One morning, as I picked up the newspaper that was just delivered to my home, I noticed that the entire front page of the newspaper was an advertisement. Now this is not really uncommon, Time of India has started doing this quite often. Their headlines become Page 3 and Page 1 and 2 are a complete advertisement. What really surprised me that morning however was that it was a lingerie advertisement on the front page with a model posing in a two piece outfit, half of her breasts popping out of the bra and her underwear barely covering her pubic region. On seeing that picture, the only thought that came to my mind was that this newspaper was delivered to thousands of households this morning. It was slid under the door or thrown into the balconies of thousands of families, people living with small children, their mothers, sisters. What kind of effect was that newspaper going to have if it was a small kid who picked it up first or what kind of situation would it be if a daughter picked it up in front of her father?
I remember a time when as children, we used to watch the elders of our family religiously follow the routine of spending at least half an hour in front of the TV every day, listening to that news broadcast on Doordarshan. It really meant so much back then. The news meant so much; the way it was delivered meant so much. There was no useless effort trying to sensationalize an event unnecessarily. Back then it was just a lady reading out news to the readers. The effect however was the same, the purpose was solved and in my opinion, in a much better way.
We now have an endless list of TV channels and several 24/7 news channels that will claim to be the best at either the speed of delivering the news or at the integrity of it. But is that claim really valid anymore? Is the effort really now on reporting the events as they are or is it trying to sensationalize them? Is media still reporting events that matter or are they uselessly trying to fill up the pages and hours with stuff that doesn’t matter? A few days ago I read an article about a wife who abused her husband of raping her during their honeymoon? The newspaper went on describing that the husband sodomized the wife by force repeatedly. Was that detail really necessary? Was just mentioning that the wife was physically abused not enough? Was adding more and more details to this incident not merely an effort to just add spice to it? Once as I was stepping out of the gym, I noticed the following headline on the front page of Navbharat Times.
Now how is this actually news? What is the need of feeding these unnecessary reports of incidents to people? If you switch to a news channel, more than often you will find it covering unnecessary events, for example as shown in the images below.
In my opinion, nowadays the media has started serving us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. Gone are the times when there was some amount of integrity with journalism. Gone are the times when purpose of news was to make people aware of important events from around the globe. Now the word “news” has turned into a cash cow that the media is trying to milk in every possible manner. Now the focus has shifted towards earning more and more readers and viewers in order to increase the revenues. It is not the time anymore when you could just listen to the news and eat up the entire newspaper. Now the reader is forced to make a judgment and decide what is relevant and what is not. Out of the endless stories that we read in the newspaper or watch on the TV, there are barely just a few that really impact our lives, our careers or our businesses. Out of the endless news that we have started to consume day in and out, there is hardly any that can help us become a better person. But due to the sheer amount of useless stories that media tries to cover, it is becoming harder and harder to filter through to the stuff that really matters.
Another thing that really bothers me is how insensitive the media has become. In their race to bump up the revenues, words like privacy have lost meaning to them. Every other day we hear stories of people hitting the journalist and taking the frustration out on him. Media then makes a drama out of that as well but the question is, why corner someone in the first place, so much that he or she takes it out on the media person. Their has to be sensitivity towards people, their privacy, their emotions. For example, the incident that I shared above, a newspaper with picture of an almost naked woman was freely distributed to every household. They must have charged a fortune to the lingerie company for that front paper ad but was any thought given to the homes that it was delivered to? Another such incident that comes to mind is of the Delhi zoo incident where a young man fell into Tiger’s moat and was killed by the animal. When I opened the newspaper that morning, there was a big picture on the front page of the terrified youth and the tiger starting at him. That snap was taken just moments before the killing happened. Knowing what followed, it was indeed a disturbing image. I could not just get it out my head all day long. That look on the youth’s face, knowing that he was about to die, was enough to disturb anyone emotionally. What was the need of publishing that photograph, just to sensationalize the incident? Is it really a sensation for the family of the victim? Was it really a sensation for people who saw that picture and remained stirred emotionally all day long? On every news channel, they kept playing a part of the clip showing the tiger running around with the victim in its jaws. They blurred out the human form but what was the point of doing that? Everyone knew what was there in the mouth of that tiger? What was the need of playing that clip? Was reporting the incident just not enough? Was it really a sensation for that youth’s 7 months pregnant wife to watch her husband’s dead body being dragged around by a tiger? They talked about responsibility but where was their own responsibility towards the viewers when they were playing that clip? Families including children watched it; one can only wonder the effect it may have created on their minds. The question that no one is asking is; is media not really over-doing things these days?
And that is not all. If you watch a news channel continuously for a day, another thing that you will realize is that the media has also started losing the explanatory power. The important events are just covered in a minute or two and rest of the time is spent in feeding more unnecessary but spicy events to the viewers or readers. Will just accumulating facts make us understand the world better? Answer to that question is no. The relationship is actually inverted. The important stories are events that cannot be tagged as stories, slow and powerful movements that have a transforming effect. The more and more useless facts we digest, less likely we are to understand the big picture.
Another word that comes to mind is “media trial”. The media literally puts people on trial before the actual trial but the question is who is going to put them on trial for misleading people? Who is going to announce them guilty for becoming so money-minded and insensitive?
Updated: May 2015
A few days ago, right after the day when Nepal was hit by the earthquake that caused destruction at a mass level, this is how the front page of Times of India looked like which just made me wonder that how was it sensible to publish a disturbing image of a dead body buried under the rubble? What were they trying getting this image seen by every household the first thing in the morning? Was publishing an image of a collapsed building or damaged road not enough to give people the idea? Everyone knew that thousands were killed in that quake but did we really need to see a dead body to get an exact idea of how destructive the quake was?
