I never watch Indian TV news channels because of doc’s orders, but Twitter brought the toe-curling coverage of the death of a superstar, right to my phone.
“Try to meditate,” he had said. “It will help you relax and hopefully bring down the numbers. I want to see 130/80 on your next visit.”
It was ironic that a media guy who once thrived on stress and breaking news had to give up watching TV news. When I earlier told people I am a journo, they always asked me why we, the information industry, always focuses on the negative and never on happy news. My quick reply then was, ‘Will you read happy news? It is boring. Conflict makes the news.”
Watching Indian TV news channels for a couple of months after we arrived in India, was enough to make me think of reaching for the kitchen knife and taking a taxi to the TV station. Even worse than the daily news was the deadly adrenaline boosting talking heads on TV who shout at each other.
After I had deleted the news channels from my ‘favourites’ list, I was much more relaxed and enjoyed the time away from the idiot box, doing things I liked such as reading a book, taking pictures of cats with puzzled looks on their faces, from the apartment balcony, and listening to Bhagyamma, a wizened old lady, speaking to me in Kannada and who pretends she is a gardener as she plants local herbs in our tiny patch of land. The doc does not know it, but I am addicted to Twitter, an online news and social networking service, which its CEO remarked recently was “broken”. Jack Dorsey said he could not foresee how the service would be used for hate-mongering, dividing people, spreading misinformation and troll armies halting any debate.
Question mark
When Tweets started landing in my timeline about the death of Bollywood star Sridevi in a hotel room in Dubai, my instincts and journo curiosity came into play and I questioned the story about her dying of a heart attack.
The biggest killer of Indians is heart disease, but death by heart attack at 54 years for this star seemed implausible as there were no risk factors and she was not obese or diabetic and there was no family history of heart attacks. I retweeted the news with my comment and immediately got 600 ‘impressions’. That spurred me to retweet the ghoulish news that her body was now in the morgue. “The morgue?!” I tweeted with a question mark and an exclamation mark meaning that something was not right.
It did nothing to the sad story and the inexplicable death of the movie star except get me a few minutes of fame and nearly a 1,000 ‘impressions’. I quickly logged on to analytics and found that within a short period there was a sharp curve upward of people engaging with my tweets and ‘Liking” and retweeting them.
While I was playing this macabre game, worse was happening on Indian TV channels. The channels stay alive, so to speak, because of TRP (Television Rating Point) that indicates the popularity of a channel. The higher the rating, the happier the advertisers are with the channel as they can reach their products or services to huge audiences. When news flashed that the star died of accidental drowning in a bathtub, a channel got a reporter to lie inside a bathtub on camera and showed how it was possible. One channel asked a member of the ruling party for his thoughts, and he said, “murder’, implying that the husband, who was grief-stricken and “crying like a baby”, was behind his wife’s untimely death.
While Dorsey is trying to ‘fix’ Twitter, it is also time that an ombudsman looks into the Indian TV channels before people laugh it away into irrelevance.
Mahmood Saberi is a storyteller and blogger based in Bengaluru, India. Twitter: @mahmood_saberi
