Comedy circus redefined... ! I work for a so called organisation which boasts of very high ranking/ TRP's and often claims time and again that it has thwarted competition, wiped it clean! Daily rounds of tortuous edit meets set the mood of the day which is to follow ticker lines of many channels and then decide which story requires follow up and reportage. We trail emblazoned paths searching for clues to a murder mystery, as self proclaimed detectives. We even suggest how a heinous crime is committed in the dead of the night, how an enraged father kills his own daughter and then the domestic servant (Arushi murder case) just with the help of the police who are themselves clueless and crippled with missing links. We stop at no cost in following a great scoop but we often tend to forget how innocuous we sound when we side with one version of the story and weave a desi racy crime pulp fiction. Then follows innumerable lives (sometimes staged, called SIM SAT) and this horror is mediated in living rooms of thousands of couch potatoes/ news junkies/entertainment junkies!English news channels tend to give the impression that they are in the business of news even urging the audience to feel the intensity of this news with tag lines like "Feel the news", "if it's news its on XYZ TV, News without views.. and many cheesy lines the unimaginative content team tend to advertise in trail blazing font...Much like the sci fi genre news is also entering the realm of abstraction and fantasy. Where it can misreport or suggest a reality which in the first place does not exist. We are all in the business of manufacturing consent.. through coercion, repetitive bulletins and morose commentaries...If Jade Goody came to India we send a team of "special investigators" from our channel tracking her every move and televising it as one great story on a 24 hour news channel. And even better if someone had a wad robe malfunction (cry out loud) it becomes a heavily packaged news story with many graphic elements literally....So who are we making this skimmed reality television for... we hop skip and gloss over issues and present them with innumerable graphic elements.. we copy paste each other and flash BREAKING NEWS tag line... breaking all bounds of shamelessness and we pat ourselves in the back and wipe the cream of our whiskers..But then ... number one is a line that always works.. even if no one is watching.
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