Friday, July 13, 2007

Did you see what I saw.......?

While I sat watching the News rather disinterestedly there seemed to be some unexpected developments on screen. Sat wondering if it was some break in communication at the studio, not for long though.

An interesting article says it all, but takes the fervour out of the action with that doubt …”Was it stage managed?”

Appended below is the article.Read on….

I have a new hero and her name is Mika Brzezinski

Richard Adams in Washington
Saturday June 30, 2007
The Guardian
It was Peter Finch, in the 1976 movie Network, who first played a newsreader suffering an on-air breakdown. Driven to madness by poor ratings, Finch's character snaps and tells viewers to shout: "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more."

It's hard not to think of Finch, who won an Oscar for his performance, when watching a similar implosion by the newsreader Mika Brzezinski on the cable news channel MSNBC on Wednesday morning.

Despite goading from her co-hosts, including the former Republican congressman turned rightwing talkshow host Joe Scarborough, Brzezinski stood her ground and refused to read her segment's lead news item on Paris Hilton.

After a media frenzy that saw even arch-publicist Michael Moore elbowed off CNN's Larry King show to make way for Hilton's first post-jail interview, Brzezinski has become a cyberspace star. Clips of her shredding the script were the lead item on the Technorati search, while the blogosphere was alight with praise. "I have a new hero, and her name is Mika Brzezinski," wrote one.

For many people, the Hilton kerfuffle was the first time they had heard of Brzezinski, an experienced newscaster and journalist.

While she does pop up on the mainstream NBC Nightly News, she is mostly confined to acting as Scarborough's sidekick on MSNBC's morning show, which lags in the ratings well behind the major channels as well as its cable rivals, Fox News and CNN.

Hilton and Brzezinski do have something in common, both being blonde, telegenic and the daughters of influential fathers. But any similarity ends there: while Paris is the scion of a wealthy socialite Rick Hilton, the 39-year-old newsreader is the daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, a foreign policy heavyweight in Washington and a former national security adviser to Jimmy Carter.

In 2001 Brzezinski was working in New York as a correspondent for CBS News, and on September 11 was assigned as the network's "Ground Zero" correspondent. She was broadcasting live on CBS in front of the World Trade Centre when the south tower collapsed.

But suspicions remain that Brzezinski's moment of madness was staged, although the worried reactions from her co-hosts when she attempted to set fire to the script on air suggests she wasn't acting.

Brzezinski's dismissal of Paris Hilton is shared by the majority of Americans.

Sunday, July 01, 2007

Al Jazeera -Rewriting the definition of a 'News' Channel

When Osama bin Laden’s spectre loomed large over US all of us waited to get those blurred images of the Taliban or Bin Laden to announce the future intentions of his band of brigands. In the ten years since, all this has changed. Al-Jazeera brings you crisp News from all corners of the Globe, with Newscasts from Washington, London, Doha, Kuala Lumpur and a desk that has the best talent drawn from reputed institutions across the globe.

Any wonder then that watching Al Jazeera’s News is no more a limited vision of the Gulf region, the Muslim world or the channel for developments in the world of Osama and his boys. Interestingly the Al Jazeera News often turned its spotlight on the Asian region, much to the chagrin of the US which has all along wallowed in media glare.

“Under its slogan of “The opinion and the other opinion,” Al-Jazeera gave an Arab world hungry for information and debate the means to talk to itself and shape its future. It spawned imitators across the region and has launched an English channel station that is beginning to challenge the western monopoly of international news as a “voice of the global south”- George Galloway, British MP(The Hindu, June 18, 2007)

We have to remind ourselves that the US decides “What is News?” for us. Therefore they would not be delighted about a recent arrival on the scene altering priorities. Further it has the support of the despotic regimes in the Gulf who would not be too comfortable with the Al-Jazeera kind of journalism.

Neutering that voice must be achieved and what better way than get a pro-US man on the board of the newspaper. Pro-US voices have now found a position on the Board of Directors, what better way could there be to set the agenda for a media house. The US which has held centre-stage as far as ‘Newsmaker’ status is concerned cannot reconcile itself to not featuring among the items in an Al Jazeera newscast which is looking Asia-centric.

Al-Jazeera brings you News in a highly professional manner, and has earned the reputation of being “anti-Us and anti-Arab” which only amply shows how well it holds up the mirror on the region it reports.

Rajdeep Sardesai on the launching of CNN-IBN

News Channels - does that create a drone in your ears, of a host of signature tunes, and the screen flickering with ‘NEWS FLASH’, ‘BREAKING NEWS’, ‘FLASH’ and the innumerable distractions that take your mind off the genuine NEWS.

Here’s what Rajdeep Sardesai the whizkid of the News Channels who had to answer the question, “Are you sure you want to do this? Where is the space for another channel, and what will make your channel different?” has to say.

–“We were in Amsterdam at a conference organized by the European Broadcasting Union. The host for one of the sessions was a Canadian anchor, and the subject under discussion was the growth in private television across the world, including interestingly enough in Russia where the first private network had just taken off. As questions were raised over whetherthe new Russian channel was being financed by Vladimir Putin, the anchor turned to me indulgenty: ‘So, how many privated news channels do you have in India?’ around 30 and growing was the brief reply. The Canadian anchor was flabbergasted. ‘My God, that’s more than in the whole of North and South America put together.’

The sheer numerical strength of television industry suggests a robustness in the medium, a growth that is unparalleled. The lates viewership datasuggests that there are over 60 million homes, and many news channels claim a ‘connectivity’ or ‘reach’ of around 80 to 90 per cent. The advertising revenue estimates for the industry are in the range of Rs 700 to 750 crore (across channels), up from around Rs 100 to Rs 150 crore five years back. In other words, there has been a 500 per cent expansion in ad revenues. Little wonder then that everyone wants a slice of the pie.

The economics of the business is in a flux. The capital expenditure to start a channel is around Rs 50-75crore. Distribution costs are rising – channels have to spend between Rs 5 to 10 crore annually to ensure they get the right band placement, and salaries are rising exponentially.

The econmics represent only part of the problem. The bigger issue is the crisis of content: is the multiplicity of channels resulting in better journalism? We would like to believe at CNN-IBN for example, without sounding immodest, that we have made a genuine attempt to push the boundaries of news journalism, that we have been much more hard-hitting and energetic in our news coveragethan what English journalism is traditionally associated with. The brief to our journalists has been clear: go beyond the soundbite, beyond the obvious and actually look for stories that need to be told.

Jeremy Paxman, the BBC newsnight anchor who described himself as the ‘endangered panda’ in the age of rolling news, says that the problem with round the clock news is that you have to keep giving the impression to the viewer that the screen is constantly buzzing, that there is always something happening on screen that will prevent the viewer from switching channels.

The result is a completebreakdown in the concept of “ Breaking News’, or for that matter, an ‘exclusive’. For example,you could have an interview with a leader across more than one channel, with every channel flashing it as ‘ only on this channel’. It’s almost as if the exclusive bug is necessary to convince the viewer to stick to the channel.

The competition has also led to what some believe is the growing ‘tabloidisation’ of the medium. I have often chosen to take refuge in what Sir Robin Day, the venerable BBC broadcaster once said, ‘Television is a tabloid medium, at its best when there is war, violence and disaster.’The most powerful images are often those that have a touch of drama: a stone thrown at a bus will always be a more dramatic visual image than an empty street during a bandh.
The rise of crime reportage on television is a reflection of television’s penchant for titillating the viewer. It also reflects how television rating points have come to govern editorial decisions in the television newsrooms, especially in Hindi news channels, where the competition is even more maddening…..

Talk to the viewers, I say. CNN-IBN is by far the fastest growing news channel in the country, so we must be doing something right. The journey, I might add, has only just begun."

*The latest score of News channels stands at 40 and still growing.