A recent TV news clip of a journalist reporting from the midst of a cyclone shows him buffeted by strong winds and swept off sideways at one point, as a prim voiceover asks viewers to note how powerful the storm is. It’s a dramatic moment, but somewhat spoilt by the fact that the camera unwittingly catches another person just behind the reporter, walking normally, clearly unaffected by the gale.
A cyclone is a cyclone, its strength measurable, its effect obvious, its damage assessed after it passes over. So why did the TV reporter feel the need to enact a fake drama to “show” viewers the strength of the winds?
An eyewitness account
At its inception, the chief thrill of television was that it provided an “eyewitness” account of events happening far away, making news authentic, intimate, and real-time.
In a strange volte face, television today is increasingly taking away the authenticity of the eyewitness account by adding artifice, as if it were not ‘news’ it deals with any longer but creative narratives, the domain of entertainment.
When a skirmish breaks out on the borders, TV studios become war rooms and anchors wear military fatigues. They recreate the surface of the moon to report space missions. They pretend to report while wading in flood waters while held aloft on someone’s shoulders. They smudge eye makeup to suggest tearfulness.
Television has turned the idea of reporting about events on its head by itself becoming a participant, a bit player in the political, medical or weather drama unfolding on screen. The reportage is no longer about the incident alone, but also about itself, as actor-director-producer. When news is recast as ‘performance’, the borders between truth and fiction get more and more blurred.
The phenomenon has been spawned by what Professor Jean M. Twenge called the era’s “narcissism epidemic”, which has made the news anchor more important than the news. Acquiring popstar status means the anchor now markets himself or herself and, as a subset of that, markets the news as well. Thus, even cyclones have to be ‘packaged’ and sold.
The parallel between TV news and WWE wrestling is unmistakable. In a WWE match, the wrestlers enact elaborate spectacles of blood, gore and broken limbs but the whole thing is fake, scripted to the last detail. French philosopher Roland Barthes wrote: “The function of the wrestler is not to win; it is to go exactly through the motions which are expected of him.” Similarly one might say of anchors today that presenting news is no longer their job — their function is playacting. Their carefully orchestrated performances are meant to provoke suitable responses of anger, revenge or sentiment from viewers. If WWE was built on the premise of entertainment masquerading as sport, what we have today is entertainment masquerading as news.
Following a script
A rocket launch or the introduction of a Rs. 2,000 note can no longer simply be reported but must be scripted into a show with the anchor in a metallic faux spacesuit or waving a magnifying glass at a giant currency note, contortions that don’t necessarily present more information for the viewer but certainly produce spectacle. What former BBC chief John Birt spoke of as a weakness of television, the “bias against understanding”, because its inherent format — show rather than tell — prevents it from properly establishing context or deep-diving into background, has been exacerbated by television now smudging facts and fantasy into one messy thing called infotainment. It is, as Barthes said of WWE, a “spectacle of excess”.
It is no coincidence that the two most visible formats on Indian television today are reality TV and news programmes, both of which titillate by claiming to be a ringside view of real life but are, in fact, aggressive showbiz. By mimicking reality TV, news shows challenge the credulity of viewers and implicate them in the make-believe, thus succeeding in neutralising all content.
vaishna.r@thehindu.co.in
