News needs a new yardstick

GUEST COLUMN

The television news industry has managed to cross Rs 1,000 crore in revenue in under five years, a majority of which has come in the last 36 months. Still, I am not impressed. Some might call me cynical, but after 15 years in the broadcast industry, I am bitterly disappointed to see this most powerful medium reduced to no more than a TRP trap.

News channels have been commoditised just like consumer durables. New news channels are born every week. The recent launches are good examples that "news channels" are not merely precursors of social change but harbingers of fortune (or misfortune?).

The real issue is not the endless list of brutal rapes and daylight murders, and neither is it the debate over Delhi being the National Crime Region and Mumbai the bastion of the underworld. Haven't we always known this? Haven't we heard of rapes and murders in the days of yore? Haven't conmen and beautiful sex workers existed before? Haven't we known about the existence of corruption in power corridors? And of the casting couch?

The real issue is something else; it is sustenance of business in the absence of a competent authority and the means to judge the growth and quality of television news. It is a great tragedy that television news is measured on the popularity index and not on an impact index.

This is compounded by a paucity of people who understand the difference between television news channel and a newspaper.

Unfortunately, television news today is managed by people who were print journalists, or our friends who came in from advertising or FMCG. The problem is not their lack of talent but their inability to understand the nature of the medium.

Television by nature is a medium of visual contact; it is about things that appeal to the eye and the human mind. The print media is about stimulating the mind. It is the primary instinct of the human eye to stop at something that is not routine. This explains the presence of some mediocre news channels at the top of the TRP ladder while some top-end channels languish at the bottom.

General entertainment is stress-free viewing targeted at viewers seeking "entertainment" and not "social change".

TRPs measured through a system counting and measuring visual contact and connect may serve the purpose for them. But news is not entertainment and, therefore, must be measured on an index of "impact".

Our mind commands the eye to stop at anything unusual. This does not mean that the mind is assimilating the visual data and initiating a "change".

News as content is a catalyst for change that comes about by understanding, analysis and, finally, action. For the desired action to take place, the mind must be focused and in the environment to facilitate this phenomenon.

An entertainment-seeking viewer, whose number is large, tunes in for just that and not, say, "we the people"