Channel Surf-Zee News, Times Now

TV news has become such an all-round farce that one wonders why we bother watching it at all. Be it the English news channels or the ‘we speak the language of the masses’ Hindi ones, neither of them seem to have anything of value to offer other than a daily dose of drama masquerading as news for their audiences.

Take last night’s news for example. Zee News had their Rakhi Sawant lookalike, Alka Saxena along with another female anchor on their 9 o’clock news programme, ‘Non Stop at 9’. Which it seems was a mere pretence to get some semblance of news bulletins out of the way before the real show began at 9:30 pm.

Although both houses of the Parliament had been adjourned during the day with the resurrection of the Bofors scam, they couldn’t be bothered by such trivial news and decided they would much rather focus on Sachin and Rekha being nominated to the Rajya Sabha. In their ‘Non Stop at 9’ segment they didn’t so much as mention Bofors but ran a number of other news reports, giving each as little time as they could get away with.

All this while the ticker at the bottom ran a number of other news headlines as ‘Breaking News’. None of which were related to the footage actually showing on the screen at the time.

While Zee News didn’t touch the Bofors issue, it wasn’t as if much was gained by discussing it either. Times Now had an evenly divided panel of Renuka Chaudhary, Kumar Ketkar, Chandan Mitra and Meenakshi Lekhi. This was all high drama again as a brazen Chaudhary bulldozed any of the panellists who dared to question her, all the while insisting that the Congress had nothing to be embarrassed about. The high point of the night’s news was that even Arnab Goswami started laughing at one instance. Now that’s not something you see every day!

If you’re wondering why the arguments made by each panellist haven’t been mentioned, it’s because there were none. Just a lot of ugly finger pointing.

Returning to Zee News, by 9:30 they had cleared their set of all irrelevant news and got down to their basic agenda – lavishing suitably extravagant praise on “cricket ke bhagwan” Sachin and “sada bahaar” Rekha, who had both got Rajya Sabha nominations.

Here’s a question Zee. A former chairperson of an energy and environment engineering company who had figured in Forbes’ list of richest Indian women and is a chairperson of Teach for India was also nominated, and all you can talk about is how Sachin is the greatest and Jaya Bachchan and Rekha will now both be in the Parliament’s Upper House? They allegedly had a man in common, ages ago. Get over it!

The lady mentioned earlier is Anu Agha by the way, whose name was just mentioned in passing. She also happens to be a member of the Sonia Gandhi-backed National Advisory Council. But no, that’s not worth discussing at all.

Finally, there was one small voiceover piece questioning Sachin’s inclusion in the Rajya Sabha, the implications of this decision on cricket and on sportspersons from other games. To which the afore-mentioned Ms Saxena decided to ask if any other athlete had ever achieved as much as Sachin did. A little bit of a sweeping statement, to put it mildly.

Times Now was discussing Sachin’s place in the Rajya Sabha and its impact on his cricket with a full house of eight panellists. There was not enough screen space to fit all of them in. One wonders what an angry Roshan Abbas and Derek O’Brien were doing there. Times Now, mercifully, didn’t have the Rekha angle, but forgot Anu Agha too.

At 10, Zee News shifted to Punya Prasun Bajpai, but he too was a disappointment. After quickly informing us that the Allahabad University is on fire and the VC and Proctor have been held captive by the students for close to 30 hours, he too decided to get on to the more important news of how Rekha had overcome the odds in her life to reach where she is today. He hoped that her own struggles would mean that the actress would raise her voice for the ‘marginalised’ (cue eye roll).

They later topped it off with a confrontation scene between Rekha and Jaya Bachchan from the film Silsilay. Please Zee, get over it!

With all this passing as news, one wonders if we really need to be worrying about corrupting kids’ minds with movies about soft porn actresses, or is it the too-lazy-to-think adult minds that should be a cause for consternation.