A Murder is Announced

By KS Murli

A murder is announced. And the press goes berserk. Scandals are better, not bitter, and the bitter they are, the better they get into breaking news. Bad news is good news, may be the holy grail of all media, but while following the rulebook, someone forgot the spirit behind it.

Are we, the people, really interested to get into the nitty-gritty of someone killed, slaughtered, barbecued, and raped, for week after week, month after month, and year after year?

A poor thing whose name begins with the letter A got killed months ago. And apparently, we are all agog with this running theme of whodunit. Apparently there is no such thing as reader fatigue; we are all condemned to have an insatiable appetite for daily serial crimes. Apparently, we can’t get through our daily grind without resolving the suspense of the body-in-the-sewer or whatever it is at the given moment. Apparently we are like this only.
It’s got to the point where the only thing that’s different between the mainstream media and the tabloid sheets is the masthead. One can only hope that this too shall pass, and the mainstream media stops its me-too aping of the tabloid.

Not too long ago, coffee-table conversations used to be about an inspiring editorial on a national issue. Now, perhaps, we have better things to do than yak-yak. Because, a murder is announced: the murder of informed, insightful, debate of ideas that affect the country, the world, and the society at large.

In the sixties, the Indian newspapers used to cover some of the finest Parliamentary debates, and articles by political leaders of that era such as Jagjivan Ram, Ram Manohar Lohia, Acharya Kripalani, and Morarji Desai, inspired a national debate. The seventies belonged to crusading journalists like Arun Shourie, and veteran writers like Dhiren Bhagat, Kuldip Nayar, Girilal Jain, and V.K. Narasimhan, who kept the spotlight on ideas, ideologies and insights. The eighties and nineties saw the visual media spreading its tentacles, and the early pioneers of TV seized the opportunity, leveraging the full power of the media for news, views, and juice. Prannoy Roy, Vinod Dua and Nalini Singh, to name a few, set benchmarks for others in pursuit of ideas.

Suddenly, something happened to the way the media works, and more likely than not, one cannot rule out any ‘murderous’ motives wittingly or otherwise. India’s chattering classes, fed on a conservative, but healthy diet of ideas, slowly got hooked to a more fashionable diet of junk news. Instead of a Claude Alvares waxing eloquent on the eco-terrorism of corporates through six heavy, but all the same heady, pages, we now have six spicy, but all the same, stale, pages wrapped up in murders, rapes, and loot, including past and current. Writers like Arun Shourie known for their tabloid-size articles went out of business (Maybe that’s why Shourie is now writing books!). In the Age of Twitter, space – mind space – is at a premium, and news bytes that inform but lack bite, are at a discount.

It might sound like an exaggeration, but one does get the feeling that some of the present day editorial pages are well, literally a page turner – you want to turn the page quickly! Have we gone from the coffee table to the cocktail circuit to the water cooler to restroom chatter? Answer: But wait, for a murder is announced!