Source : India MediaIn response to Dr. Prannoy Roy's speech on current status of journalism in India: http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/prannoy-roy-on-the-tabloidization-of-indian-news-760247?pfrom=home-cheatsheet)
Dear Dr. Roy,
I have never had the opportunity to work with you. It will remain one of my professional regrets.
Tabloidization, like all catch-phrases, is largely misused in the public sphere. British academics coined this word a few decades ago to understand their changed media environment as news broadcasters were confronted with the culture of the market and beginning to fathom its impact on their news content.
What is tabloidization to them is not necessarily so for us. Our cultural context in which we disseminate news is quite different from theirs. Can you imagine the BBC or even ITN beginning the day without the ubiquitous weather report? No, just as our audiences cannot imagine going without a morning dose of astrology. Both, in their own way, determine how the day goes for viewers in the UK and India, respectively.
My doctoral thesis in the UK related to researching reasons for the dumbing down of news content in Indian commercial news channels. And I have had first-hand experience of just how this happens (I don’t have to tell you that!).
Before I embark on the rest of my commentary, let me correct a factual error in your address. The first-ever, privately produced English, news and current affairs bulletin in India on Doordarshan was “The First Edition”, produced by the Asia Pacific Communication Associates. I know that for a fact because I as News Editor produced that bulletin, presented by Dileep Padgaonkar, and rushed the tape to Doordarshan just in time for the broadcast in the morning of December 12, 1994. The rest of the production houses’ programmes followed.
Ratings is a seven-letter English word which, for journalists, is a more derogatory epithet than its shorter, four-letter sibling beginning with the sixth alphabet. But our lives revolve around it. No escape. Ask the BBC. Even the grandfather of “good journalism” is its victim. For the public service broadcaster, the audience ratings are critical in order to defend the legitimacy of its licence fee!
Our world of news broadcasting is quite young. Excluding the USA from our communication and limiting the comparison with the UK, the ITN was born in 1955. BBC, beginning its broadcasting in 1937, is a little older. In India, Pratima Puri read her first regular, daily news bulletin on Doordarshan in 1965. Zee came in 1992.
Yet, thanks to technology, we have aged faster as broadcast journalists than our British peers.
When we talk of good journalism and bad journalism, we must be clear what exactly are we talking about? As a journalist, I think we should only be talking about living true to the traditional principles of news gathering – objectivity, neutrality, factual, ethical. But we are not talking of these things, aren’t we? Why?
We are talking about ratings. We are talking about our relations with sources. We are talking about astrology. We are talking about a responsible internet. We are talking about democracy in our DNA.
When I last read Harold Evans, these weren’t mentioned as being among the traditional values of news craft.
And yet these are the factors which seem to concern us. This is at best a self-instilled diversionary tactic. We have come a long way from our traditional news rooms into our glitzy, multi-million-rupee virtual reality sets where we parody news. All of us. Without exception. We have come so far down the line it is very difficult to go back up the line. So, we clutch at straws. Like rating, sources, astrology, internet, even democracy.
There is as much a credible discourse about tabloidization, or bad journalism, as there is about good journalism. We understand bad journalism to define good journalism. Bad journalism is anything that is sensationalist, populist, irascible, shocking, irresponsible, lying, name-calling; everything good journalism is not. Academic Bob Franklin calls it Newszak, his Australian colleague John Langer calls it the Other News, John Glencross of UK’s Independent Television Commission calls it the Pelvic News.
What’s bad about bad journalism? I’m trying to call a spade a spade here. What’s wrong with an astrology programme or reconstruction of a crime scene or a fiery, live pow-wow between feuding politicians or a hyped news package?
How is it differently “bad” from a virtual reality set – which suits a light entertainment programme more than a news studio – a two-way live between anchor and reporter – where the reporter chats without knowledge instead of going about the primary duty of gathering information – and blatant misuse of technology to come up with alarmist theme tunes and slugs, incomprehensible graphics, fake lives and repeated preview of “stories yet to come”, etc? These exercises to catch the viewer’s attention span, just like the crime-cinema-sport nexus or the astrology programme or the meaningless debates – which are anyway well past the point of danger of being degraded to the absurd -- are an insult to the viewer’s intelligence.
And yet we go about all this every day, diligently, ritualistically. And still we talk about Tabloidization?
However, when we place all these gimmickry in the Indian cultural context, it makes for some meaning. For the majority of the Indian population, the television continues to be the lone source of entertainment. It is the single-window system for getting news, views and all that in an entertaining manner. What the public needs, the public gets. Period. If the public does not want it, it will tell us so, quite emphatically at that. So, no point being moralistic about it, unless the platform is one of public service broadcasting. Let us not become hypocrites. We cannot be part of a private, commercial establishment dealing in news the content of which is tailored entirely to suit better and increasing advertising revenues and yet behave like we are all Woodwards and Bernsteins. By the way, in the US, journalism students often refer to them in quizzes and even examinations as Redford and Hoffman!
I used to think when the TAM ratings system was in vogue that a person belonging to the SEC AB segment would be a high-brow professional and influencer till I came to know the person was actually of the rank of a small trader! Does it go on to prove that the ratings system was and will be attuned to the survival of Tabloid journalism which brings in all the eyeballs than good journalism?
But all this is besides the point. The truth of the matter is that in the media industry, in our world of journalism, everything is dictated by a “us” and “them” binary. “Us” denotes the upholders of good journalism, the high-brow suits who are part of the affluent intelligentsia, our thinking elite. These are the people who name-drop – whether the schools or colleges they attended, their mates among the top UPSC cadres, industry or politics, who intuitively take on the mantle of gate-keeping the country, its people, its policies and even its consumption of news. The “us” are the statusquoists, the traditionalists, some of whom hire journalists from among the kids of certain social stature or of parents in influential services. “Them” denotes, obviously, the rest, those two-penny chaps who are always awfully aspirational, whose aspirations reach nowhere, who form the big, bad, broad base segment of the country’s population, who need decisions taken for them, who need to be told whom to vote in elections, who can even be journalists without achieving positions of influence, and who like bad journalism.
This binary has divided this country from the times of British rule. It continues to divide us culturally, linguistically, economically, politically. It divides the world of journalism as well. Is it the “us” or “them” which is part of the so-called mainstream, national, English media? Is it “us” or “them” which is part of the so-called vernacular, regional media?
For “us”, news has to be consumed slowly like an aged single malt, all such news falling in the hard, political category (aren’t we the decision-makers?). The likes of “us” frown then the boundary between politics and entertainment is eroded (shouldn’t political news come first, entertainment last just before sports, because politicals news is central to the whole journalism genre?).
Tabloid journalism may be immoral, unethical and possibly dangerous but these are not the reasons why it is vilified. It is criticized for the simple reason that it is less deferent – is actually challenges – traditional authority. It addresses that vast segment of the Indian population that was never the target of the prestige press. In course, it has given rise to a fresh, completely separate, discourse on journalism and mass communication, waiting to transcend the traditional. It makes a caricature of a politician or a captain of industry. It cocks a snook a haughty bureaucrat. It laughs at the P3 anglers, it flays the nexus between the four pillars of democracy. It does it all while transcending the traditional barriers of both information and entertainment, entering its exclusive world of info-tainment. The “them” love it. They give us the reach. They give us the time spent. They encourage the advertisers. They pay our salaries.
And we, the “us”, the good journalists, the influencers of political leadership and public opinion, we produce this brand of journalism. Do we leave an inch on our screens which is not sponsored? Aren’t we the chaps who hire producers at fat salaries to come up with programme formats which deliver little news but lots of techno-whiz? Isn’t it true that traditional organizational hierarchies are so broken down in our newsroom that everybody, right from the top boss to the new recruit, is an editor?
Good journalism and bad journalism are idioms of a post-modernist corporatised world where, to quote an academic, “the celebration of the market as a cultural and economic strategy” is what life is all about. In the natural world of ordinary people, there’s only journalism. Without a prefix or a suffix. That’s the journalism we all knew and practiced once upon a time.