Charged by the media

Rupert Murdoch built a news empire around the world which often exulted in a prevarication of the truth, or worse, as news filters in of the shutting down of Britain’s oldest paper, News of the World (NOTW) tabloid, invaded people’s privacy and committed some of the gravest rights violations.

Perhaps some postgrad student will one day study how a country’s nosediving economy is related to its internal obsessions with sex, crime — and royalty. No offence to the love sparks generated by the William-Kate wedding, although the feel-good atmosphere must surely have added a neat sum to Britain’s depleting exchequer.

Hacking into the voice mails of a murder victim, as NOTW did some years ago, revealed over the last few days by The Guardian newspaper, has generated yet another primary emotion, this time around abhorrence, revulsion and disgust. Britain is riveted by the revelations, especially because there’s a direct link to the Cameron government.

More papers will be sold, more money will be spent on the navel-gazing that is already underway. When so many of your other major policies have failed, such as those around Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the bad news is bound to fall off page 1. That’s when journalists, only driven by the profit motive, will push the envelope that verges on verbal and visual pornography.

Murdoch owns large parts of the Indian media as well, for example 26 per cent of the highly successful Hindi television news channel, Star News. The crime-sex-mystery formula that Star has so successfully packaged in India is driven by a mug’s game called ratings. Advertising will only flow to your channel if the eyeballs are fixated on it for more than 30 seconds at a time.

Guess which story on television will get larger viewer interest: Rahul Gandhi’s journeys into the villages of the Hindi heartland or a reconstruction of grossly violent crime and murder on a show on Star called “Sansani”? No prizes for your answer, of course.

The tragedy in India is that Hindi television channels have shown advertising agencies how easy it is to put their finger on people’s primary impulses. In a gender-insensitive country, it is the man who will have control over the TV remote, and it is the male gaze that will charge the adrenalin. That’s why you have short skirts and revealing necklines selling something as contradictory as cement or water filters.

The problem is not when these sexually-charged ad spots are separated from news content, but when the news itself seeks stories in which these primary impulses are embedded. That’s why Bollywood and its swinging stars are a staple diet on several news channels.

The totally specious argument is that the nation is fed up with the financial scams, frauds and stories around corruption tumbling out of politicians’ closets. The nation needs some entertainment, you see.

The power of the Indian news media is an old story. Interestingly, several English TV channels and some Hindi ones are self-introspecting about the way forward and coming up with broadcasting regulations that will control some of the nonsense that appears.

As the sun firmly sets on Britain’s empire of the media, and travels to South Asia’s economy, driven by India, the region’s media will also have to throw up new ways of interpreting the news.

Saleem Shahzad, the intrepid reporter from Asia Times Online, and Jyotirmoy Dey of the Mid-Day newspaper based in Mumbai, showed us the way. We will salute them if we follow the direction of their pens.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 11^th, 2011.