Soon after the English cricket team thumped the visiting Indians with a solid whitewash, it seemed cricket had suddenly fallen off from the face of this planet. A game so euphorically followed in India, it appeared, had been wiped off clean from the slate.  All references to it had gone blank. The little flickering widgets- which so ardently popped up the moment you tuned to an Indian news channel - had gone missing. So had the cricket savvy news readers, who so passionately showered praises and just as easily played critics to their team. Channel after channel I surfed, all in the hope that a little caption would bring me abreast to the situation at Oval. But, no. Not a single shred was to be found. Cricket it appeared had indeed left for the heavenly abode.
The day Indian`s lost the four match test series to the English 4-0, no Indian news channel reported the debacle, not even one! It brought to the forefront an unmistakable trait of theirs; they report about stuff they think people like, not the things that an honest journalist inside them demands. Every time they leave out reporting what they must, they reassert this fact. And just as easily they plummet from the ranks of being a credible news agency to a puppet meant to feed a country`s ego.
In these times of information blizzard, when information can even be had from a dustbin, if connected properly, it really comes as a surprise that TV channels suppress information. Let us get one fact clear. It is one thing to prioritize stuff, leaving out something that may not be important but an altogether different thing to assign importance to it based on your own convenience. Granted that a news channel cannot report everything under the sky, but how can it suddenly leave out the culmination of something it arduously had been reporting for a good part of two months? One dies wondering, how does a cricket team, an important ingredient of every news item one day, become useless to report about the very next? Interestingly the day it has been white washed.
It would hardly have made a difference had the inconsistencies remained restricted to Cricket alone. It is just a game after all, and any news about it being aired or not being aired does not flag the end of the world. However, this is not the first time that cheating when it comes to fair reporting has taken place. Just as well, cricket is not the only subject that has borne the brunt of poor reporting.
Last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, when men were being popped like birds in Kashmir, the Indian news channels bore a seal of silence. Not one channel sufficiently covered the stories unfurling on the bloody streets.  Not one channel chose to be true. Either they were totally unaware of what was transpiring here, which seems highly unlikely – I find an OB Van of a reputed news channel parked outside a hotel in Srinagar almost every day I pass it – or they were purposely turning a blind eye towards it. The chances of the latter being far more pronounced, as every sane mind would agree.
So what really encourages this eccentric-reporting (that’s what I prefer to see it as). If it is the hope that news can remain buried in the bin when they choose not to speak about it, I must say they are miserably mistaken. Disappointed with their coverage that night, it took me precisely the time it takes to switch on your broadband modem to know the result. One would do better, however, than passing off this cunning conglomerate as being so naive. Surely their motive behind the eccentric reporting must be more complex.
What could it be then? Are they influenced? Are they scared? Are they hurt? The hurt thing seems quite possible. You get hurt when your favorite team gets trampled. You get so hurt sometimes that you barely want to think about it, let alone go out there, pretending everything is hunky-dory and apprise millions.  But hold on. This was not supposed to be about personal feelings. You have a news channel to run, for God`s sake. If you let your personal likes/dislikes come in the way, you are done with reporting. That is a given. You may be hurt, yes, but people want to know what is hurting you so bad.
The most plausible reason however, seems to come from the unanimity factor adorning the whole issue.  All the channels, as if driven by a common protocol, leave a particular subject out!  What could this mean? It could well mean that external agencies, way above the pay grade of news editors, are influencing news. Agencies that discuss threadbare the strategies to be adopted and makes sure they are. Agencies that decide what to do when India loses an embarrassing cricket match; what to do when ducks are hunted in Kashmir!
Whatever the reason behind this loose reporting, one thing is sure; all is not well with Indian news channels. For them, for us, for all that are fed; it is not healthy and it must go.

(Feedback at basim.amin@yahoo.com)

Lastupdate on : Tue, 20 Sep 2011 21:30:00 Mecca time
Lastupdate on : Tue, 20 Sep 2011 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Wed, 21 Sep 2011 00:00:00 IST