and sight some slighted reportage in our own backyard?
4. And here's the smile-and-let-go-of-kiddos argument: TV journalism is, at most, a teenage offspring; newspapers are over a 100 years old. Now, would I tick off my nephew for every supposedly unsavoury thing he does? He is 6 by the way!
Same logic with TV news. Print should show sense, and then expect some sensibility in due course.
PS: (A few steps away from this moral high ground, a young TV reporter climbed on to the roof of a house, adjusted her hair and began to speak. She was out of earshot.
That, by the way, was the last para of the IE piece. Let us not hit below the belt, for more often than not it comes back and hits us. For, do we know for sure there would not be an IE journalist who would go out on the field, hair ‘adjusted’ and all, and whose voice would not be “out of earshot”?
Shantanu Datta
Dhaka
Sept 13, 2010
(The writer is a journalist now working for an English daily in Dhaka)
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