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It
was very exhausting. As poignant and tragic all those
tear-jerking stories were about the people who died in the 26/11
attacks, it was extremely tiring seeing the same stories appear over and
over again across the news channels last week. The coverage was simply
staggering, and it was expected to be. But I wonder why no channel had
the courage to stand back and say that, one year later, there was no
need to have a grisly, detailed rerun of what happened last November; no
need to speak to those victims and ask them to relive that trauma which
ripped their lives apart, perhaps forever, and deal with the
first anniversary of 26/11 a little differently, and not as an integral
part of terror TV.
So, yes, I am tired and I am also a little angry. Because by amplifying the coverage of 26/11, however significant those coordinated attacks were by 10 Pakistani terrorists, television has succeeded in diminishing the importance of thousands of terror attacks which have become a permanent picture in India’s life. In fact, Mumbai itself is no stranger to conflict. Between 1992 and 2008, there have been several attacks on the people of Mumbai itself. Only consider, in March, 1993, a series of 13 bombs went off killing 257 innocent victims; again in March, 2003, a bomb exploded on a train, killing 10 commuters. Does anyone remember those anniversaries being marked? I don’t think so. And this is just a fraction of the more than 4,000 attacks that have taken place in Indian between 1970-2004, accounting for more than 12,000 deaths. This data is sourced from the Global Terrorism database, which is maintained by the University of Maryland and the US National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, and it indicates not only the scale of terrorism in India but also the media’s neglect of the issue. The impact of the 26/11 attacks will certainly outlive us, and in a way that one event changed the way India feels about terror attacks on our soil, but by losing a sense of proportion, television has made sure that those three days will always define terror in India. So why did TV go into this paroxysm of over-coverage? Was it to use that old bugbear to ratchet up the TRPs of competing channels, or was it because the attacks happened not only in the financial centre of India but because they were concentrated in upper crust locations; in iconic places that represented India Shining, and its burgeoning economy? After the attacks on America in 2002, here was a home- grown tragedy which perhaps could almost fit into the 9/11 template. Here was an opportunity to forge a new equation with viewers through an element of creativity and long-term planning, but, instead, the 26/11 reportage became a simply a way to underscore the horror and move backwards instead of forwards. And talking about moving backwards, CNN-IBN has set a new benchmark when it aired a sponsored feature, Shave India, as part of its regular news programming. Many media analysts believed that news networks had reached rock bottom when cine-stars Rani Mukherjee and Abhishek Bachchan, on the eve of the release of their film Bunty and Babli, in a misconceived PR gimmick had read primetime news on NDTV 24x7. Another low was reached when a company,
Kingfisher, began to sponsor a lifestyle channel, NDTV Good Times, but
this week the editorial bar has fallen even lower. In fact, I can’t
even see a bar. The 30-minute Shave India programme on CNN-IBN,
though it sporadically carried a sponsored feature label, was
essentially about how important it was for men to use the Gillette Mach
3 razor to have that clean-shaven look. The programme recreated the
format of a news studio and had stars like Neha Dhupia giving their
opinion on why that particular razor was a useful tool — cheap and
efficient.
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