Shouting to convince is outdated
Times Now vs Republic
Opinionated news far out-weighs pure, unalloyed presentation of news today. This is as dangerous a trend as is raising vacuous decibels inside TV studios, bulldozing through the legal system to hijack the tenets of intellectual property, making viewers hear and see just one side of the story, and provoking ideas to clash instead of converging to strengthen and seek direction. News, I sometimes feel, lies lifeless until I open the next morning’s newspaper. By the way, I subscribe to more than half a dozen print-media dailies because my evenings are generally toppled and conquered by debates that leave me completely enervated. The past few years have seen Arnab creating Arnab-clones on almost every channel and the consumer of news struggling to endure wave after wave of loud voices toppling over each other until nothing but incoherence survived.
News isn’t about irrational punches thrown irresponsibly. News ceases to remain news if you need to shout to be heard. News isn’t about raising your voice and nor is it about improving your argument – the nation simply wishes to be told the truth minus the overlapping decibels of loud and vain voices that drown whatever logic or interpretation could have existed. Look at the way Arnab Goswami functioned during his Newshour days or now plans to go about with his ‘Republic’… and you will know how to yearn for a rational debate instead of sensationalism. Look at the way Arnab talks about every Indian having “a right to use that phrase. And this phrase comes from the heart. Every Indian, through his or her questioning spirit, can use the phrase Nation Wants to Know”. Look at the way Arnab talks about saving “Indian journalism from the influence of Lutyens’ Delhi”, and goes on and claims to have the intent to “take journalism outside Delhi. Take it to Pune, to Guwahati, to Bengaluru, to Mumbai, but the national capital. They are so compromised, so co-opted that they have no right to represent the people.”
All that Arnab has been saying is surely not the complete truth and whether or not the nation wants to know, let me add that if someone who is a Rajya Sabha member from Karnataka since 2006, and appointed vice-chairman of NDA in Kerala in September 2016, decides to invest over Rs 30 crore in ARG Outlier Media Private Limited, the company that owns Republic, all that I can infer is a blatant pro-establishment stance where ‘right of centre’, ‘pro-India’, and everything-pro-anything does not stand even a remote chance of existence. Arnab has been systematically decimating the validity of dissent in views… and now even news waits trembling as he polishes his strategic axe.
The catch-phrase that everyone is talking about, the perfect punchline, an incisive aphorism, a moral tenet, a set of words that has had a powerful effect on listeners and viewers is also getting expected loud-mouthed claims of ownership from Arnab. I am not an intellectual property lawyer but I do know that TV programs are backed by large teams of creative professionals and a lot of stuff attributed exclusively to an anchor might simply be a part of misconceived perceptions embedded in the minds of a segment of ill-informed lay viewers. The courts and the judges will have the final say on this matter but to a common man, a phrase that has effectively sold a service or a product does deserve rights of exclusivity. Mary Minow in ‘Copyright protection for short phrases’ writes that “in the world of trademarks, short phrases are protected if consumers associate them with particular goods or services”. The mathematics of logical economics here favors Times Now.
But Arnab continues to fire volleys of deafeningly loud words assuming that this is the way battles are won. Words are, of course, free. We all know how Arnab, the anchor, has been flinging words at unsuspecting panelists. He has been like an armed man sitting on a televised debate firing mortar shells of high-pitched decibels at the panel. Is such a man debating a question without settling it or settling a question without debating it? With people like Arnab Goswami it is invariably destructive tsunamis of words eroding sensible shores and beaches of perspectives… and he invariably misconstrued that this is what the Nation wanted. Words and more words are fine only so long as dissenting perspectives do not drown, Mr Arnab.
Despite all this, I love this man. He has taught us everything there is to know about irresponsible TV anchoring. He has made millions of loudness-challenged viewers yearn to have the good old news format back in vogue. He has convinced an entire nation that the scintilla of logic appears only when loud words have been silenced. The nation now knows that all debates on the television need to let truth be the aim, “not victory, or an unjust interest”, to echo the words of William Penn.
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The Arnab Goswami vs Times Now debate
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Arvind Passey
Post written on 02 May 2017
