The line between fact and fiction and news and entertainment has merged as 24 hour news channels pitch to survive in a free market.
The era of sedate looking anchors and sombre sets that characterised much of DD news broadcasts is long over. What liberalisation
and FDI flows brought to the television industry, specifically news channels, was a sea change in settings. Private players emerged slowly but surely with Zee and Star TV being the pioneers. Today, they find themselves competing for attention with two dozen news channels in a scenario where proposals for setting up several others are awaiting final clearances. What this plethora of news channels brought with them was the 24×7 format, hitherto unknown to the Indian audience. Now, while it was easy to retain audience attention for a half hour news update, it became equally difficult to do so in this new world order where channels remained on air throughout the day and programming was round the clock. Operating costs tripled and so did the TRP anxieties. Tabloidization of news became the unavoidable answer to churning out content in a cost effective manner .Traditional competitors thus, no longer limit themselves to rival news channels but extend to the GECs. In such a climate, questions about the integrity of news per se are bound to be raised. What we are witnessing then is a blurring of lines between fact, fiction, news and entertainment.
The television news industry is shaping and being shaped in turn by a ‘sound byte society’. A sound byte society is one that is flooded with images and slogans, bits of information and abbreviated or symbolic messages- a culture of instant but shallow communication. I t is not just a culture of gratification and consumption, but one of immediacy and superficiality, in which the very notion of ‘news’ erodes in a tide of formulaic mass entertainment. It is a society anesthetised to violence, one that is cynical but uncritical and indifferent to,if not contemptuous of, the more complex human tasks of cooperation, conceptualisation and serious discourse.
There is an economics behind the politics.TV advertising is the electronic linchpin of consumer capitalism: a relentless invitation to self indulgence and unlimited consumption. The 24×7 news cum fiction format supports these ends not just in its dependence on commercial advertising but also in its content which tends to celebrate affluence and acquisitiveness as normal, while ignoring activities such as voluntarism, community activism, political engagement or other pursuits that involve self sacrifice for larger causes. Stories on the India Auto Expo or panel discussions on which laptop is better are commonplace and often fuel complete shows like Overdrive and Newsnet2.0 while chances of spotting a piece on say recycling one’s mobile or the sarva shiksha abhiyan are hard to come by. Another factor to be blamed for this turn of events is the rising carriage costs that news channels have to pay which leaves very little for programming and content. This perennial fund crunch prevents channels from sending reporters to cover elections in the north east or engage in serious investigative journalism. The law of optimal allocation of scarce resources sadly works to favour the production of soppy page 3 news stories that are both low on effort and cost. Examples include the massive media coverage meted out to the Abhi-Ash wedding and the success of Star News’ ‘Saas,bahu aur saazish’.
With advancements in telecommunications and the internet, we have become an impatient society when it comes to information gathering and the 24×7 news format reflects that. Television is essentially a kinetic medium capable of changing images and subjects quickly. Unless it compresses time this way,it will lose out on viewership. However, this compression comes at a price. A fast forward effect is generated which demands quick and final solutions to complex and intransgient problems. Anchors like Arnab Goswami and Barkha Dutt make sweeping assertions and reduce issues to a numbers game always asking for a one word summation or a ten point tackle. Such a breezy and bulleted simplification of complex issues cannot be called news. It is entertainment.
Because 24×7 news traffics mainly in scenes and images that are highly localised in time and space and in words that must condense their messages to accommodate the medium’s visual dimensions and severe time constraints-it is also essentially a symbolic rather than discursive medium. The communicative function of symbols is to simplify. The Indian flag and Independance day news programmes evoke patriotism and not its moral ambiguities. Entertainment merges with news and facts with fiction. India TV recently used karate shots from Chinese films to illustrate the idea that the Chinese army is growing in strength and is therefore a cause of concern for India thus bollywoodising the news experience by adding some symbolic masala .
The 24×7 news format priviledges quantity over quality. With limited budgets and a vast amount of air time at its disposal,channels are pressured into taking up stories that are light and breezy; attracting eyeballs without the hike in price. So news channels will devote several time slots for airing stories on cookery,the fashion week and celebrity gossip. The addition of shock value to stories is a compulsory requirement for the medium because the murkier the details the better is the audience response. Also constraints over the time and finances allocated to each news story prevent a research into their historical past or analysis of the future. Most stories on the Naxals focus on the violence portraying them as terrorists without as much as backgrounding the backlash as a response to the decades of displacement and exploitation at the hands of the Indian state. TV news thus creates black and white caricatures of economic, political and social actors and institutions which can hardly be said to be corresponding to factual realities.
The blurring of lines between fact,fiction and news and entertainment is dumbing down audiences. 24×7 news television scales the world down to fit on the screen. It isolates us from the larger environment and our responsibility towards it such that ‘we see without being seen and hear without being heard’. Viewers are becoming increasingly passive and devoid of the zeal to bring about change, passing the dal and curry while viewing live images of the war in Iraq as if theres nothing unsettling about it. Of course there is the ‘sms your opinion in a yes,no and maybe format’ for tokenism but is this push button campaigning representative of an educated public and informed opinion or even responsible news programming, remains to be seen.
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