With my tongue firmly in my cheek, here is what I wish folks in the media and entertainment business would do to make it a better place.
I do wish that…
- …the news media would always behave as well as it did over the coverage of the Delhi gang rape victim. It never once tried to “leak” her name, her family’s pictures or anything. There seemed to be a gentleman’s agreement not to do the wrong thing. Yet during the same time it showed pictures of the 17-year-old rape victim who committed suicide in Punjab. So the Delhi case was an exception, not the rule.
- …film journalists would do their job. Read the transcripts of various episodes of “Walk the Talk” that Shekhar Gupta has done with Amol Gupte, Naseeruddin Shah, Vinod Chopra and Prasoon Joshi, among other filmi folk. Or read some of the writing in Tehelka on cinema. They talk about the films, the lyrics, the acting, the direction, the craft that these people practise. They are engaging to read or hear or watch for any movie buff. But they are rare. And chances are they have been done by a political or business journalist or a researcher.
Most film journalists are star-struck, fawning or completely led by the need to know the latest gossip. So, why Ranbir Kapoor broke up with Deepika Padukone interests them more than the story of a fourth-generation actor who has, in a short span of time, made it to the top by taking on scripts that push his limited range. Why is there no magazine or website that discusses the craft or technique of popular cinema? Film journalists actually do a disservice to the industry with their extreme focus on personal gossip. Actors are generally branded as vacuous people, thanks to the perceptions created by film media. That is so very sad. Because these are bright, talented people who do their country proud. Can someone fix film journalism please?
- …news broadcasters would grow up. They are the most vocal and problematic part of the broadcast industry; frankly, they are beginning to bring it down. When it comes to lobbying, their interests always conflict with everybody else’s. But because they are news broadcasters, the government takes them more seriously. Remember that news brought in under six per cent of the Rs 34,000 crore the television industry made in revenues in 2012. Its influence on policy, however, is disproportionately high. One example: TAM, the agency that publishes ratings, had suspended rating data for nine weeks in the run-up to metro digitisation. When the period was up, most broadcasters were all right. However, news ones fought and got a reprieve for a few more weeks. So you have a funny situation in which advertisers can see how entertainment channels are doing but not news ones.
- ...all the group editors, managing editors and senior editors on television would stop remaining anchors and start becoming editors. If they could only give up the need to be in front of the camera all the time and focus on training a good second and third rung of reporters and editors, the quality of news journalism on TV would go up several notches. Like one editor said recently, “We don’t need more regulation, we need better editing and editors.”
- ...media owners would take themselves less seriously. For a bunch of men and women who run businesses where critiquing businesses, governments and others is routine, why are Indian media owners such a thin-skinned bunch? You look at their numbers or their business a little critically and they go all cold on you. If there are two brothers running the business and you quote one of them too often, the other one sulks. If you mention a competitor in the same line, they sulk. In one instance, every time I wrote something critical about a particular media company, they approached me with a job offer.
- ...everybody in the blogosphere would stop going on about the internet and its “freedom”. The Net is as free as any other media. Why are we going on bleeding about a medium controlled by four large global conglomerates? Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook dominate how we talk to our friends, what we buy, what we read, what comes up first when we search for something — almost everything that we do online. They are huge and very profitable. And they are largely free enterprises. The radio, which has greater reach in India, is not allowed to broadcast news. And we haven’t heard a meow about that one. Why does the internet freedom thing fascinate everyone so much? It is free and will remain so.
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