Good TV, Bad Journalism

This past Thursday, I was convinced I was a journalist.

I have always debated about whether Television is the right medium for news. Can television news persons be called journalists or are they entertainers?

On the day of the Mumbai terror attack, I was convinced that TV can be a good medium for news, TV news personnel can be journalists. They choose not to be.

It was 4 Am and I was in the Production Control Room of NDTV studios. At 9:15 Pm, the previous night terror had been unleashed across Mumbai. Such an attack was, clearly, unprecedented. For a news person, it was an (as insensitive as it might sound) extremely exciting time. In this excitement, we overstepped.

The TV news person in me will see the past four days as a valuable experience that will stay in the memory for a long time. The journalist, though, will feel it prick her conscience forever.

It is a basic rule of reporting from a war (read conflict, tension) zone that the reportage should not disrupt the security forces at work or harm them in any way. When a slew of cameras stood outside Taj, Trident and Nariman House to give us minute to minute account of the commandos' operations, we were disclosing the strategy of our security forces live, in real time!

What were we thinking? That the terrorists inside the 5-star hotels had no access to TV sets? That they had no access to Internet or phones? Would they not be better equipped now that their television friends have told them what their enemies are upto?

When we chose good television over good journalism and aired footage of the NSG commandos being airdropped on Nariman House (for instance), we might have caused unimaginable damage to the lives of those security personnel and/or hostages. Would it then not sound contradictory and utterly superficial that we ran stylised montages of the security personnel and paid homage to them? For all we know, we could have saved those very lives that we later mourned.

We could have done many things to become responsible journalists. I have always believed that the media should be self-regulatory. We should have aired all news and footage of the operations with a gap of about four-five hours since its actual occurrence. Surely, the shock factor for the viewer would remain the same if all TV channels came together and decided to break news that happened at 9 PM four hours later. This would ensure that we are not airing the operations in real time. When we can organise ourselves to speak out for/against say, Foreign Direct Investment in broadcast, we can surely come together to take collective decisions on matters of such grave importance.

Not everything is meant for live television. We necessarily have to make a distinction between a cricket match and a terrorist encounter. While one needs live footage and commentary, the other does not.

One might argue that even if TV channels would show restraint, in the age of the Internet, can we really hold back information for long? Well, we might not stop information flow but we can surely reduce the impact, the intensity and the reach.

Sometimes our facade of being serious journalists profoundly disturbs me. We have our conscience to answer.

Raksha Kumar