Media Monday: Broadcasters Editors Association- is it justified?

Editors of some major news channel Broadcasters have formed this ‘BEA’ association to “strengthen the values of objective and fair broadcast journalism” and to “protect and promote the freedom of expression.” –indiantelevision.com

Though I’m OK with the second part of the motive, but keeping in mind the channels which are promoting this association I’m very much critical about the first quote -“strengthen the values of objective and fair broadcast journalism”.

What ‘objective and fair’ journalism?

Except for the news over some handpicked of channels, rest of the channels show everything except news. Forget about being fair, the news is rather scripted and recorded by journalists themselves.

They shouldn’t be called journalists but ‘short movie’ scriptures and the news should be called as a ‘you tube’ video on Television.

Let me explain this- there are some channels which still capture genuine news and their “Breaking News” does mean something which is important and not any news which will break one’s heart!

Just to give an example of what some of the Indian Channels think of Breaking News:

“राज ठाकरे के कुतों का अंग्रेजी नाम”

WTF?

English news channels don’t suffer from this stigma (at least for now) because of their TG. But who knows, with increasing number of channels by the day someone might come up with this idea of launching a comedy English news channel.

And yes that might be the ice breaker and we may see several other channels such as ‘Comedy Business news”, “Comedy Stock market news” and blah blah. Ohh that might be the killing day for TV content!

I strictly want that I&B ministry should categorize Channels such as “India TV”, “News 24” and “IBN 7” as ‘entertainment news’ rather than ‘news channels’ and stop allowing them to be a part of such associations where they would do nothing more than creating another “Breaking News”!

[This Media Monday post has been written by Rabi Gupta, a start up enthusiast and co-founder of iDubba (Intelligent Box).]