The Making of Breaking News

 

I am slowly, yet reluctantly, coming around to the conclusion that we need News Papers! This is no easy conclusion, given the debris floating around in the ocean of Media! The news-wrecks and tragic castaway stories that a conscientious reader comes across often in the traitorous waters of the Media where pollution is phenomenally high, it is hard to vote for all the newspaper around, though some seem to hold fort. The monetary spill on these waters that threatens to endanger healthy journalism and the ‘play-along-school’ of Media who don’t ‘feel like’ hurting the so called ‘ruling sentiments’ and ‘drifts of powers’ render the selection of newspapers further painful. After skims and scans, one feels often that the tea in the cup outlives the reading time!

 

For many of the elders it is the morning tea-newspaper combination, with a snack thrown in, that works for the launch of a day, in or out of lock down. This tribe will be munching chips, sipping hot tea, eyes running wild, desperately looking for a news item which is worth seriously pursuing after the initial scan. It is such a delight to feel that one can save a lovely read for the comeback, when the tea cup is half full and snack pile (sure, small pile) diminishing not in proportion to the tea remaining. A lovely, incisive, bold, honest, fresh, occasionally disrespectfully humorous, piece of writing to fall back on! Sadly it is not that easy catch hold of such a piece of writing these days.  Which exactly is the reason the decision to support the News Papers is not an easy one.

 

But there are compelling reasons. For one, the 24 hours TV News Channels keep ‘breaking’ news. If the question is what else should a full time news channel do (or break), well, the hint is home. It is true that something significant, alarming, tragic, hilarious, celebratory, keeps happening somewhere each moment- something that needs to be ‘broken’. But things have come to such a pass that a full time TV News Channel can’t exist without ‘breaking’ news, however local, regional its reach is! Scrolls will keep breaking new stories emerging or apparently emerging. Or even, kind of emerging. With insights that will put even prophets to shame, leave alone palmists and horoscope pundits, the broken stories will promise to break more and every such story is loaded with potential to alter the status quo of whatever/whoever! While certain channels started off giving 10 important news headlines, another went for 12, then yet another 100! Since ‘significance’ can be a matter of subjective decision, it wasn’t hard to break the ‘significant’ news items. Thus breaking news story has been turned into a number. The more you break, the more you make! It is common knowledge that anything which is listed as 10 most important, 12 significant, 5 key, the readers/listeners/viewers fall for it! The ploy simply has been taken to its summit with 100 pieces of significant news. ‘Summit’ may be the wrong word, as it is always possible that another channel will make it 500 news stories of the day (or the moment)!

 

There was a time when we didn’t have full time news channels perhaps because the world dint have so much news to be broken then. Only the BBC kind traded in the zone and it didn’t matter much as it didn’t have free access to bulk of the homes and screens were not in every one’s possession. Since it was an elite channel, not much news was broken on us. Now that we have so many full time TV News Channels even in one local language, being aired free of cost(!), we are submerged in broken news lying around. But in the past I was speaking of, major news breaks came in the form of a scroll at the bottom of the screen as a flash. That did the job. But then only significant news items flashed and significance was premium I feel. Now that we have a scenario in which news is broken all around by all in the social media, TV News Channels have decided to leave nothing off its radar. The sad conclusion is that the viewer is dished out more than she can take, more than is possible and more than what is true at times.

 

What tires me further is certain TV News Channels having multiple scrolls! It keeps rushing in three and four tiers, at different speeds. Certain data will flash on the margins and there will be someone speaking too. This news mess messes up with ones orientation. This news-disoriented viewer gradually takes such an apathy towards it. The kind of feel that we have seen it, heard it. This news-overdoing surely makes one long for the non-news channels which occasionally broke news to us while we watched a movie and we were grateful for that! Most of the news channels are aired free of cost(!) and hence automatically reaches us among those who pay for it! It is not bad being a news watcher. In fact, we need to keep an eye on the news. But the full time news channels around, with its mad zeal for breaking news, to have nothing but broken news, to break as much news as possible, to hunt broken news to its ‘logical’ conclusions, being on the alert to break news, waiting for broken news, itching for breaking news, anxious about not being able to break news, worried of not having enough news broken enough, enraged that broken news coming in is not being break-worthy enough, morally furious that the news could have been differently broken, with urge to spin the possible tangent for the breaking news, furious that the news is not spinning the way it was broken,  to make it look and sound like really broken news, to break it from Left to Right and Right to Left, to be armed to secularize the communal break news and to communalize the secularly broken… they are breaking the genuine, perceptive news watchers. 

 

Let us set aside the full time venom-spitting certain channels specialize in. Those channels make one think of what one Cricket commentator said long back: You always have the right to use the 'turn off' button! But what of those who refuse to know (or simply don’t know what is turn off-able?) the difference between 'on' and 'off'?! What if the channels are consciously feeding a population ready for News broken always with the wrong side up? And also, creating such a population dying for more of the upside-down kind? The news as a movie (unfolding story) in which the victor and vanquished will be scripted the way it is broken? There is, for me, a case for cutting down on full time news channels.

 

I would be really happy to go back to the non-news channel days when the real flash broke the movie screen at the bottom. Or to go back to what I started off with, the morning newspaper. After all the news that gets broken through the day, the (often) good for nothing channel debates which try to generate more break-worthy spin and to nullify certain others breaks, after all the social media news breaks, what really matters will be there on the news Papers in the morning next day, provided you are subscribing the right ones. At a time when a number of online news portals are displaying admirable rigor, nerve and boldness, calling spades exactly that, it isn’t but easy to choose which Print daily can go with hot tea and snack in the morning! But with the excess of the Full Time News Channels, one is forced to make peace with the relatively less broken newspaper to snack on!