Can media learn from Aamir Khan, and Mr Khan from the media?

The Satyamev Jayate host interviews experts with charm and patience, but his programme could do well to add data and build tension

The police, and its problems, formed the second episode of TV series Satyamev Jayate 2. It had moving visuals of police high-handedness, and brutality, and, to present the other side of the story, gave details of conditions under which policemen (and women) live and work. (The inaugural episode, which I missed, tackled issues around rape. The one earlier this week talked of garbage disposal and the racket it involves.)

Satyamev Jayate and host Aamir Khan are engaging on issues where it is tough to be engaging. How many of us can hold readers or viewers' interest on garbage? There is much that the media can learn from Mr Khan, but, if I may say so, there are a few things the actor can learn from the media, guided as we are by editors who have earned their stripes in the business of giving out news and information.

Aamir Khan teaches the media how to treat experts with respect, and let them talk without constantly interrupting them or demanding resignations of people involved in the problem. Television news, or print media, is not the place where people should be asked to resign. We can probe, we can investigate, we can lay out those findings before the public and investigating agencies; but I believe we cannot ask for resignations.

More data

Which brings me to what Mr Khan can borrow from a reporter’s diary:  Number crunching, to begin with.

Satyamev Jayate is high on concern but lacks data. The programme on police reforms, for instance, did well to inform us that 92% of all police force is made up of constables, but that’s where the data journalism stopped.

It did not probe how much state governments spend on the police, what part of this budget goes to paying salaries, or training the police, or building homes for them, or arming them. It did not tell us what part of the budget on policing stays unspent. In short, it did not follow a good reporter’s code: show, don’t tell.

Do-gooders

The programme can also be too full of do-gooders who do not control the system. The one on policing would have gained, (what is called building tension into a story), from an interview with a seasoned political leader on why politicians interfere with the working of the police, or the political compulsions of running a complex country, of which control over police is an important part.

In the episode on garbage collection, though, Mr Khan, after talking about how a mafia controls garbage disposal in most cities, did clarify that he had invited at least eight chiefs of municipal bodies to his programme for a discussion. Seven of the eight did not answer back.