Yonder sits the Fourth Estate!

It used to be revered as the Fourth Estate and was once quoted by Edmund Burke as “the most important than them all”. Now, it would be fair to fit them one notch above the lifeless TV soaps and probably a couple of wedges below the cricketing world dominated by minnows and match fixers. Gone are the formative years of Indian television when the baatmiyan used to be our rare source of truth and one national newspaper in the morning used to be our connection with the outside world. For those who desired to know the truth, these limited sources used to be adequate. We used to turn on the TV to dissect a rumor, now we turn to rumors to validate the TV claims.

Rummage through any of those 100+ channels on the idiot box and you are more than likely to trip on some histrionic ‘breaking news’ of yet another rescue operation for the 6 year old fallen in a ditch or a 60 year old professor in Allahbad University having an affair with his student. If it is your lucky day then they will pull you by your ears and rub your nose into the belly of some ‘sting operation’ on some local MLA or some drunken cop accepting bribes!! Flip, flip, flip, and stop! … Couple of retired *one-night-wonder* Cricketers wearing moth-infested blazers would be giving their ‘resident expert analysis’ on how to win the next World Cup. Next, two scruffy local politicians would be arguing on totally tangent issues and an even louder ‘holier-than-thou’ news compare would be asking non-coherent questions in his Bihari accent about why Mumbai can or cannot become Shanghai! In the background we can see elaborate graphical pie with the viewers opinion poll results. (13% feel that Tendulkar should sack the waiter in his restaurant who spilled soup on Chappels wife). Bored, no worries … Flip, flip, and stop! … Voila, we have the latest on the numerology analysis of how a Star son and the former Miss World will pair if there is an extra ‘A’ in their first name followed by a silent ‘g’. Puhleeez!! As if we care!

Seriously, what is with these TV polls? And who picks those poll questions? Who should be Indian Crickets next captain? Should Amitabh have invited Shatrugan Sinha in his sons wedding? Will that 6 year old survive his plunge in the ditch?

The newspapers are no different. Gone are the days when the front-page headlines used to be a new national policy announced by the PM or an update on the emergency. Now it is all about masala. About Star sons and billionaire politicians. About Hollywood Actors in India and how their security misbehaved with the media. Some veteran actor is not willing to pay his horse’s medical bill, or someone threw acid on his girlfriend because she won’t come to the movie with him! Remove the larger than life print ads from the newspapers and you will probably end up with a couple of square inches of ‘news’ and a square foot of daily comics (add to it a sudoku and a dying crossword). Sometimes I feel that the only real value of money I am getting from a newspaper is when I sell it to the bhangaarwalla!

On a serious note, I do realize that even those news corps have to feed their employees and of course they need moolah to do so. They will go to any extremes to get the green, just like any other normal business. The bottom line is that they are showing us what we want to see. But somewhere down the process, don’t you feel that this is turning us into an immature audience and them an unethical orchestrator? If this downward spiral has to be reversed then I believe that the mighty will have to mediate. And I still believe that the pen is mightier!