Monday, March 29, 2010

This is how news is made!

The tubelight that I’m, have slowly begun to understand as to how news is made these days – the corner stone on which the whole edifice is built on is ‘sensationalism, in any which way, to boost TRP ratings’!

Let’s take the news grabs that are hogging the headlines these days:-
(a) Modi, the CM of Gujarat, having been grilled by the SIT, set up by the Supreme
Court.
(b) How Amitabh Bachchan is being hounded by the Congress party.
(c) ‘Pak specific Agni’ test fired successfully.
(d) IPL matches on and in full swing with the Mumbai Indians winning all their matches on the trot, thanks to an ‘in-form Tendulkar’, etc, etc. I shall talk about only these four, due to constraints of time and space, to expose the grand design of the media.

Let’s go back in time and see as to how these news grabs had developed, say, from the Ides of March:-

(a) Speculations were rife as to whether Modi would offer himself for being grilled by
the SIT because truth will be spilled out, implying that he’s guilty even before being tried. And as a connected story, the Chief Justice of India was advised not to share the dais with Modi in connection with a legal function. Thank God, the CJI did exactly what he’d to do in the circumstances without prejudjing the Gujarat CM.

(b) A sizable section of the press along with political parties like the Congress and the CPM were wild that Amitabh Bachchan had agreed to be the ‘Brand Ambassador’ of Modi’s Gujarat. The so called advocates of democracy were, in other words, disallowing freedom of expression and were getting after ‘a comparatively soft target in the film star’. So, the CPM central leadership overturned their Kerala comrades’ decision of making him their brand ambassador and the Congress party made its displeasure known to its Chief Minister in Maharashtra for letting the film star be part of the opening ceremony of the remaining lanes of the Bandra-Worli sea link.

(c) The missile ‘Agni’ has so many variants by virtue of its range and firepower, almost all of which have been test fired successfully, so far, without reactions from Pakistan. By terming it as ‘Pakistan specific’, news grabs for the next few days are assured from across the border, in the form of virulent criticism and tirade from their leaders, probably to the benefit of some arms company!

(d) The garish IPL cricket circus is on and a case is being made to get Tendulkar into the national team for the T20 world cup, which would be the enduring theme on the sports page over the coming weeks.

Have just stated the obvious and I’m fully confident that I won’t be wrong in my predictions of the news headlines of the coming days. Can’t we, the public at large, ever learn or is it that we don’t want to?

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