The Hindu Business Line : E-media excels itself

As a long-time student of effective communication and media-watcher in India and abroad, I have developed great admiration for the reporters, anchors and editors of the private TV news channels in the country. They are invariably on the ball, full of spirit, mentally agile, impressively articulate, exceedingly observant, going after news relentlessly and putting it across in a gripping manner.

They excelled themselves during the three-day siege of Mumbai, capturing the unfolding of the horrendous happenings minute by minute as if they were taking place in our presence on the spot.

But for the police making the places where the tragedies were being enacted out of bounds for the media, the reporters and the camera crew, brimming with competitive zeal and energy, would have thought nothing of risking their lives to get as close as possible to where the action was to bring kudos to their respective channels.

Most of them were almost continuously on duty without sleep or rest, giving eye-witness accounts, unmindful of their voices getting hoarse, from the time of the shoot-out on the night of December 26 till the end of the ordeal on the morning of December 29.

Graphic visuals

Some visuals were so graphic that they would have made it to an Indian equivalent of Pulitzer, if there was one. Here is my pick: The billowing of smoke from the grand and imposing façade of the Taj Mahal Hotel; the dropping of the commandos from the helicopter on the terrace of the building next to the Nariman House; the shooting by terrorists from the running police van hi-jacked by them; the dropping of the dead body of a terrorist through the window of the Taj.

What I found most amazing was the frankness with which these young men and women hit out at those whom they held accountable for the incompetence and negligence which, in their view, had weakened the nation’s defences against terrorism and endangered the nation’s overall security itself. The right words flowed in the right sequence, without faltering or fumbling, going for the jugular of whoever was culpable in their eyes.

Ugly face

They have done a signal service by exposing the callousness and insensitivity of some of the more obnoxious specimens of the ruling class. But for them we would not have known the existence in our midst of the emulators of Marie Antoinette who sparked off the French Revolution by her “If they do not have bread, let them eat cake!”

It was the TV news channels that turned the klieg light on the ugly face of the political class with the close-up of a Sheila Dixit viciously snarling “Don’t talk nonsense!” when a news channel reporter told her about a six-year old girl being run over by her school bus; a R. R. Patil blithely dismissing the Mumbai carnage as ‘a small incident’ that would always happen in a big city, and crowing that the number dead was kept at a couple of hundreds when it could have easily been 5000; a Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi angrily lambasting those ‘dressed in suit-and-tie and wearing lipstick’ for their temerity in criticising politicians; a V.S. Achutanandan, insulting the parents of a commando (Sandeep Unnikrishnan) who laid down his life for the country (which is more than what could be said of the politicians), by his outburst, “If it had not been Sandeep’s house, not even a dog would have glanced that way!”

Bravo, men and women of India’s news channels!

B. S. RAGHAVAN

More Stories on : Radio/TV | Terrorism | Offhand | Maharashtra

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