COPY PASTE JOURNALISM

Of the very few cable channels that my TV has been gifted with (the TV in India), I usually swap between NDTV, Star World, MTV and AXN (aah the typical America returned you might call me!). I woke up on Tuesday morning and was watching the news; they were talking about the upcoming G8 Summit in Germany and one of the most to-be discussed topic-none other than Global Warming. Ever since George W. decided to pay some commemoration to this problem, all the other countries have added their concerns. It would be wrong to say that they weren’t before this, but now that the so-called great America has voiced its concern, it’s as if the issue has gotten more important. But that is not what I am talking about (this is a whole different issue).

Prajna Datta Varma was anchoring that news cast and I was rather listening intently to her. When the special reporter started the news, I was shocked that her’s and Prajna’s words were the exact same thing. I know you must be wondering why I was shocked- wouldn’t you be too! It’s as if they had no other words for the report. How is this possible? Why use the exact same sentences while you are presenting? No wonder Microsoft Word is so useful even in journalism- COPY PASTE. I guess they thought that viewers wouldn’t realize their mistake (for lack of a better word). This is what I call Copy Paste Journalism.

Lack of originality is a major problem in broadcast journalism today. Everyone tries to copy the other journalist because they are not confident in their own capabilities and they try to better the other. In the mean time, they forget that their stupidity is actually portrayed lucidly. Journalism as far as I remember, used to be an art of presenting what is the way it is, not presenting what is by adding in some sort of a masala. Like I had written in The Virtue of Idiocy, irritating details of the humane world are thrown light upon, while important ones are given a nod and shown the door. I don’t think anyone in India is aware of how grave the situation in Venezuela is, ever since the shutting down of a news channel because of its so-called anti-socialist ideas that did not go well with President Hugo Chavez. Breach of freedom of speech? Most Certainly! But what do we (Indians) care about now a days? Whether Hillary Clinton or Barak Obama will become President? Might I remind everyone that they haven’t even won the Democratic primaries yet and that the elections are in 2008- so can we really stop obsessing what is happening in the West? Who can come with the most amount of gossip first is the race, not who is giving the real news. I used to want a journalist a long time back, still do somewhere in the corner of my heart, but such sort of ridiculous propaganda of the unimportant details of life make me want to question my desire to present reality to the world. It’s as if we have brainwashed people to forget to differentiate between good and bad, right and wrong, important and unimportant.

It really is shameful! I am at a loss of words. I guess blogging is the closest I can go towards presenting what is and what we forget these days! That’s all I can say!

~Shreya