The journalism of haste

Yes the media will always give the losers a hard time. The loser has to answer difficult questions and while the winner can just smile and make a few canned statements, the winner has to come up with a damn good reason for the loss and in today’s world- come up with that reason fast. Because our journalists today are in a hurry. They do not want news that is investigative and informative. They just want that sound byte which they can put on at prime time with a fifteen second looping video so that they can give the impression of being right there in the heart of the action.

That is what happened with the senior leaders of the BJP when the results of the Lok Sabha elections were being announced. By the time it was obvious that the UPA ( or the ruling party led by the Congress) would be able to form a majority Government at the centre, people like Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitley, Narendra Modi were being put on national television and asked to answer questions they could possibly have no answers to. The verdict was as much a surprise to the BJP as it was to the TV channels who had used exit polls to show a fractured verdict and a strong anti-incumbency factor less the twenty four hours before. The channels were quick to give themselves a moment to be surprised and move on, but they were not willing to wait and get a meaningful statement from the BJP leaders.

Many of those interviews, to my mind, were used to just fill time gaps. Not a single BJP leader could make any comment except that the party would meet in a couple of days and together do an analysis of what had happened for such a surprising outcome. Yet the same questions were asked in several ways and the same responses were given so many times that it was embarrassing. It looked more like a lynching of the BJP leaders rather than a serious journalistic attempt at getting news and information that would otherwise not be available to the common man. The loss of the BJP was being made out into a spectacle and was being served up to an audience hungry for thrills.

The exit polls are a symptom of precisely the same disease that is plaguing our TV media today. They hope to predict what is almost impossible to do- as the actual election results showed- and are an attempt by TV channels to cash in on sensationalism. Today’s journalists do not want news unless it is breaking news. So they will create news and sensation. No one can wait for the actual poll results- they must do and exit poll to tell you what the result will be like. Of course there is the always the unsaid footnote that all of this could turn out to be nothing more than a bunch of useless numbers.

This is such a strong phenomenon that it seems to have affected even the leading news men and women of today. Take for example the Udayan Mukherjee interview with Mr. Pranab Mukherjee. As Editor in chief of CNBC TV 18, Udayan is a highly respected figure, but the interview published on the front page of a national newspaper, sounds just like a TV interview. An attempt to extract statements about the budget before the budget is announced. Trying to make the FM commit to agendas and items in the budget knowing full well that it would be impossible for him to do so. All because Udayan and the newspaper wanted to be the ones that “broke the news” about the budget before anyone else did and before the budget was even put out there. The result- a two-page interview at the end of which you do not feel any more informed than you already were before reading the interview.

While all this maybe deemed necessary at the altar of commercial TV in this hyper-competitive age, journalism in haste has a price tag. It comes at the cost of real news. Sound bites quoted out of context and deceptive headlines leave people with half the information. It builds a culture where people do not have the patience or the taste for the kind of journalism that is truly informational and enlightening.

Looking at the TV and reading some of the stuff in newspapers today it is sad to see the waste of space and time that comes with a journalism of haste.