Media Rewind 2019: The Year of the Feral News Anchor

Imagine a man dressed in a kid’s astronaut costume with a green screen moon in the background reporting on ISRO’s latest space conquest. A self-proclaimed Yoga Godman holding Arnab in his arms like a toddler. And actors dressed as mythological characters participating in a prime-time debate.

No, these are not hallucinations you get after consuming a dubious-looking pill from some shady guy in Lodhi Road who your office colleague swears “has the best shit in town.” No, these are events that actually happened.

Over the years we’ve seen our TV news media do various deranged things in their quest to continue to be slaves to power. But this year, something scary happened. Years and years of cannibalising their own humanity has resulted in them finally getting rid of any civilised tendencies they used to possess. So now they might still have a human skin-suit on the outside, but on the inside, they’re all like untamed animals you find in the wild.

The Battle Hymn of the Armchair Warrior

Take the aftermath of the terrible and tragic Pulwama terrorist attack. Every anchor used that attack to beat up the war drums. Even before the families of the soldiers had been informed of their immense loss, our armchair brigade on television had begun shouting for revenge.

You must be thinking to yourself, it can’t be that bad. Sure, they might have had an initial emotional reaction but sobriety and the reality of the situation must have reined them in after a good night’s sleep. They must have calmed down in a day or two. Oh, you poor naive child. I wish I had the comfort of your ignorance and belief. Spoiler alert: it didn’t.

The conclusion of every panel on every channel was that we must do war. Any war. Didn’t matter whether we had to use nuclear weapons or not. Just do it! And anyone who tried to bring any semblance of reality to the conversation by suggesting that maybe we should spend a minute or two to think whether we should turn an entire subcontinent into a post-apocalyptic hellscape was shouted down by everyone from the anchor onwards to the guy who drove the OB Van to their house.

The conversation was so toxic that a former military veteran who had lost a limb in the line of duty was told that he isn’t emotional enough when he suggested that besides a military response we also need to introspect how the whole thing happened on our watch. The wife of one of the soldiers who died in the attack itself was trolled for not supporting an all-out war against Pakistan. As always, the ones most eager to fight a war were the ones who’ve never had to bear the consequences of one.

The Greatest Show On Earth

Then there was the General Election from the ninth circle of hell. Our fine folks in television made everything better by having really intelligent discussions. Psych! It was all about who is the most Hindu-est of them all and what really happened at that Gandhi family vacation in 1987.

All our brave television warriors turned into nervous wet blankets when they were called to do an interview with the PM. They had super-duper exclusive interviews and asked mostly the same questions and got the same answers. We got to know more about the Prime Minister’s juice cleanse routine than his agenda for the next five years. The Prime Minister attending a press conference and not even saying a word was a great visual metaphor for the state of our media.

In one of his “interviews” with a newspaper, our strongest leader spent the major part of his interview complaining about the newspaper’s former editor once writing an editorial criticising him. The only newsworthy thing to come out of it was his new nickname for his so-called “enemies” – The Khan Market gang.

It was like Christmas in July for our news anchors. They had a new group to demonise. Move over Urban Naxals, the Khan Market Gang is here. Suddenly, this gang was everywhere and to blame for everything. They were the new monster under Arnab’s bed.

Anyway, we all know that our Prime Minister doesn’t talk much to journalists from abroad but during this election, our Prime Minister spoke to intrepid Canadian correspondent Akshay Kumar. He really caught the pulse of the nation when he asked such incisive questions like “which is your favourite mango?” Must have provided real comfort to all those jobless youth worried about the state of the economy.

Then there were the exit polls. What a dumpster fire! All the mainstream channels — except NDTV — commissioned an exit poll. That’s because NDTV is at that stage of its life where it doesn’t really like talking to people. Republic TV commissioned two polls, and just like everyone else on that channel the polls didn’t agree with each other. The polls at Times Now were all over the place but they didn’t care. They haven’t done accurate reporting in years so why expect them to start now? The India Today/My Axis poll had so many errors that they had to withdraw their seat-by-seat projections. However, out of sheer dumb luck they ended up coming real close to the actual result. What a time to be alive!

Nothing to see here

August brought with itself the beginning of many horrors. The government abrogated Section 370 and made the state of Jammu and Kashmir a union territory. They cut the internet, phone lines and even closed down the post office for the entire region of Kashmir.

A functioning mainstream media would have done stories about an elected government turning half of a state into an open-air prison. Maybe made some noise about the millions of people effectively under house arrest. No matter what your politics, anyone with a smidgen of decency can agree that cutting off anyone from the world like this is nothing short of torture.

However, what we got was pictures of government officials eating lunch with supporters on the empty streets of Srinagar. Each channel interviewing the same government-approved individuals. And anchors who kept repeating the phrase “the situation is normal” despite the visuals of empty streets, closed shops, and a heavy deployment of soldiers telling us another story.

No Rule of Law Please, We’re Indian

In the first week of December, we learned that the Hyderabad police had shot and killed four accused criminals in an “encounter.” Neither the police nor the media were even pretending that the entire thing wasn’t staged.

Ideally, in a civilised country, an actual journalist would be frisking through any of the evidence provided by the police placing the accused at the scene of the crime. They would at least have a frank discussion with a few legal experts that would explain to the public how state-mandated killing is a huge violation of the Constitution. Even get a proper historian to the studio to hold forth on how encouraging state-sanctioned, extra-judicial murder is detrimental to the rule of law.

But, we’re not that country. Instead, we had a joyous celebration of death. News anchors were bringing people to the studio or holding court at public places to express their glee at the turn of events. Instead of calling out the Hyderabad police for their actions, our anchors were asking when their actions would be copied by the police forces in other states.

In the Name of the Leader

Over the past few years, our news anchors have become really allergic to any protests. It doesn’t matter who is protesting, if it’s against the governing party at the Center, then they’re going to spend all their energies demonising them. Most of the time, they ignore the protests. And when they show up, it’s to either provoke the people participating in the protest into doing something stupid, or to get some byte from a random person so that they can paint the entire protest in a negative light. And if they can’t even find someone like that, they will get their own employees to pose as the protestors.

They spend most of their time acting like anyone who opposes the Prime Minister and his government does so for sinister reasons. They will use the faintest of reason to undermine any criticism. If it’s a student, then he’s part of the Tukde-Tukde gang. If it’s an intellectual, then they’re a member of the Khan Market gang. And if their target is sympathetic to their audience, they will condescendingly ask who brainwashed this poor soul?

And then they’re also whipping up public sentiment against individual dissenters. They know their continuous attacks on a lone person might put their life in danger, but they have no compunctions in putting a huge target on the person’s back. They might not be leading the mob on the ground, but they’re sure present there is spirit.

According to them, you cannot oppose the governing party for normal reasons like politics, common sense or human empathy. No! There’s always some deep-seated secret pathology about why this happens. Our anchors’ purpose of existence is not to ask power any questions. Their agenda is to delegitimise any questions asked of power.

No Country for Democracy

We can blame the governing party and their cohorts in the media for the kind of coverage we see on television every day, but there is also a huge group of people who must carry some of the blame: the viewers. People who know that they are being lied to but still watch these shows diligently every day.

It’s not just the television anchors who have shredded their humanity. So many millions of people in this country have done so too. After any horrible incident, our media is flooded with suggestions of horrible, violent fantasies. People from all walks of life let the world know different ways of murdering an accused.

In a democracy, every citizen is entitled to their day in court. The frustration with the process of law is understandable. But that does not mean that we allow the state to kill with impunity.

We’ve always had extra-judicial, state-sponsored murder in this country but this cheering for it and demanding for it is an indictment of our society’s lost humanity. We have become a people who have no compunctions in brutalising anyone. As long as you leave me and mine alone, do anything else with the rest of them!

People in Hyderabad were showering police with flowers in the aftermath of their extra-judicial killings. Our elected representatives garland leaders of lynch mobs. We let our government metaphorically tie an entire state to the front of a jeep.

This bloodlust is going to take the entire country to a place from which it will be hard to come back.

But hey, at least we sent all the Urban Naxals to Pakistan.

Oh, wait!