By B V Rao

News channel editors are like horses. They wear blinkers to work! That need not necessarily be a bad thing. Horses are forced to wear blinkers so they see only the road ahead and stay on course. We all call that focus, staying on the job, and any manager worth his salt will tell you that that is a great asset.

Unlike horses, news channel editors wear the blinkers voluntarily. They seek but a few “good” stories on a normal day and are ecstatic when a mammoth story such as that of a missing chief minister lands in their lap early in the morning, as did YSR’s. This story had all the trappings of a great TV event and more: it had power, politics, fear, uncertainties, search and rescue, bad weather, air force, greyhounds, choppers, Sukhois, shades of terror (Naxals), high drama, emotion and mystery and rumour. What’s more, it was open-ended.

News channels love nothing more than an open-ended mystery. It lends itself to many “theories” such as did the copter crash or land or crash-land? Then the anchors get to throw a lot of jargon, some of which they themselves have heard for the first time such as ELT, physical assets on the ground, repelling, slithering, winching, etc. And then a story without an ending means endless programming which is like a gift from the Gods themselves. It takes care of every channel’s legitimate worry of how to occupy the viewer the next minute, for the next 30 hours.

 To the extent that focus is important, this obsession with one story is great. But a few hours into the story, the channels are so deeply entangled in it that they do not know how to get out of the story’s clutches. They don’t “have” a story; the story “has” them. I call this the Abhimanyu syndrome. The nature of the medium demands that channels plunge headlong into breaking news and try to get a grip on it as they go along. But what often happens is the story gets a stranglehold on the channels, instead of the other way round and the channels don’t know when and how to extricate themselves, just like Mahabharata’s Abhimanyu. He knew how to get into the “chakravyuh” (a certain enemy formation) but not how to come out of it.

As a result, channels have a penchant for overstaying. Each channel stays on the story not because it has new information but because the other channels are staying on it. They all keep parroting the same stuff over and over again and every once in a while when they sense falling energy levels and fear viewer fatigue, they try to inject fresh life into the proceedings. They do this by starting to run faster than the story which manifests itself in many ways such as the anchors suddenly raising the pitch and volume (like somebody suddenly stuck a pin in the bottom); talking faster and faster to suggest urgency; and bending facts, introducing half-truths and telling open lies such as talking to dead chief ministers on mobile phones and blaming the tribals of Nallamala for the cruel joke on the viewers.

Look at what happened with the YSR story. In 30 hours of TV time, the story inched forward just a few times: the news break, the launch of the search operations, the centre joining in, Sukhois joining in, ISRO being called upon, US help being sought, a few press conferences (which said much the same), the chopper’s remains being spotted, the death being announced. That’s hardly content for 30 hours. But the channels were prisoners of their own self-generated excitement. The world wouldn’t have ended if they ventured on to other stories while keeping a close watch on developments in the YSR story, returning to it when required.

 But everybody was fixated. According to figures from the Centre for Media Studies’ Media Lab, NDTV 24×7 spent 431 minutes out of 480 minutes, a whopping 90 per cent of its entire prime time (7-11 pm) on Sept 2 and 3, on YSR. Times Now spent nearly 77% and CNN-IBN 70%. (See table for details.)

 Time spent on YSR story on Sept 2 & 3 prime time (7-11 pm). Source: CMS Media Lab

As you can see, purely in terms of the airtime they gave to the story, the Hindi channels kept their composure more than the English ones. Star News, which spent the most time on the story, gave it just 37.5% of its prime time and other private channels even less.

That is great, but what did they do with the rest of their time? Did they give any play to the other “big” news of the day, the Delhi High Court’s judgement that the Chief Justice of India’s office is covered under the RTI Act? Considering all the recent controversies about the higher judiciary’s assets and the people’s right to know, this was the mother of all legal stories. In terms of its long-term relevance for the country, this story had far greater significance than even YSR’s disappearance which was, I recognise, much more dramatic. So, how did the “national” news channels handle this story? See the table, courtesy CMS Media Lab:

 Prime Time (7-11 pm) Coverage of Delhi HC Ruling on CJI Office, Sept 2 & 3

Yes, that’s right. As the table along side shows, they just ignored it. The CJI-RTI story just did not exist for them. It was fully and completely blanked out by the national news channels. We must be grateful for NDTV 24×7’s two gracious minutes but when you take into account that the channel has instituted the first RTI awards and is promoting the same as its commitment to the national cause, it’s a pittance, a joke on the RTI movement.

 That brings us back to editors, horses and blinkers. Blinkers are meant to keep the horse on course, not to blind it. In their preoccupation with “the” big story, editors become blind to the other stories of the day. They give up the very job of the editor which is to decide the order and merit of stories and allot time accordingly. If news selection is all about running one story endlessly at the expense and exclusion of all other stories, do we really need editors?

 Think about it.

by Bikram Vohra

Editorial integrity, as we once knew it, died long back and no one really noticed. Like those doves they shoot and mark with crimson to denote peace or swords rusting in their own glory. Much the same way, senior journalists sold their souls to the highest bidder and turned Faustian. It all began when editors per se betrayed the cause. Like Mark Anthony leaving the battle of Actium to chase Cleopatra, these fourth estate mandarins dumped their staffs and galloped off after filthy lucre. Admirable was the fact that they could gallop with bended knees.

Before you knew it, editors had become representatives of the management instead of being the fierce front-liners for their sad little flock of scribes. They cheerfully sacrificed their charges to survive in their jobs and so the moat was breached. We had lost the good fight and we still are largely held at ransom by our own.

The chasm between the editor’s salary and the next five put together was indicative of the growing caste system in journalism. Naturally, any sporadic attempt to bridge with a scoop or a strong report met with disaster. No, we cannot run this became the mantra in the newsroom. As newspaper owners realized that these journalists of the 21^st century were men and women largely made of straw and easy to buy and sell, they predicated editorial policy to their business interests and the editor today is just another guard dog for the same interests. News is censored in-house and you can cry yourself hoarse but it is true. Elitist editors have made it so. The 100 member party-going, cigar-smoking, pontificating little rabbits who run the media mafia can be body stripped and searched and you will be hard placed to find a soupcon of moral courage in them.

 With no one to back it, Editorial  is often seen as an increasingly necessary evil that has to be tolerated by other departments and if the proprietors could do away with it entirely they probably would.

As a matter of fact this idea has been advocated by a very high profile owner of an Indian publishing house on the premise that a newspaper can be brought out untouched by dirty journalistic hands. Since professional Public Relations staff write better and do more home work than their journalistic counterparts and get a lot more money for doing so, all you need are technicians, not newshounds. Regrettably, as a tribe we are offering to Caesar so much space without Caesar even asking for it that very soon we will ourselves be only technicians totally besotted by the call to survive the day rather than seize it.

Excuse me, can you give me one more freebie goody-bag for my brother.

How has all this happened? What weakness within allowed us to be marginalized and is this, like global warming, just a phase? No hall of fame, clay feet in our bosses and deep and abiding insecurity have made us a pretty pathetic bunch.

Yet, there is hope. After 40 years on the business I would like to find some warm sanctuary in that thought. After all, TV killed the radio and the radio has come back with a vengeance. They said newspapers would be dead when we went into news overdrive and the Net linked up with the telly and the mobile phone to inundate us with a nonstop tsunami of information. Our synapses crackled and popped and we are now deep into news fatigue.

The newspaper, the magazine, the niche publication have been bruised and battered but they did not lie down like battle-weary troops and die. They are still there. So there must be some magic, some residual wunderbar about the published word that is forged in a special crucible. The touch, the texture, the intimacy of the paper and the printing, the artwork and the design, the inside story, the ability to return to it at will and as often as you like, all combine to create an awesome staying power.

Unfortunately, half a generation of good writers has run to the glamour of TV. Many more have found it financially pleasing to join the glossies and a fair amount of potential has dribbled into PR and the devil take your hind leg, it pays the bills, mate.

This is the period of transition. Not enough writers, columnists, commentators in the ranks. Too many youngsters seeking fame and bylines before they have taken off their diapers. Weak hierarchies, weaker editors who don’t or cannot write, too much emphasis on ‘how the paper looks’ than ‘how it reads.’ Advertising spurs the product, leaving the journalists vulnerable and often defenceless. Marketing is more important any way you cut it.

It will change. It always does. And the same technology that sidelined the print media will bring it back into the game. In fact, the worst is over. The new generation is heap smart. Slick, armed with savvy and the smarts, with easy access to information, enjoying the arrogance of youth and not afraid to say it like it is. And they have begun to read books again and turn away from their woofers and tweeters and 5-speaker surround systems. This is a global phenomenon where the dynamics of the world are no longer insular. You cannot shut the window on the new winds. Truly, the newspaper and the magazine will return to their old glory if those who work in it respect themselves and don’t sell themselves to the company store. It is the surrender to mediocrity that is our worst enemy. That and the need to find good leaders to plough the field, not those who kneel at the financial altar and bargain us away for cheap.