Last night, CNN-IBN died and CNN News 18 was born. To announce its new avatar, the channel has made a promo. One that seeks to inform viewers what journalism is, and since we at Newslaundry are always eager to glean from the wise, we took notes while watching.

The ad opens with a stretch of barbed wire in close up. In the distance are an orange sky, a few spotlights and the blurry outlines of ten people.

Do not start humming songs from Border. This is no place for melodramatic, staged fiction. This is the real deal. CNN News 18 is here to tell you about journalism.

Cut to a dusty swirl out of which emerges Bhupendra Chaubey, mic in hand, and a cameraman. Don’t worry, that’s not a gun holster hanging from the cameraman’s waist. It’s his cap.

“Journalism is hard, back-breaking work,” Chaubey tells the viewer. So hard that he drops the mic into a pile of earth for no fathomable reason. Or maybe this was Chaubey doing a mic drop to show he’s young at heart.

Even if that’s the last word from Chaubey (it isn’t actually), others have other things to tell us about journalism. Zakka Jacob, with dry leaves swirling around him like he’s a stand-in for a Bollywood hero during a sad love song, informs us that journalism is “a commitment for a lifetime, a one-way street.” For all those thinking that sounds like marriage, Jacob (having picked up the mic that Chaubey dropped) walks down the aisle, sorry path, which has a one-way sign up front and is lined with spotlights.

Why spotlights? Maybe they were left over from a Bollywood shoot, along with the wind machines that the ad makes full use of, to blow dried leaves all over the place. It seems nothing screams hard-hitting news like dried leaves.

Undeterred by the foliage and random light being reflected at her — did the Bollywood crew leave behind dodgy reflectors as well? — Shreya Dhoundial informs us, “Once we take the plunge, there is only one way to go: Deeper, further.”

Evidently, the scriptwriter is not familiar with Freud.

Suddenly, the humans are gone and instead a crowd of unmanned cameras are visible. Maybe they’re the Transformer version of cameras because they’ve organised themselves into two rows and Smitha Nair is walking through them. In the distance, a single spotlight beams. Was that left behind along with the reflectors, from the Bollywood song shoot?

Nair tells us journalism is “sleepless nights, because a scam is unravelling.” On cue, the word “scam” appears. It’s been scrawled on the earth and covered with dust, which the wind machines blow away. Is the journalist then basically a glorified wind machine?

Karma Paljor makes sure that the mic relay race continues. Showing off a far more swaggersome stride than Jacob and Chaubey, Paljor, mic in hand, informs us that journalism is also about seeing “nature’s fury, up close.” A single, dying twig comes into the frame, crawling its way out of a mound of dry earth. This is not exactly how we’d imagined “furious”, but what do we know?

Cut to the Transformer cameras that now stand around a smiling Dhoundial, who reminds us that empathy and concern are critically important aspects of journalism. Which is why she’s standing all alone, surrounded by machines that are incapable of empathy, on what looks like a drought-struck patch of land. On the plus side, we’re feeling loads of empathy for the CNN News 18 crew for swallowing the amount of dust and dry leaves they must have in the course of this shoot.

The rest of the advertisement continues along the same lines: dust swirls, spotlights, leaves and somewhat-grumpy looking journalists who occasionally attempt smiling. At one point, you can glimpse a piece of installation art made of what looks like two jhaadu. Some journalists come out of cars, others scrunch their eyes as they attempt to look deep into those of the viewer, a few seem to be getting caught in a trap laid out by the Transformer cameras. All the while, we’re told that CNN News 18’s journalism is about passion (which does sort of explain the decision to shoot this ad like it’s a Bollywood song. If there’s one thing that India is passionate about, it’s Bollywood).

The ad ends with Jacob saying that at the root of all this leaf-blowing is CNN News 18’s commitment to the viewer, because they are “the centre of our universe.”

This would be heartening to know if that statement wasn’t followed by all the journalists swiftly getting the hell out of the frame. Apparently a key element of journalism is making a quick exit. What we’re left with at the end of the ad is cracked earth, unmanned cameras and the CNN News 18 logo.

The most reassuring part of this ad is actually the end, when all the journalists leave the frame. Of late, CNN IBN had done some excellent work — like their coverage of the drought in Bundelkhand and the recent furore over charging students of Jawaharlal Nehru University with sedition — so we can only hope that they desperately wanted to get off this ridiculous ad shoot and go back to work.