Daily Post 1376
BROKEN NEWS
When things used to be get broken in the earlier days, it used to appear in the media, more professional the media organisation, the earlier it appeared and the coverage was cut and dry. When things used to run seemingly fine a few decades back then the tone and tenor changed the gravity of the news. Certainly investigative journalism send shivers down the spine of the targets. Print – newspapers and news magazines were the staple news for all. There were very few yellow rags. which were accordingly known. The TV had everything; news, masala, serials, music and movies. Life seemed to be pretty balanced and so was the media.
The story of the down slide began when news was transformed into entertainment and their subjects became running commentaries, as if they were balls of a five day cricket test match. Running twenty four hours, day in and day out even the emergency services find it difficult to handle. Here out of choice and with barely any content. The art of creating news was then invented. The news taste buds were numbed to appreciate the trash turned news endlessly. The entertainment serial channels were making roaring business. They had to reinvent again, from news to entertainment and then to making news into a full fledged Hindi serial of the Saad Bahu variety. Even that was not enough because the competition started becoming more intense with every passing day.
From Hindi to English to vernacular, hundreds of channels started ruling the air waves. Some theorem called TRP was created, where the viewer was at best a pawn. The news now became Breaking News. News was to bring something broken in the system, incident or accident into the public domain, if the news itself gets broken then what do you do. The size of the TV and also the font kept growing, as if it was being beamed for eyes losing their eyesight. Simultaneously, media started losing it’s vision. It could see the world only thorough a periscope, diverted at angles where required, for it’s convenience. The TV Type Titling started on the YouTube videos and spread all throughout social media.
Breaking the back of the breaking news came the dinosaur called social media. Everyone became a newscaster mostly on the bandwagon of propaganda, for the powers that be and thoughts they cling to. How long will this mess last nobody knows, we are already in the era of Fake News and Post-Truth. President Trump has hugely enriched this repository. We are at the cusp of another momentous change, the age of the DeepFakes, when fakes become real. From the crony capitalism to the Godi Media, as it is alleged, is a media ecosystem completely gone awry. Last thing one would want is to have a challenged media in these challenging times.
THE BATTLE CRY OF BREAKING NEWS IS A CLEAR MANIFESTATION OF A BROKEN MEDIA ECOSYSTEM.
Sanjay Sahay