The practice of listening to the news on a daily basis is quite prevalent since decades ago. Evolution has begun from radio and newspaper to Doordarshan on ‘idiot box’ i.e. Television and then to variety of channels in which some are sold and some are not.
As the trend of an aggressive live debate which has taken a high rise after Arnab Goswami’s show ‘The Newshour’ , Every media channel has started recruiting mainly angry looking and loud speaking anchors to host these type of debates. These debates actually results in muting someone’s voice whose voices these hosts don’t want to listen, or sidelining the voices of some major leaders who belong to Minority or vulnerable groups of society. These debates also results in calling someone just to show their faces and not giving them appropriate chance to speak, as the channel have to show their so called ‘Democracy’ to the viewers.
As the Title of the article suggests, News channels have mainly became views channel where we are just sitting to hear the views from so called anchors, editor in chiefs or other position in news channel. Their views mainly depends on political connections of their channel owners or mainly on the problems faced by the majority of the population. As in a country like India, it is the right of every person to express himself/ herself, but the chance should be given to every person to express in any language. Mainly Hindi speakers on English channel debates are considered as less knowledgeable and stereotyped them as they were talking in vague or general sense.
As live debates should have a clear focus in enriching the knowledge of viewers by providing certain facts and figures and try taking ”Actual” Debatable topics, not the topics which can overfill the actual filled hatred in the minds and hearts of people.
Jafar Ali Zaidi
M.A. Development, Azim Premji University
www.jafarzaidi.wordpress.com/