I still remember the time when dad explained me the meaning of ‘breaking news.’ Breaking news is nothing but a sudden incident/event that has occurred and you get first informed about it. But look what’s happening today.
I will not hesitate in holding the media responsible for this. They are the ones who introduced this term to us and now they are the reason behind this change. Just see what they have done with the news today. If news has broken in afternoon, some channels have the guts to show it as breaking news in their evening bulletin.
I completely agree that the channels run the news time and again as they are unaware when a viewer might click on their channels. But that nowhere states that they must carry that news as breaking news throughout the day.
Updates are what each channel does on that story. But for heaven’s sake it’s not breaking news. You are simply informing the viewers and summarizing the entire incident in your bulletin. One channel came up with this trend and the others followed.
Here are few funny headlines/stories which I can recollect that were aired as breaking news:
- Kurukshetra mein hui Prince ki jeet. (6 year boy, Prince from Haryana was trapped in a bore and was rescued after 50 hours. This story was aired by Zee News and Star Plus for almost the entire day). Agreed it’s a big story, but it doesn’t mean that other stories are spoken about at all.
- ‘My lips are still hurting’ says Rakhi Sawant. (The most controversial and talked about kiss between Rakhi Sawant and Mika Singh. Again Zee and Star were the lead channels to air the story. Deep inside all of know what kind of personality Rakhi is. Still she was given major importance the entire day).
- ‘Chaand ulta nikla.’ God this was the heights when Aaj Tak (once upon a time the most responsible channel) carried this story in the afternoon slot. They went to the extent of showing a group of people standing and checking out the position and shape of the moon. And that too during bright daylight.
- Yesterday there was another funny story (this time it’s not Aaj Tak, Zee or Star). It was India TV. Imagine they went on to show a graphic representation of UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) taking cows and buffalo from some village as their population was increasing. I guess the reason must be shortage of milk on their planet. So, they decided to kidnap cows and buffaloes from Earth.
You can see which direction our Television journalism is heading. Only to earn TRP’s the editors of these channels have forgotten how to term a story as breaking news. I think rather than following what the other channels are up to, they must concentrate on creating awareness about important issues. Which in the in matters the most to the aam janta.
4 comments:
"My lips are still hurting"... yep i remember that one.. wt crap.. a stupid incident like that ws turned into a major national issue.... playing on news channel whole day long.... Crazy!!!
hey quite agree dear. It sounds funny, but being a journalist, i'm not knowing a true meaning of breaking news...LOL!
Hahahahah, interesting instances you have mentioned..and I happened to write about a similar thing some time back. I'm telling you, the only tip for us aspiring journalists, stay far far away from the utopian picture, because it doesn't exist and if it did once upon a time... its too far off now. :)
Its really disgusting jus for the sake of TRP how can these channels show crap. No not crap I call it shit. I think in the rat race of good TRP news channels have forgot there responsiblity...
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