NDTV: Practising what it preaches?
In its latest promos, NDTV decries tabloid journalism and positions itself as different.
But when M.REYAZ watched it on the day of the Salman Khan verdict, he found the difference slight. Pix: the Dutt show on Khan.
Last week, while receiving the RedInk Lifetime Achievement Award by the Mumbai Press Club, Dr Prannoy Roy spoke on the tabloidisation of news in India, adding, “Tabloidization is the death of good journalism.”
Dr Roy said – later also published on the NDTV – “Perhaps the biggest danger we face today is the tabloidization of our news. Every advanced country with a developed, mature media has a wide spectrum of news - from credible and serious journalism to the tabloid…But in India there is this dangerous slide to one end of the spectrum.”
As one of the co-founders of NDTV, Dr Roy also took the moral high ground, saying that NDTV is “India's most trusted brand…perhaps it is because of our determination to be India's only non-tabloid television network.”
Dr Roy has been dubbed the ‘Ted Turner of India’ and his speech was hailed by well meaning media professionals and those who expect the media to work as a watchdog. In fact, that’s how NDTV is marketing itself these days. In its latest ad, it aggressively targets rabble rousing news channels, saying the “biggest danger to Indian television” is “sensationalism, hysteria, wild accusations, polarization,” that is “tabloid news.” (Watch Video here: https://youtu.be/cfdf4eDT6hY)
But is NDTV doing what Dr Roy and the channel preach? On May 6, I did a small test. I watched NDTV at 8 PM to see what they were covering in their prime time shows. Here is what I found:
On May 6, the verdict on the Salman Khan hit-and-run case came as a local court in Mumbai pronounced him guilty and announced a five year sentence. At 8 PM, Nidhi Razdan’s ‘Left, Right and Centre’ reported and discussed the verdict and only at the end was there a news capsule on Congress President Sonia Gandhi’s intervention in Parliament which also mentioned her address to Congress MPs earlier in the day.
At 9 PM, Barkha Dutt’s ‘The Buck Stops Here’ had a discussion on the verdict and repeated the same points as in the earlier programme, although with different guests. However, it went a step further to explore if the Khan verdict could be a watershed judgement sending out the message that celebrities can’t escape the consequences of their actions.
Barkha’s panel included one of the victims, Kalim, narrating his story. In fact, through the day, NDTV kept broadcasting reports from the victims’ villages where several victims told NDTV’s Lucknow Correspondent Niha Masih that they expected compensation and were not really bothered about justice being done.
On this show celebrity jewellery designer Farah Khan Ali, the one who wrote outrageous and insensitive tweets on the verdict, not only kept defending Khan but sounded elitist, boorish and completely cut off from reality as she remarked that, although she paid her taxes, the government had still failed to provide basic housing for the poor.
She was at least better than Abhijeet, though, who kept repeating on other channels how poor people who sleep on the streets are stupid and that if they sleep like dogs on the streets they are bound to die like dogs.
On Barkha Dutt’s show Suhel Seth said that the victims of Khan’s drunken driving were not the only ones; even the star was a victim of the system and hinted that he was paying the price for his celebrity status.
However, the most outrageous comment of the show was reserved for Zafar Sareshwala, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s supporter and a friend of the Khans, who not only defended Khan but said that the government wanted to “teach him a lesson” and that the sentence was “disproportionate.” It was left to Mahesh Jethmalani and Shobhaa De to be sober in their analysis.
At 10 PM Suneta Choudhury had a news magazine show on the Biggest Stories of the Day that did have news capsules on the Goods and Services Tax bill being passed by the Lok Sabha, Sonia Gandhi’s attack on the government, and the return of the kidnapped doctor and his family in Patna in the second half of the show. But the first part largely focussed on the Salman Khan verdict.
Now sample the few things that NDTV largely missed from Delhi alone. Sonia Gandhi’s intervention in Parliament, for example, and her address during a Congress meeting where she practically “tears into the BJP government, charges Modi with 'blatant U-turns' and delays” certainly deserved much attention, but as someone pointed on social media, she chose the wrong day.
The GST bill is a landmark measure and warranted more deliberation on the general news channels. The Upper House of Parliament also passed a landmark land swap deal with Bangladesh that former PM Dr Manmohan Singh had signed with his counterpart in Dhaka but which had since been in cold storage due to the opposition of the BJP and other parties.
In addition, India signed an MoU with Iran regarding India’s participation in the development of the Chabahar Port in Iran. Anyone with little sense of geo-strategy knows the importance of this port, particularly after the China-Pakistan deal over Gwadar Port. The last two news items were not even mentioned by anchors while reading the ‘top’ news.
These are just a few news items that NDTV largely ignored from Delhi alone; of course, reports from the rest of the country are ignored on most days as a matter of routine, except when some calamity occurs or some big leaders visit a place.
But practically full day coverage of the hit-and-run case of an actor, at the expense of other news, is also ‘tabloidish’.
As I kept surfing and checking online videos, I can vouch for the fact that certainly the ‘most trusted’ news channel was, by and large, saner and more sober than any other channel, although the guests were mostly the same. It is ironical that someone like Rajdeep Sardesai of Headlines Today tweeted, after doing a one hour show on Headlines Today on the same subject, “In all the focus on #SalmanVerdict big day in parliament. GST passed; Sonia vs Modi battle on RTI, CIC. Mumbai trumps Delhi today!”
Unlike most media houses who unabashedly promote jingoism and sensationalism, NDTV does at least attempt a more sober and restrained approach. I will hence continue to watch NDTV in the hope that Dr Roy and his team will not simply blame the viewer or the advertisers but will look inwards, as he has promised.
(M. Reyaz is a Delhi-based journalist and a research scholar at Jamia Millia Islamia. He tweets at @journalistreyaz)