Why do we watch television? For infotainment of course. But what is infotainment? Information + entertainment of course. How does one discern which one is which? Stupid question? Not really. But let us first admit that information can be entertaining – as you would have discovered while watching Discovery, National Geographic and History channels – and entertainment, on television, can be informative; the socio-cultural snippets about the place where a cricket test match is being held, for example. Understandably not all information is entertaining, and not all entertainment informative. Both can be repulsive too. And, of late, revulsion has come to impact one’s sensibilities in a big way thanks to the crass handling of crime related news stories, lending infotainment an odious odorat.
Crime is not merely reported, it is dwelt upon lingeringly in various TV news channels. Obnoxious details and images hit you hard on the nose. Whether it is Star News or Aaj Tak telecasting live the lynching of a chain snatcher in Bihar or Zee News giving gory details of domestic violence/crime in its Crime Reporter show, one detects more than a hint of scoopophilia. The slant in newscasts by channels like NDTV and IBN7 is decidedly pro-upper middle class. They either ignore the hinterland or cover only such happenings that impact upon urban lifestyle. But sensationalism and hypocrisy are not limited to these channels alone. There are no honourable exceptions, lamentably. Let us contextualize the latest example from Goa.
A fifteen year old is raped and murdered on the silvery sands of Goa. The local police try to be casual about it and would have got away too, but for a minor detail. Scarlette was a White Brit. On learning this, our electronic media went hyper-active. The police was hauled over the coals. The latter got respite in time when the British tabloid press dug up the victim’s mother Fiona’s “credentials”. The tone and tenor of our television chatterboxes changed perceptibly all at once. Horror was replaced with disdain, condescension and other attitudinal hues reserved for non-PLUs. Worse, there was an element of morbid voyeurism in the way the injury marks on Scarlette’s body were repeatedly splashed across the screen and “extracts” from “her diary” read out; shedding the sensitivity that was so abundant when Jessica Lal and Shivani Bhatnagar murder cases were televised a few years ago.
This skewed sensibility, this hypocrisy, was quite manifesting during the Getanjali Nagpal case too. On at least two news channels the troubled girl – whose marriage and budding modeling career had gone awry – was hounded by assorted journalists who, embarrassingly, had joined the onlookers in sniggering at her. Things changed dramatically once her German husband called from abroad reiterating his love for her. Mercifully, the girl has since been allowed to be rehabilitated in peace. But what takes the cake is that the same anchors who were earlier busy painting Getanjali in all the lurid hues suddenly started claiming credit for “rescuing” her from her predicament. With unashamedly straight faces too.
Coming back to the Scarlette case, things touched the nadir during NDTV’s We, the people show. What should have been a searching interrogation of the working of the police and the state government, turned into an inquisition targeting Fiona’s parenting. One wonders what the proceedings would have been like if she were an upper class Briton with exactly the same traits as she reportedly has at present.
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