Thank you Roger Ailes for ruining Indian TV News

Roger Ailes passed away on May 18, 2017. Had he died barely 10 months before, America’s airwaves would have hailed him for his lasting contribution to American politics and news media. But Ailes died unsung and ignored because Fox News, the news network that he founded two decades ago and mentored to unprecedented success, ousted him last July as current and former female staffers piled up charges of sexual harassment against him.

Regardless of his downfall, it is widely acknowledged in the US that Ailes changed the way America produced and watched television news. What few realise though, is that the portly and balding septuagenarian has also left a lasting legacy on Indian TV news.

The news of Ailes’ death took me back to a morning in October of 2002 when I rode an elevator up an office block in South Delhi’s Okhla district to become a cog in Rupert Murdoch’s global empire. The Australia-born global tycoon was already a player in Indian news and entertainment having bought the Star TV network in the mid-1990s. But little had prepared me for the full-on primer I was subjected to as I joined the soon-to-be (re)launched Star News.

Until then, Prannoy Roy’s NDTV had run Star News on contract. A few months earlier though, Murdoch had decided to part ways with the contractor and run the channel himself. At that time, India did not (and still doesn’t) allow a foreign entity to own majority stock in news. But office whispers suggested Murdoch was certain that then-Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee might trash that rule to do him a favour.

It was a measure of Murdoch’s confidence that he began hiring Star’s own news staff, buying equipment and setting up studios and offices across India without having that concession from the government. (Failing to get that rule waived, Murdoch would be eventually forced to reduce his majority stake in the company he had exclusively set up to run news by bringing in an Indian partner, with whom, too, there would be a falling out – but that’s a story for another day.)

References to Ailes began from my very first day at work. The newly-hired chief manager of Star News, Ravina Raj Kohli, was 30-something with no prior experience of news, which in the Ailes-ian world was a very good thing. Kohli was bright and professional, a delightful exception in a roomful of cynical and sniggering Bihari and Uttar Pradesh journalists who pretended they’d learned their politics in their mamas’ wombs. Kohli dared to want to shape Star News differently from the preexisting competition.

But that “differently” was preset. On her orientation travels to the United States Of America,  Kohli had met with Ailes and wouldn’t stop talking about his brilliance. Ailes was an American icon with a place guaranteed in American history. He simply hadn’t a peer, having helped in his pre-Fox life, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush become presidents designing and executing their communications and perception strategies. Generations of American politicians had learned not only the art of TV news appearances, but also TV campaigns from him.

In a nutshell, here’s the D-I-Y blueprint that flowed from Ailes and Fox to Star News via a bunch of his employees para-dropped not only from the US, but also from Murdoch’s Sky News networks in the United Kingdom and Australia, to train the Star News staff.

To begin with, in the telling of Ailes, most mainstream media was ultraliberal and therefore out-of-friggin’-touch with the “viewing millions” that preferred a conservative brand of politics and society. Apparently, a survey Fox had privately commissioned statistically confirmed this wisdom. Therefore, Star News would do well to locate itself on the “right” and give people what they “want”, and not what they “need”.

And because India’s people are all proud nationalists, ready to defend and die for India, Star News should as a news channel serve India, Indian, Indian-ness. Not for nothing would Star News shortly choose as its motto, “aapko rakhe aagey” — that in Hindi could mean both “keeps you ahead”, as in you get the news first, and “keeps you front and center”, as in it’s all about what you prefer, not what we think you should prefer.

Of course, it fell on the network to interpret what people wanted to know. And the people wanted, Star News deemed, news that backed the government trying to Make India Great Again by braving an onslaught by multiple enemies on multiple fronts. We also decided that people didn’t want to know of farmer suicides, poverty, malnutrition, public healthcare and education, groundwater contamination, unless it was in the residential neighbourhoods of Tier A cities such as metropolitan Mumbai and Delhi. This was because these areas and cities had the most viewers, whose time spent watching television enhanced a channel’s attractiveness for advertisers. (A couple of years later, a snarky sales chief at another network told me he was an income head while all others, including the news staff, were expense heads.)

The “viewing millions”, Star News instead deemed, wanted to know more about entertainment – as in Bollywood and popular music, and sports – as in largely cricket and cricketing superheroes. Of course, them millions weren’t averse to “social” news — such as about khap panchayats, the village kangaroo courts that often punish inter-caste lovers, sometimes most extremely by sanctioning their deaths, or news such as outrageous fatwas by random Muslim clerics that are always top draw as news items.

And, of course, the people wanted crime news, the better if its grisliness kept them up at night. On Star News, the criminals were sociopathic locos and the cops the do-gooders. Apparently, this, too, was fashioned on something similar running on Fox News. I remember at least once I tried to get it across at a “brainstorming” session, that the Indian police had, well, a different record and that the “viewing millions” perhaps knew better than having such touching faith in their police. But no one at the brainstorming had had any nasty experience with the Indian police so I was worrying myself silly over nothing.

While the above wisdom was about content, do not for a minute think that “presentation” was not top of the agenda. It was Ailes who had revolutionised how TV news looked by making Fox News glamorous, and then some. We decided that Indian TV news — drab, dull and unappealing — also needed jazzing up. Foremost, smart, sexy and young “hunks and babes” needed to replace the worn-out Ms and Mr Know-All news anchors.

Actually, “hunks and babes” became a guiding principle at Star News. Male anchors and reporters at the station were asked to shave their moustaches and sport no beard, not even a stubble, under any circumstances. Women’s wardrobes were to only be Western. Good looks were in, hot looks even more so. What is news if it doesn’t bedazzle?

But the most lasting legacy of Ailes’s influence on Indian TV news is that of the super controversial newscaster who converts his desk into a bully pulpit to express the vilest illiberal views and be obnoxious to guests who disagree with him. The inspiration for this from Fox was in the form of Bill O’Reilly, the star anchor of an eponymous show, the O’Reilly factor, where every night he gave his unique spin to national events.

For weeks we, the early Star News hires, watched with fascination the O’Reilly Factor on Fox News which, though not available in India, was specially beamed live to our office. The world can be forgiven to think that Bill O’Reilly was naturally coarse and unlikeable to liberals. But the insiders at Star News at the time were told that it was Ailes who had crafted O’Reilly’s persona with an eye on ratings and advertising dollars. (Those dollars came pouring in for the O’Reilly Factor for nearly two decades until sexual harassment charges forced O’Reilly out of Fox News last month, quite like the boss he loved and whose death O’Reilly mourned last week.)

For long, Star News tried to build at least one anchor with that persona of Bill O’Reilly’s, but failed miserably to do so. To score that achievement would be left to another gentleman at another network that would be launched a few years later, an anchor who has gone on to now become — depending on which side of the divide you are on — one of India’s most despised or loved newscasters with detestable redneck opinions, a shameless subservience to the government and abominable studio manners. He, in turn, has spawned many imitators across the Indian television news landscape.

And the model of news television handed us in those preparatory months to relaunch Star News not only thrives across India but has mutated into an evil much more dangerous, not just for the vocation of journalism but for the wider society as well. Trading in jingoist, hate-filled nationalism, creating enemies where none exist, becoming unquestioning stenographers to the official establishment, the Indian TV news business has decayed into a terrible ogre that amplifies all that is wrong with Indian society.

As I readied to quit Star News in the summer of 2004, I sought an appointment with the network’s new chief to say goodbye. He began speaking excitedly of his success at a rival news channel where he worked before heading to Star News. “The important thing is to get the news out”, he deadpanned, “regardless of whether it is accurate or not.” Three years later, I sat face-to-face with a tremendously successful newscaster-broadcaster who had turned his network into a roaring if dubious success by finding newsworthiness in astrology, black magic, superstition, and such like. “The best part,” he said to me philosophically, “is that we don’t need to speak the truth anymore.” I quit his employment a week later.

The author can be contacted on Twitter @ajitsahi.

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