THE ELUSIVE NEWS

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THE ELUSIVE NEWS

Finding a needle in the haystack would be simpler than finding news in this country. The messenger declared himself more important than the message and over a period of time he became the message himself. This is news in India today. Think of a situation where in yesteryears Doordarshan would have become an important news item itself. And the newscaster a celebrity. A degraded version. A newscaster becomes an editor and starts deciding on the news trajectory. When news was fact, there we no trajectories. There were editors who had scholarship, balanced writing and objectivity, that could never be questioned. The word editor may soon be out of dictionary given their trafic nosedive. We remember black paged newspapers appearing in the days of emergency.

Cutting the clutter. Hard facts. Objectivity. Picking up the cudgels on our behalf. The battle is on to find the elusive news. The breaking news is that every news channel keeps on claiming that. What a tragedy of the fourth estate, when it always in the act of catching the news and news always making the proverbial escape. It seems the epitome of the wild goose chase. There is no channel that has a item called News, it has primetime and tonnes of other fanciful names. The shrill of the newscasters or sorry, the anchors, are shriller than Moffusil town bus conductors at their bus stands, shouting to entice passengers. What a let a let down!

The modelling of anchors on their channels themselves, speaks very low of their capability to be in the news business. The tall claims and electronic fights that follow can put any country to shame. They seem to be deciding the agenda of the nation. News channels being banned from a protest site is something unheard in human history. Finally, the anchors and news channels have become the news themselves, the elusive search as expected from these professionals, has ended in a success. Their search is over but it is difficult to say, how long the country will have to wait to get its dose of democratic news.

The newspapers have become like gift wraps, closely covering the prized gifts. The news. It gives a feeling that lots of private companies keep sending this gift everyday. The prized catch is somewhere inside. Difficult to find. If you locate without loosing you cool, its gets over in five mins. What more can you get in five rupees. News has become an insert in the newspaper. There is no free lunch. On the other end of the spectrum we have the YouTube news channels , mushrooming by the day, one man armies, trying to make a difference. For whatever little they can cover, the little that they do is a breath of fresh air. Who knows this would become the mainstream media tomorrow.

FOR THOSE WHO HAVE VITIATED OUR NEWS ECOSYSTEM DON’T HAVE THE CAPABILITY TO FATHOM OUT THE DEMOCRATIC DAMAGE.

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