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 B V Rao

One has always wondered why a discerning advertiser would want his product to be seen on news channels, especially the Hindi ones, drowning in all the slush that they call content. What value do premium products get out of their association with such trash?

 It was thus with interest that one heard Milind Pant of Yum complain about the sameness of content on all channels. Pant, a big consumer of advertising space, was sharing the dais with CEOs of news channels on the concluding session of exchange4media’s NewsNext 2009 conclave. With him on stage were Barun Das (Zee News), Chintamani Rao (Times Now), G Krishnan (TV Today), Raj Nayak (NDTV) and Ravi Prakash (TV9) with Barkha Dutt as the moderator.

 As the only one bringing the advertiser’s perspective to the panel packed with news channel CEOs, Pant bemoaned the absence of differentiation among channels. He was indicating that if you removed the logos, you wouldn’t be able to tell one channel from the other. With no content differentiation, the advertisers had no option but to put their bets on the questionable TAM ratings mechanism for estimating reach and popularity of channels.

 Now, if there is anybody the news channel heads would listen to carefully, it is the advertiser; he is the only guy supplying them that life-sustaining substance called hard cash. Here was an advertiser telling all the CEOs that they had failed in their basic job of brand-building, so one was keen to see how they responded. They didn’t, not until the first audience question from Rahul Dev, editor of CNEB. He wondered why advertisers like Pant don’t keep away from channels that show trash and told him point-blank: “If all the advertisers come together and decide as one to boycott these channels, they will be forced to correct course in single day,” said Rahul.

 It was a rhetorical question, based more in pain than in reality. It was bound to appeal to the gallery and it did. Loud applause followed. But surprise, surprise, even the panel of CEOs enjoyed the discomfiture of the cornered advertiser and actually joined the applause! Not just that, Raj Nayak pounced on the tribe called the media planner (who advises the advertiser where to place his ads). “Most media planners don’t even have a TV set in their offices, they don’t catch TV at home and they have no clue what is happening” he riled. The point he was making being that the media planner blindly follows the TAM figures and the advertiser blindly takes his word.

 Other CEOs, except Barun Das, nodded in vehement agreement.

 It was a strange argument. It almost seemed like they were looking at the advertiser now to rescue them from the crisis of content in their offices. The CEOs were faulting the advertisers for not asking content questions. They were questioning the advertiser’s wisdom of taking as gospel the TAM ratings to which they themselves pay obeisance every Wednesday!

 But Pant was not the only one to be beaten down by the CEOs. Up until Rahul asked that question, the CEOs had spent the better part of the hour defending the same TAM ratings.

That happened because Ravi Prakash said the TAM method was questionable, the meters were too few, they obviously seemed to be placed in households with little literacy and hence that reflected in the TRPs each week making everybody a prisoner of pulp content. “We keep talking about how we do not want a content regulator, but there is already a content regulator sitting on our heads: TRPs,” said Ravi.

Krishan and Chintamani pounced on Ravi, the only CEO who seemed to be in mood for some introspection (which is what such conclaves are supposed to do). They trashed his suspicions of the TAM methodology with, I must admit, logic. “It is not like Aaj Tak is number one all the 52 weeks. For a few weeks in the year, it loses its position. The fact that there is so much change means that the TAM ratings are indicative of what’s happening on the channels,” argued Krishnan. Chintamani agreed: “It has never happened that we did something well, expected it to do well in ratings and it did not reflect in the TRPs,” he argued as some in the panel went into denial claiming that they never worried about TRPs when making their news lists!

Both Ravi and his detractors are right. Yes, the TRP monster hangs over the head of every editor and CEO whether they admit it or not, and yes, the ratings seem to be largely indicative of a channel’s content strength. But the catch is here: content of the saap-sapera, Rakhi Sawant, cricket, crime and Bollywood variety is a sure-shot, instant success at the TRP box office. Additionally, it is easy to manufacture without straining the brain or draining the resources. While content of the sensible, responsible variety needs investment of time, energy, intelligence, resources and patience. You have to invest in it over time and it pays only in the long run.

But TRP is a weekly game. So most channels take the easy route to success and TAM takes the brunt of the blame. And along with TAM the cable operator who charges obscene amounts of money to carry each channel (who, may I ask, created this monster but the channels themselves) and now even the poor advertiser is a culprit for not changing the course of content over which he has no control. Everybody, just about everybody other than the channels themselves is responsible for the sad plight of content!

After all the advertiser-bashing, Barun brought a semblance of balance: “It is not the advertiser’s job to course-correct the channels. If things are going wrong it is for us to change course,” he said.

Instead of hoping that all the advertisers will come together one day and force the channels to clean-up content, how about trying this easier way out: why can’t all the channels come together and banish the trash? Even though TV news is young, learning, evolving and all that, at age 11, it is time we learnt to clean our own poo.

The average TV journalist hates his job or, more precisely, hates what he has to do to keep his job, which is roughly true of any average person in any average job. The dirty, mindless content he dishes out with such passion is not HIM. Much like any average person in any average job, the TV journo, too, has made his peace. He gets by the tough life of the TV newsroom by throwing the protective ring of philosophy around himself.

Thus, the television newsroom is a very philosophical place. It is littered with life’s eternal truths. Like for example, this great philosophy of an output head in one Hindi channel: ‘Hum jitna girenge, TRPs utna uthengi!’ The steeper we fall, the higher will the TRPs rise. This relates more or less to the philosophy behind the saying, “greatness lies not in not falling, but rising higher each time we fall”. But it actuality means that the greater the debasement of news, the higher the TRPs!

At Star News, where I was Input Head for a good two years, the philosophy that kept us going was this: We wake up everyday. The maid, the gardener, the cook, the dhobi, the guard and the driver, they all work for us (and we pay them). Suited-booted we go to our fancy office, set up our laptops and start working. For all of them! Though we could never be sure till the following Friday if it was paying us, we stuck to the job because it roughly corresponds to the philosophy of “you pay for your sins in this lifetime itself”! So, there we were paying back our dues on the same day, every day!

At a more personal level now. I live in Gurgaon, so used to do breakfast, drive across three states, sit in my room waiting for lunch time, do lunch and wait another few hours to return home to do dinner! No work. Not a scrap of it. I would drive 40 km one way and 40 km the other, just to do lunch at office, because for the channel the stringer in Bulandshehar, who always landed up in a sundry bedroom just when a sundry wife was about to beat up a sundry husband for dating a sundry woman, was always more important than the sundry editor at office, who had sundry ideas on sundry other problems of life.

Here again, it was the philosophy that kept me going: Nobody is indispensible at work and nothing is impossible in life. Stringers can become editors, editors can become (lunch-eating) furniture. If the poor stringer got paid Rs 1,000 for feeding the channel for three hours and I got a fat salary for eating lunch, serves him right. Who said life was fair? Life, in fact, is a great leveler! Only one thing used to bother me, though: I should have had lunch also at home. The cheque could have come by courier! But then again, nothing comes easy in life. If you’ve got to do 80 km for lunch, you’ve got to do that.

And then there are those who started out as hardboiled journalists. Wanted to change the world etc., but were forced to attend to more pressing matters such as Professor Pyarelal ki prem kahani (the Patna Prof, who lost his heart to a student), IPS officer bana Radha (an IPS officer, who believed he was Lord Krishna’s consort Radha), Ghaas khata aadmi (a man who ate grass), or the riveting story of a naag and naagin of previous birth, separated by fate but reunited in this birth as man and wife! Their agenda may have been hijacked, the goalposts shifted, but they hung in. Reluctantly to begin with, but have now become the high priests of trash, because you got to do what you got to do. Ganda hain par dhanda hain!

Once you’ve fortified yourself with the ‘paapi peth ka sawal hain ’ philosophy, then everything is easy game. Darao, darao. (Scare them, scare them). This philosophy comes in handy when calamitous things are about to happen, such as three eclipses in the space of a month. So, it was that one channel brought in an astrologer for a show designed to scare the wits out of everybody. This astrologer was no philosopher. He said there was no danger, eclipses are very normal, no danger. Cut. Ad break. Astrologer replaced. Philosophy: if you can’t see the wolf, it doesn’t mean it won’t eat up the sheep!

But you don’t get three dangerous eclipses in a month every day. So, what do we have for today? Nothing. Nothing? Kuch nahi hain toh Rakhi hain na? If we don’t have anything, we have Rakhi (Sawant) don’t we? As long as Rakhi is willing to get kissed and get hooked on air, where’s the problem? Why do you need anything else? And if at all you need something else, why is Raju Srivastav recording, re-recording and re-re-recording all his jokes in different backgrounds every day? Jiska koi nahi uska khuda hain yaaron. Rakhi is a TV goddess, ask NDTV Imagine.

What? No Rakhi, no Raju…? Toh phir byte hain? That byte can be anything from a small time priest in a Madhya Pradesh temple saying he is about to die at 4 pm that day to the doctor saying the PM has a prostrate gland problem to Amitabh Bachchan saying just “hain” or Rakhi (oh, that saviour again) saying “aplogise aplogise” (sic ) to Mika. Those 10 seconds are treated as audio-visual gold because the newsroom knows to “make do with all it has”. All the relevant, non-relevant, irrelevant backgrounder is dug out and spread around that single byte for a three-hour feast for the viewer. That is the Ethiopian-finds-a-pea philosophy, higher than the “be content” philosophy, because this guy threw a party for the neighbourhood because he found a pea! Cruel, but again, who said life is easy?

I can go on and on with such examples, but suffice it to say that where such high philosophy rules every twist and turn, how can things be bad? How can channels be accused of debasing news? Must be that “eye of the beholder” thing. Dirty minds always see dirty things. Give them pure kitsch, they will see only the kitsch and forget it’s pure. Dekhne wale ki dil mein khot hain, huzoor.

Get it? It finally comes back to you, the viewer. You are the one who’s debauched.

(Venkat, as the author is called, insists the argument is his own and that no one else, such as exchange4media, should be hauled up for blasphemy.)

One story that news channels should have grabbed and played up was the investigative report of BBC’s Richard Watson on the Mumbai 26/11 attacks. India’s news channels have unfairly been carrying the stigma of helping the terrorists in their mission. Watson pointed out that there was something elementarily wrong about the Government’s accusation and I expected some pick and play to this story even though Michael Jackson was ruling the airwaves.

Watson quoted an Indian intelligence intercept of a terrorist conversation:

Terrorist in Nariman House: Is there anyone in our building? Pak handler: Look at the terrace at the back, the police are there. There’s a building under construction, they’re on top of that building and there’s a lot of police on the main road. You know Merchant House? They are sitting behind the protruding rear wall and firing shells…”

Watson argued that the detailing those in Pakistan had about the position and deployment of police in Mumbai and the precision with which the war was being directed from there meant two things: one, that it was impossible for them to have got this information by just watching live TV, and two, that this kind of minute military intelligence gathering can happen only with hands-on work from ground zero. Meaning that the terrorists had local Lashkar units feeding Pakistan precise details from all three spots of engagement.

This was an unexpected lifeline for the Indian channels to rid themselves of the sad slur of acting to aid the enemy in times of war (in normal parlance that is called treason). BBC is not gospel, though we often treat it that way, but there was merit in Watson’s argument. I don’t recall any channel consciously or unconsciously showing or talking about “the Merchant House or the protruding rear wall” from where shells were being fired. As I recall it, all the 60 hours of live coverage were marked by little coherent reportage and yielded little intelligible information to the viewing public, forget about military intelligence to the enemy.

The most serious charge against the channels’ indiscretion was also the most absurd. They were damned for exposing the NSG commandoes to risk by telecasting the chopper-dropping at Nariman House live. It was said that the Pakistani handlers instantly Blackberried the information to their wards in Mumbai. (I can imagine the message: “There’s a chopper on your heads. Look up, you idiots….Sent from my Blackberry!”)

Were they choppers or B52 Stealth Bombers? What about the racket they would have raised from miles away? They were hanging over for a good 10 minutes, damn it! You think the terrorists mistook the noise for a marriage band on the terrace? If they were as well trained as we all agree they were, they would have known exactly how many commandoes dropped down by just noting the time the chopper was hovering over. (Anyway, if this was going to be such a deadly surprise assault – I can’t see how, with all that noise – why didn’t the Government advise the channels just before to suspend live telecast for a while?)

There is another big hole in this TV-helped-the-terrorists theory. It presumes that the terrorists left the crucial job of intelligence gathering at ground zero to India’s news channels! Which in turn presumes the terrorists were cocksure the Indian security establishment would goof up its most elementary job of securing the war zone and keeping the media at bay.

The Mumbai police instantly rubbished Watson’s investigation. At the same time, the Government has not tired of telling us how meticulously well-planned this operation was and how it had ISI and the Pakistan Army written all over it. If that be the case, as indeed it seems logical, how is it that they left the most critical part of the war (intelligence-gathering) entirely to chance? What if the Indian Government had disallowed live coverage? Once the terrorists entered the premises, would they have conducted the rest of the operation blindly, without a script? Knowing the ISI and its operations, that’s hardly likely. Isn’t it incredulous to think that they planned only as far as getting the teams inside the premises and it was just by a happy accident that they decided to work a little harder because TV was anyway giving them precise real-time intelligence?

As we can see, the News Broadcasters Association (NBA), a representative body of major news channels, had solid grounds to debunk the Government’s theory. Instead, the NBA chose the path of self-indictment by rushing into a Code of Conduct for Emergencies back then in December. If that was bad enough, the channels only surpassed themselves by completely ignoring Watson’s report. The newspapers briefly played it, but the channels blanked it out.

This reticence to take on the Government confounds me. Not just because this was a golden opportunity to revisit the Mumbai 26/11 attacks and redeem themselves, but because it was an equally good chance to turn the heat on the Government and the security establishment. By accusing the media of helping the terrorists, the Government had deftly deflected the debate from uncomfortable questions about the quality of our response. God knows the Government has a lot of explaining to do, but by pinning the media down with absurd charges of complicity with the enemy, it ensured the media was on the defensive and did not raise any questions about the efficiency of the 60-hour operation.

News channels riled the viewers in many ways during Mumbai 26/11. But helping the terrorists, even if unconsciously, is not one of them. Desperate bits and pieces, which was what live reporting was, do not make for solid, actionable military intelligence. The Government knows it, it just needed to be told off by the NBA. But as you can see, when it comes to standing up for their rights, the collective power of television news industry is still a myth.

Tailpiece: Addition to the Dumb List

Last week’s ‘Top 10 list of dumb lines on TV’ evoked quite a response. One friend, a senior print journo, wrote: Loved your TV piece. Upset that you didn’t mention how they tell the weather person “thank you sooo much”, as if she’s paid their home loan EMI!

(Venkat, as the author is called, thinks TV channels do not stand up to government-bullying because they have squandered the power of public opinion, which they enjoyed during the heydays, because news has been replaced by nuisance.)