SIGHT & SOUND
Trial by television
Amita Malik

The programme The Big Fight must by now have established a record for decibels. But the edition I watched last weekend was not so harmless. Had I not known Rajdeep Sardesai to be a professional of high integrity, I would have started having doubts about its motivation.

To begin with the audience: they started clapping Arun Jaitley even before he had started speaking and they clapped endlessly no matter what he said. One would like to know who chooses the audiences and how they can be infiltrated by obvious cheer-leaders for different parties, because this is not the first time this has happened. I hope the balance was not deliberately upset to add spice to the programme. For that matter, what was Arun Jaitley doing there? One of India’s most brilliant lawyers, an expert in argument and one of the most articulate TV performers, did he have to be a stand-in for the obvious debating opponent of Digvijay Singh, Uma Bharati? If a party lawyer (and in this case the Law Minister) was to be the star, Sardesai might as well have dispensed with Digvijay Singh and asked Kapil Sibal to represent the Congress.

Then, with these two aspects having been nicely arranged, Rajdeep Sardesai set himself up as a relentless public prosecutor out to put Digvijay Singh in the dock. In recent weeks, Sardesai had mercifully toned down his decibels and the habit of rudely interrupting participants when they were in the middle of a sentence and also hotly contesting their arguments, which is the function of the other debater. This time he had dug up all sorts of facts and figures to confront Digvijay Singh and hardly any on the same scale for Arun Jaitley. Rajdeep even asked Digvijay Singh, among other things, to apologise to his opponents for something or other. One hardly thought that was the function of a neutral referee, which is what an anchor is supposed to be. He spoke as much as the two participants, if not more, and got so worked up at one point that he was frothing at the mouth. Jaitley kept his cool, which is not surprising when you get such favoured treatment, but so did Digvijay Singh, which must have been very difficult against that unbalanced assault. I was appealed. I have followed Sardesai’s career, and he has worked very sincerely, with interest and sympathy ever since he started and I can find no explanation for this strange lack of balance last week. May be when one becomes a TV star, it goes to one’s head and one tends to forget that viewers are very demanding, no matter how popular a performer, and that it does not take long for popularity to go crashing. To show that the same thing could be done differently, I watched Srinivasan Jain the very next day, doing a 24-hour stint with Digvijay Singh on his campaign trail. Srinivasan asked very critical questions without raising his voice and did not forget the good points. One can have a very good fight without shouting loudly all the time or taking sides, which can be counter-productive.

I have been watching with interest the evolution of one of the comparatively new news channels, Sahara Samay. It is headed by an old NDTV hand, Arup Ghosh, who will be remembered, together with his lively colleague Shireen, as the stars of the morning show of the erstwhile Star News. Arup does not seem to have wasted his time with NDTV and it shows in the professionalism of the Sahara News Channel. They have got quite a few scoops and I think have done the best all-round coverage with breaking news and brief and instant interviews over the cricket scandal. It is also no accident that their reporters have been physically attacked over the Judeo scam. I still feel that some of their newscasters and reporters need more training and experience but they have some very professional ones too.

Tailpiece: I am a little bemused about certain TV awards given in Mumbai for the "best news channel" and the "best anchor for an interview show" because clearly these are awards for Hindi channels and can in no way be described as the "best" or "national". None of the regional-language channels in eastern and southern India, which are just as good as Aaj Tak and in some ways even better, seem to have been in competition. Only when regional languages are taken into account and qualified judges have their names made public would these awards gain credibility. Until then, these awards should be clearly classified as Hindi awards. The best-known film awards have long had different slots for different regional cinemas and give separate awards to them, making it clear that only Hindi films are eligible for Hindi awards. Intense lobbying seems to go on every year and I should not be surprised if the baby dolls from Headlines Today get the best newscasting awards next year and it is also dubbed the best channel, although I hope not for English.