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Reporting on wedding and kisses
Published on Sun, Apr 22, 2007 at 10:42, Updated on Mon, Jun 18, 2007 at 10:23 in 
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New Delhi: The past week saw the media not just reporting news, but making it as well. It started with the incessant media focus on the Richard Gere-Shilpa Shetty kiss at an AIDS awareness event. The moral police was soon up in arms. Then came the terrible attack on the Mumbai office of TV news channel Star by activists belonging to one ‘Hindu Rashtriya Sena’.
The rowdy protestors crashed vehicles at the news channels’ office while agitating against a story aired by the channel of the inter-religious marriage of a Surat-based Hindu-Muslim couple.
Finally, the week came to an end with the hour-to-hour carpet coverage of the shaadi of the year—the Abhishek-Aishwarya wedding.
From full-fledged reporting on kisses to something as trivial as a wedding—is the media getting its priorities wrong or is it simply trying telling a good ‘sellable’ story.
The issue was debated on CNN-IBN The Big News by Editor-in-chief Rajdeep Sardesai and Outlook Editor-in-Chief Vinod Mehta.
Does the media reports or creates news?
“I don’t think media has the power to create news,” said Mehta. “All we can do is give momentum to a story and provide it the oxygen of publicity. However, by non-stop coverage, it sends a completely wrong message. All that we are doing is bringing a subject to the public eye while people start thinking we are the ones creating the entire story,” he said.
It is indeed true that media mileage many a times takes the zest out of a news story. TV channels often stretch a debate for so long, that it becomes tedious, and repetitive for the viewers. It not just kills the ‘newsiness’ of an issue but also makes it appear trivial, said Mehta.
“The problem with most news channels these days is: that they don’t know when to stop. Once we start covering a subject, we just go on and on and on,” he added.
“We provide the oxygen of publicity to a subject and sometimes bring in things which are perhaps of no interest to the viewers. The main event gets embellished with so many side-issues that it results in complete distortion of the original story,” he concluded.
Shilpa Shetty-Richard Gere Kiss and the media hype
Some say that the focus was on the kiss. While others feel it is the disproportionate focus that troubled viewers and not so much the kiss really.
A foreign actors “obnoxiously open and offensive” kissing-act with an Indian actress was certainly an event that deserved attention in the Indian context. To many it came as culture shock. However, the media while covering it should have exercised restraint, to try not to make it appear sensational.
“I think it would have been abdication of responsibility had we not covered the story. Whether we like it or not, the Gere-Shilpa story has a certain element of news value in it. So, we must cover it. However, we must exercise restraint. That’s where editors’ intelligence comes into picture. You cant let the cameras let loose on a story. You must know when to switch them off,” said Mehta.
Star TV’s office gets attacked over airing a story
An irate mob belonging to a little known organisation called Hindu Rashtriya Sena ransacked the Star TV office in Mumbai smashing cars parked outside the office and also damaging the office itself. The motive: anger over a programme showing a Muslim youth and a Hindu minor girl who had eloped.
Is there a sense of worry that in a way media is letting itself be taken as a hostage? “Yes,” said Mehta. “Who had heard about such organisations such as Hindu Rashtra Sena or something like that before? The attack was deplorable. And yet it gave the Hindu Rashtra Sena an identity and a name,” he said.
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URBANEYE
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Yes it is time for media to evaluvate their reporting method.Our Indian brothers are so sensitive it is not nice
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Mr.Rajdeep, Isnt your channel CNN-IBN the frontrunner in coverage of all these trivial matters especially the so-called wedding and also
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Mr.Rajdeep, Isnt your channel CNN-IBN the frontrunner in coverage of all these trivial matters especially the so-called wedding and also
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I dont think CNN-IBN is any different to other news channels. Your channel also tries to create hype on many
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The media both TV and News papers have lost their sense of purpose. That is reporting. In both versions there
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