Habitually Good

I have been ranting to my wife and friends a whole lot lately about how pathetic news reporting in India has become. With the arrival of hordes of news channels, it is almost next to impossible to find a good news channel which reports factual data about a news event instead of sensationalizing the news event with their own interpretations of these facts. The quality of journalism in this country has taken a big nosedive. And it is not just the TV channels, even the quality of newspapers is no longer what it used to be.

In the old days, one of the best ways to learn good English skills (remember in India, English is not our native language) was to read the newspaper. However, everyday when I pick up the newspaper, there are so many grammar and spelling errors that I can’t help but feel angry at myself for subscribing to this crap.

Anyway, when someone sent me a forward which contained photographs of this so called journalism, I had to blog about my frustration.

This is what breaking news means on these news channels.

This is breaking news. To translate this, this news in the bottom reports what food was eaten by Rahul (Gandhi).

Now whatever the story is behind this headline, I am sure there can be more important things happening in India and around the world that more newsworthy (even if Rahul Gandhi is such an important person).

Also, if you don’t have anything worthwhile to report, then why even have a Breaking News at all. Let the viewer watch the regular news program.

Like the one above, this one reports that Amitabh Bachhan (a legendary actor) caught a cold.

You have got to be kidding me to think that this is breaking news.

What are the news channels thinking? When I think of breaking news, I want to see something that I should be notified of immediately and so it should be overlaid on top of whatever I am watching currently. I don’t care if someone (whoever it is) caught a cold.

And this one takes the cake. This news is about a dog the the Police Commissioner of Delhi lost and then found.

This is breaking news. It is so important a news that not only is this a head line, there is also a detailed time allocated to covering this news (next image).

I suppose in this case the TV channel might have been trying to highlight the fact that a lot of taxpayer resources were being spent to look for this dog. But still, there has got to be some seriously wrong type of demand in what the TV viewers want to look at if the news channels keep pouring out crap like this.

And what about over analysis and sensationalistic reporting of news. The most recent case being that of Arushi Talwar’s murder.

I was disgusted by the reporting of this news. The tone, the language, the conclusions, everything about the reporting of this news was geared towards pulling viewers instead of reporting news. I couldn’t find one channel which was reporting facts in an objective manner.

The sad thing about all this is that the news channels keep showing utter nonsense and show no signs of slowing down which means only one thing: we as viewers must want this type of reporting. And that is the saddest thing of all.

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