This year has been defined by generous outpouring of outrage and shock in the television studios. With political exposes being the flavor of the year, the doyens of debate who earlier used to descend around dinner time, arrive well before tea-time. And they appear visibly horrified by the slew of stings, exposes and revelations - especially the dude in gelled hair and blue rimmed spectacles.
What irks me is the practiced voice modulation, the element of surprise and the air of shock expressed by some anchors.
Is it because of a new study which says that watching horror films can help burn calories? Perhaps all the horrific sting operations and shocking exposes are designed to burn calories of the ‘mango-couch potatoes’. Watch prime time news and shed kilos in one sitting. Brilliant. Right?
On a serious note, did the media not know how the powerful were accumulating wealth over the years? Did they not know how a certain party President was operating his social enterprise? Did they believe that running a social enterprise enables people to allegedly gift a BMW sedan and a nine crore bungalow to their children? Surely the lavish lifestyle was not coming from the salary doled out by the BJP.
Leave aside the current dart boards; there are other prime ministerial aspirants who are facing cases of disproportionate wealth. Perhaps it’s time for ABI (Arnab’s Bureau of Investigation) and RBI (Rajdeep’s Bureau of Investigation) etc to send their investigators in the hinterlands of UP and Maharashtra. The revelations will shock many. Whats more, the shock could enable viewers to lose weight.
That there are magical zeroes in sweet deals is as obvious as hair protruding from Lalu Prasad’s ear. An average person on the street is aware of the incestuous relationship between politics and business. The media knew it too. The only new surprising element is the avalanche of zeroes.
My question is: If the exceptional rise of the powerful was evident all along, why hyperventilate, act surprised, and shocked on prime time news?
I can think of three reasons apart from an attempt to shed weight.
Firstly, it seems that with 'The Right to Information Act' the high and mighty have scored a self goal. RTI has revealed a lot more than it intended to. It has revealed that the mold on top has penetrated deep and that the entire dish is rotting - media included.
And since Kejriwaal and his merry men have had the courage to dwell on taboo topics, the media was forced to kick start parallel investigations. In essence while 'India Against Corruption' occupied the vacant space created by political parties, it also occupied the vacant space left by the media. The news channels were compelled to highlight the misdemeanors of high profile who were hitherto sacred.
Finally, if an impartial probe is ordered into the accounts of media houses or television channels, skeletons are bound to tumble. An indignant loyalist was honest in declaring that it is an unspoken norm to protect powerful families. It seems that the media was following those secret norms as well. It was safe to expose the fringes, but not talk about the sacred first families and the party presidents.
The way things work, it is wrong to say that Politics and Business are intertwined.
Politics is Business.
It is the biggest business going around. Modern India is being built on the bed where politicians and businessmen sleep together – power, gas, coal, roads, highway, and dams – all require a liberal intertwining between politics and corporate houses. That’s the way the cookie crumbles.
The recent Zee/Jindal expose, where the news editor was perhaps also the business head reveals that apart from politics, media is also business. And the moral of any business is to make money.
A majority of deals,contracts and transactions, if scrutinized carefully can be categorized as illegal, immoral or illegitimate. The only way to distinguish between two wrongs is to measure the degrees. I wonder who gets to decide that.
Certainly not the media. It’s a cozy threesome.
Nudge-nudge. Hoodwink.
