If there’s no breaking news, break the news

Kanchan Gupta

09 June 2013

[There is a craving for sensational news. It's only natural that competing news channels and newspapers should pander to that craving, while covering the BJP's National Executive meet that concludes in Goa]

The extraordinary interest shown by media in the BJP’s two-day National Executive meeting that concludes in Goa today could have been termed as genuine professional commitment to disseminating news, had it not been for the fact that very little or nothing that was disseminated had anything to do with the truth. 

Beginning Friday morning, television channels and newspapers desperate to keep pace with ‘breaking news’ kept on indulging in kite-flying, attributing their own views and opinions, worth tuppence and no more, to ‘sources’. The fact is that these ‘sources’ do not exist in real life; they are as much a figment of imagination as what is attributed to them.

Here are some facts that would serve to highlight how the coverage of the BJP’s National Executive meeting was turned into a tamasha that bordered on theatre of the absurd. 

The National Executive was scheduled to meet on Saturday and Sunday, which it did. In keeping with past practice, office-bearers met on Friday to take stock of organisational issues and discuss the agenda for the meeting. In other words, Friday’s meeting was not a part of the National Executive’s proceedings, nor was it meant to discuss key policy issues, leave alone take any important decisions. That would have rendered the National Executive meeting meaningless.

Such boring details, however, are irrelevant to our mainstream mediapersons. They made out as if Friday was the first day of the National Executive meeting and floated various stories on the agenda of the office-bearers meeting, including whether Narendra Modi should be made head of the election campaign committee. This was never meant to be discussed on Friday, nor did it come up for any discussion. 

Facts, however, are not allowed to stand in the way of a juicy story and hence they were brushed aside as media ran amok, peddling colourful versions that may have served tograb eyeballs but have done nothing to enhance media’s hugely diminished, and rapidly vanishing, credibility.

The day began with wild speculation over LK Advani’s absence at Friday’s meeting. Once again, the media chose to speculate on his absence without bothering to check with his office or family as to why he had not travelled to Goa ahead of the National Executive meeting. Had reporters done their basic homework they would have known Advani was unwell and unable to travel. At his age, this should not have come as a surprise. But nobody did a fact check because that would have killed a story manufactured with great effort. 

This constant spinning of stories to keep the news cycle moving 24x7 may be a compulsion, given the dynamics of today’s information industry. Those dynamics are as much media’s creation as of readers of newspapers and viewers of news channels, not necessarily in that order. In fact, it could be argued, and not without basis, that there is a craving for sensational news, or news that is not dull and boring which the truth often is, and it is only natural that competing news channels and newspapers should try to pander to that craving.

It could equally be argued that the craving is the creation of media which, having made tamasha the staple of its fare for the day, can only turn news into a burlesque of half-truths and outright lies peppered with the profound punditry of know-all commentators, many of whom were known as ‘hand-out’ journalists in the organisations they worked for after securing jobs with more than a little help from political patrons. If the inside story of mainstream media were to be ever told, journalism in this country would stand denuded of respect and dignity.

But let that not detain us. 

What is of greater interest, if not import, is themonkey chatter of these commentators who make a great show of their earnestness on op-editorial pages of newspapers or during television debates where limitless ignorance is presented as profound wisdom.  

Witness the manner in which Narendra Modi is demonised as a politician who ‘polarises’ — since when has politics been devoid of polarisation? — and who won’t be able to attract allies. In the same breath, those who mocked at Atal Bihari Vajpayee through 1996 and 1998, praise him and seek to elevate LK Advani to a stature they have insisted on denying him all these years.

The dishonesty is truly stark and stunning. It’s moral dishonesty and it’s intellectual dishonesty. You can’t like Advani and dislike Modi, just as you can’t like Vajpayee and dislike the BJP. These are not identities that are independent of each other. Nor are they individuals who can be de-linked from the party and the ideology they represent. But who is to tell the commentariat so? Smug and secure in the conviction that they shall never be confronted by those who know better, they continue to play Bible-thumpers.

The consequences of mainstream media treading this path cannot be overemphasised. The phenomenal growth of social media in India is an indicator of the low esteem in which newspapers and news channels are held by an increasing number of people, most of them young, educated and well-informed. 

Admittedly this is an urban phenomenon, but it would not be inaccurate to suggest that the contempt for mainstream media is no less intense in rural areas. Even the most casual reading of what people have to say about media on Twitter would serve as an eye-opener for those who orchestrated the jaundiced coverage of the BJP’s National Executive meeting. But the proverbial writing on the wall tragically goes un-noticed.

That is bad news. 

The good news is that more and more people have begun to shun traditional or mainstream media. If the trend continues, the peddlers of misinformation and planters of disinformation shall one day find themselves kicked off the pedestals on which they have placed themselves.Along with them, mainstream media shall come crashing down — like Humpty Dumpty never to be put together again.

(The writer is a senior journalist based in Delhi)