I dont spend too much time infront of the idiot box, but I have been a witness to the news blitzkrieg that Indian consumers are forced to live with. With so many news channels, i usually end up pressing the “Up channel” button almost 20 times before I get out of the “breaking news” zone.
I have never ceased to admire these guys coz I guess it takes a lot of practise to present most of these Breaking News with a straight face. Tell me how can you not laugh when you are on Live TV telling the world that there are aliens living under the sea- when you are talking about the Bermuda Triangle. The other commendable feature they have is “creativity”. One would expect, creativity to limited to departments like editing, presentation etc while referring to News- but I guess these truly creative folks have taken it to the “content” part of news- the only holy grail of this business.
They are no longer in the Business of “”breaking news”, they are in the Business of “Breaking the news”. All this used to be funny and I also indulged in the humor. But now the desperation of these channels to get new content has started affecting the common man.
The TRPs of most of the Breaking News channels has only been rising and its hard to explain why this is happening.Maybe the answer lies in the fact that most of the viewers are ill-informed and highly gullible. Why else would someone believe that the world was coming to an end with the CERN experiment and commit suicide in India?The IB ministry needs to take this outright ridiculing of journalism, little more seriously….