Captive Audience Conundrum

Karl Marx once described religion as the opium of the masses. Now the 24/7 TV news channels have taken over that mantle from the guardians of faith.

From their prime time pulpits, television anchors dole out daily diversionary fix and firewall the masses from real issues, as the former brings in more eyeballs and the latter only means more leg work, sometimes loss of ad revenue or even tax raids. In their missionary zeal to pursue the holy grail of Television Rating Point (TRP), the anchors have donned the mantle of entertainers.

You may be in the middle of a spiralling coronavirus caseload, closure of businesses, rampant job losses and the Chinese may be breathing down our necks in Ladakh, but when you switch on the television you will see none of it. Instead of holding a mirror to society, our smug anchors are indulging in the exercise of smoke and mirrors.

Gone are the days of news anchors being mere messengers; they are now competing with TV serial actors with regard to histrionics. The melodrama levels these anchors whip up during their prime time shows would make late Manmohan Desai proud. They become the judge, jury and the executioners and their primetime shows are war minus shooting. Some even costume up for the act - we had a Hindi TV news channel anchor dress up as an astronaut when our moon lander mission was about to touch down. Tragically the mission ended in failure, had it succeeded we would have probably seen many more anchors in space suits the next day.

To keep news dramatic and entertaining a villain is vital. Some invite Pakistani guests and make them the whipping boys. At other times villains are spun out after giving the narrative a Goebbelsian twist - months ago it was Tablighi Jamaat, yesterday it was Rhea Chakraborty and now it is Deepika Padukone. Stoking hatred is rewarding, but when laced with glam quotient it makes TRP scale new highs (no pun intended).

For the 42-inch LED owning middle class it is a good diversion from their dreary lives of eat, work, buy groceries and whine about price rise and taxes. It further reinforces their pet beliefs - those in the movies are of loose morals, people from the 'other' community can never be trusted and the like. And instills a sense of holier-than-thou self-righteousness.

Earlier in the 1980s, when the government was busy bringing every district into its television network, the viewers were described as 'captive' audience because the state-owned Doordarshan enjoyed a monopoly over the airwaves. What passed off as a 20-minute news bulletin at 9 pm was actually a caravan of speeches, book releases, and planting of trees (all mainly in Delhi) by our telegenic prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.

Things like 'breaking news' or 'flash' were unheard of and there was a yawning gap between what we saw on television and what we read in newspapers and magazines. Anchors of that era Preet K.S. Bedi, Minu, Komal G.B. Singh, Gitanjali Aiyar, Rene Simon became household names, but more for their English pronunciation and sartorial sense. Women gawked at the sarees some of the women anchors wore, while many viewers wondered how Preet could always manage to find a turban matching the colour of his suit or tie.

The entry of satellite television in the late 1980s began stirring things up. It provided a glimpse of how BBC or CNN television news looked like. The launch of homegrown news channels like Star TV news and vernacular offerings in the mid-nineties raised the bar. We later had the first televised battle - Kargil war enter our drawing rooms and the subsequent Kandahar hijacking.

Those days were heady with TV reporters doing a lot of ground reporting. But around 2010 the news channel business began consolidating with the entry of some industrial houses and conglomerates. The managements tightened the purse strings and ground reporting became one of the casualties. It gave way to a more cost-effective prime time discussions moderated by an anchor with guests of various political persuasions.

After 2014, the television news underwent a sea change. Television anchors who pulled no punches while questioning those in power suddenly became very reverential. On the other hand they trained their guns on the opposition - whataboutery, false equivalence and jingoism became the new stock-in-trade. TV anchors have ceased being watch dogs for people's rights, but alternate playing lapdogs and guard dogs for the establishment.

Soon all panel discussions began looking the same. During the Doordarshan monopoly days the people had lamented that news bulletins were glorified government handouts and enviously marvelled at Western countries with hundreds of channels. But now despite a surfeit of news channels, diversity is hard to come by and we continue to remain a captive audience.