Indian newspapers have been around for a very long time. Some of them are even older than the Banyan tree behind your grandmother’s house in the village. While the tree gives shelter and reduce pollution, what worth do the newspapers have? When I read a forwarded article from The New Yorker or The Guardian, I wonder when one of our own could get there.
Consider the example of the Times of India, for once without rolling your eyes that another fellow takes a cheap shot at them. On the 6th of Nov, the front page covered the results of the historic US Elections. “Rosa Parks had to sit for Martin Luther King to March. King had to march for Barach Obama to run. Obama had to run for our children to fly.” Forget understanding its significance, but how many of the newspaper readers may have even heard of Rosa Parks? Now that could have been pasted from an article on the web.
Below the headline was a photograph of Barack Obama kissing his wife, Michelle! I’m not some moral Police to cut the word ‘shit’ from the subtitles or say ‘no’ to a photograph of a couple kissing (though wives have one more reason to dislike husbands owing to Obama’s grace). But when the headline talks about “our children” (which is actually American children), you would think that it has more to do with nurturing children than making them. The photograph on the top-right corner with Barack Obama hugging his daughter should have been picked.
Before we even raise the bar too high and complain about the minimal traces of critical essays, the usual news reports, their content and their presentation are to be seriously questioned. The current scenario centers around sensationalism, entertainment and enticement. In the above example, the third factor must have been what the newspaper counted on. This is definitely a working model considering that the media industry in India is thriving while most newspapers in the rest of the world are laying off a large percentage of their employees. But our newspapers are also rapidly losing credibility.
Half the content is from various credited and uncredited sources. Half the content is loquacious bawdry yarned around either a Bollywood star’s slim legs or a Hollywood starlet’s unbridled bosom, both flicked and uncredited. On a related note, why is the ‘Entertainment’ section called so, even on the Internet? Minissha Lamba sharing her most embarrassing moment or Tara Reid caught on candid camera with a wardrobe malfunction may be entertaining, but have we dug ourselves deep into the trench of atrocity to be entertained by the undeworld extorting money from Shah Rukh Khan and the slayings of Jennifer Hudson’s immediate family? How many readers may have even heard of these names? I bet that a majority of the urbanites, for whom these are ‘covered’, are too preoccupied with the cleavage to notice the name of the person under discussion.
An old teacher of mine used to tell us that he bought newspaper to use it when his grandchildren soil the flooring. Cheaper than other paper.
These are not the kind of articles that I would want my kids to read. These are not the kind of articles that I would want any kid to read. A valuable suggestion is to segment the market and target various sections of the readers separately. A newspaper only for kids is a wonderful idea that has every reason to succeed.
What a newspaper needs is lofty ideals and a good Chief Editor with a vision and a holistic view about what his or her newspaper represents. It is not just the state of newspapers but that of news itself. With the proliferation of 24×7 news channels and bulkier newspapers, some British analyst conducted a survey and concluded that there are only three C’s in Indian News: Crime, Cinema and Cricket. I’m digressing.
Image Source: The Times of India, 6th Nov, 2008
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Yes. Indeed they are joke books, as they are so thick with repetitive news articles. They do think that repetition brings in credibility. I am also of the opinion that news channels are following the same trend. They are marketed as entertainment with a single piece of news being broken all the day.
[...] and because his modern heroine came across as a partial prude. I also criticized the Indian media again and again. Especially until this point, anger and condescension seem to have been my primary [...]