TV News Was Broken Long Before Arnab 2.0
#2 of the Indian Journalism Project. On the crisis in Indian news TV.
Anurag Tripathi1 was the first TV journalist that I was in awe of. The year was 2000, and I was an intern at Zee News, New Delhi Noida. Having grown up idolising the first wave of TV news reporters in India—Prannoy Roy, Appan Menon, Rajdeep Sardesai and Barkha Dutt (in that order)—I’d taken up journalism and mass communication at university.
I had spent the first week of my internship at the Zee News building in Sector 16a (Film City) in the monitoring department. The job consisted of watching the news across all TV channels and filling up a notebook detailing who aired what. It was far from what I had imagined being at news TV would be like, and I felt like I was trapped in a silent scream. (Typical internship stuff, in other words.)
After a week of this torture, a kind-hearted editor re-assigned me to shadow Anurag Tripathi, a senior reporter. Among other things, the job consisted mostly of hanging out with him and the camera crew as they went about the capital covering press conferences.
The very first evening, we drove down the DND flyway to a press conference at Shastri Bhavan in central Delhi. This conference was addressed by a minister in the then Vajpayee government.
Because TV crews were driven by reliably maniacal drivers, we reached the venue in some 20 minutes and rushed in as the presser was finishing with a Q&A. In a few minutes, the video journalist (then known as the cameraman) assembled his camera as Anurag placed the Zee News mic with the others.
Now came the exciting part.
Instead of sitting with the other reporters, Anurag placed himself right next to the camera. I was soon to know why. He raised his voice and spoke a question over the heads of the other (sitting) reporters. When he received the answer from the minister, he looked at the time code of the tape which was displayed at the side of the camera. Satisfied, he asked the cameraman to stop recording, ejected the tape and put it into his pocket. He went up to the minister’s table and removed the mic as the cameraman folded up his things.
As we left the room—in what felt like five minutes after entering—I glanced wistfully at the array of foods laid out for the journalists.
In the car, Anurag thought for a few minutes, and then scribbled a few lines in Hindi on a piece of paper. He then picked up the phone and spoke to someone at the other end (an editor, most likely). After another homicidal dash from central Delhi back to the Sector 16a office, Anurag walked directly to the audio booth and recorded his ‘script’.
Next, he went to a video-editor, and fed the tape directly into the tape machine, and rewound it a bit to locate the soundbite (press conference answer). After helping the editor figure out the structure to the edit, he went back to the cameraman, found a spot somewhere in the office campus and recorded a piece-to-camera (PTC), in maybe one or two takes. Once that was done, he walked back to the video editor with a second tape bearing the PTC.
In a few minutes, the news story, called a package was ready. If I remember right, Anurag ran with the tape bearing the edited story to the production control room (PCR), barely in time to make it as the top story for the 9 pm bulletin.
From start to finish, the whole thing had taken a couple of hours. It was terribly exciting. I wanted to be Anurag Tripathi.
I ended up doing 13 years in news television, and I know now with the benefit of hindsight that Anurag’s tradecraft was excellent. He wrote scripts in his head, knew exactly what soundbites he needed, and spoke with economy while on camera, in either Hindi or English. He was speedy and accurate, intelligent and kind, and not at all arrogant. (To be honest, most TV folk are like this, though some of us turn into ‘beast mode’ on camera).
2000 was at the high point of what is known as the golden age of TV news in India, which started from the late 1980s and ended sometime in 2008.
Arnab 2.0 and 3.0
Around 2008, Times Now, which had been lagging behind NDTV 24/7 and CNN-IBN in the ratings, screamed to the top of the charts as Arnab Goswami recast himself as the leader of a mob thirsting for justice.
In his previous avatar (let’s call that Arnab 1.0), he was mild-mannered, charming and funny. Now, he seemed to be purple with self-righteous fury all the time. Around 2014, Arnab 3.0 emerged, which is the same as the 2.0 version but with one difference: now that the Modi-led government had been voted in to power, he no longer felt the need to be anti-establishment. His was now a pro-BJP voice.
When we TV folk gather, we like to reminisce about the good old days. But were the good old days really that good?
When I thought about these questions, I remembered Anurag Tripathi. He was the best of us all, but even he was part of an industry that is essentially a rigged game. The individual reporter, anchor, producer, or editor might win a few rounds, but the house always wins.
During the ‘good times’, a typical TV news day could be split into:
Packages (referred to above)
Interviews
Studio discussions
Live news coverage
Let’s tackle the first two in some detail.
Packages
These are news reports from a correspondent in the field. Typically, they contain:
A voiced narrative over freshly-shot footage.
Some interview chunks.
The reporter’s own take which she does standing in front of the camera.
Done well, a package can convey a nuanced story in a few short minutes. But like many other aspects of TV news, the package too was compromised.
Between 2001 and 2009, when I was mostly a reporter and anchor, things began changing. No longer could we get away with three-minute-long packages (which was said to be the minimum). Now, packages were to be either 1.5 minutes or one minute in length. As budgets came down, most packages were done in-house, through a formula.
Let’s call this formula: idhar, udhar, lekin, or in English, here, there, however.
Here’s how the formula worked. The following script is in Hindi, with English translations.
VO1 (reporter’s narration): Idhar sansad main [politician] ne bataaya ki [view of the issue].
Here in parliament, [politician’s name] said that [view of the issue].
SOT1 (politician’s interview chunk): A 15-second statement from the politician.
VO2 (reporter’s narration): Udhar [opposition party leader] ne arop lagaya ki [the issue].
There, the [opposition party leader] said that the [politician] was wrong.
SOT2 (opposition party leader chunk): Another 15-second statement, but this time from the opposition party leader.
Piece To Camera (PTC, the reporter speaks to camera): Lekin, is maamle mein kaun sahi hain, sirf waqt hi bataayega. (But only time will tell who is right.)
I know this sounds ridiculous. And to be honest, package scripts were usually much, much better than the example above. The thing to note though is the formula of both-sidesism: one view is presented, and then the opposing view is presented, and the story ends with a generic statement.
This format doesn’t allow for any nuance, especially when a three-minute-long package is crunched into a 60-second affair.
Interviews
In 1977, British journalist David Frost interviewed the former American President Richard Nixon in a series of sensational interviews. These interviews, filmed over several days, ended with the latter’s admission of illegal and unethical acts during office. The interviews were dramatised in the 2008 film Frost/Nixon.
Frost: Are you really saying the President can do something illegal?
Nixon: I’m saying, that when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.
Frost: I’m sorry?!
Interesting stuff, but broadcast journalism has never recovered from the possibilities that those interviews opened up.
For decades, TV news channels have attempted these kinds of interviews. Reporters come well-prepared. Some of them do weeks of meticulous research (here’s to you Karan Thapar!).
The problem is that the Frost/Nixon face-off also served as a warning to politicians. In the period before Arnab 2.0, politicians did submit to interviews without looking at the questions beforehand. But they usually did the interviews using bland denials, gaslighting, combativeness and self-righteous anger. In other words, they had perfected the art of saying a lot without saying anything of substance.
The end result is that most interviews became nothing more than theatre. Interesting and provocative no doubt, but serving little purpose. Today of course, even this theatre is missing, because politicians in India, especially those in power, don’t even agree to an unscripted interview.
To recap, packages and interviews were not effective. The other two elements of TV news, studio discussions and live news coverage, were interesting and lively, and often yielded interesting insights. But they too were flawed (who picks the topics/events to cover, why are particular guests invited, what sort of questions are asked, what aren’t asked, and so on.) The whole concept of TV news involves making terrible choices about where to point the camera, which issues to cover, and what makes ‘good TV’.
TV news today is nothing like how it was before 2008. But the point is: there was never any golden era.
Television rewards narratives of good vs evil, and hero vs villain, and privileges simplicity over nuance. There’s another way to depict TV news before 2008 (pre-Arnab) and after (post-Arnab). The good old days were marked by sins of omission. These days are marked by sins of commission.
If all of the above makes me sound self-righteous, I should add here that I’ve committed many-a-sin, twice over: first as a reporter and anchor till 2009, and second as a desk editor till 2014, when I fled TV news for good. Most of my friends in the profession didn’t have that choice to leave.
Which brings me back to Anurag Tripathi. Last I heard, he had left the news business entirely. When I asked a few friends recently where he was, and how he was doing, I was told that he runs a holiday destination somewhere in the Uttarakhand mountains. I’m betting the story of why he left TV news will be both interesting and familiar.
The Indian Journalism Project is a 100-day effort by BOOM and Media Buddhi starting on World Press Freedom Day (3rd May) and ending on India’s Independence Day (15th August). During this period, expect a mix of essays, workshops and a mentorship program. Do subscribe and share with your journalistic friends!
Next week: Should the ‘story’ be central to an Indian news organisation?
Name changed, for privacy.
TV News Was Broken Long Before Arnab 2.0
I agree completely. 2008 was the turning point, marking a shift from sins of omission to sins of commission as you eloquently stated. 2008 was also the year I left TV news in India, though it was due to personal reasons post-marriage and not out of an explicit plan to change course. But over my last year it was clear that things were taking a turn for the worse, which partly prompted me to switch to business news in my last TV job in India