News or Nonsense!

“Kabristan ka Rahasya”, “Ek Khooni Ghar”, “Naagin ka Badla”, “Khoon ka Pyasa Sadhu”…

This list might sound like a list of C-grade books available in a book-store of a railway station. However, that’s not the only place one can find these titles. These are the “Special Reports” of some of India’s leading news channels!

That’s right. Flipping through channels, we can find a variety of “news channels”, whose “news reports” revolve around stories like that of a palace where a king killed his queen because she had an affair with the minister and how her spirit still lives there waiting to kill any man who enters the palace. How ridiculous can things get!

Some channels cannot stop talking about how a film actress and her boyfriend made out. Not only this they claim that this is the biggest “news” and keep flashing the pictures of the film actress in the skimpiest outfit ever made. Other such “news” items talk about how two actresses hate each other because one of them lost weight and looked better in a movie which starred the other actress as well.

There will be “special reports” on how a sadhu or a tantrik can bring back the spirits of the dead and how he can make you talk to them or how an image of some god has appeared on the wall of someone’s house and how it’s auspicious!

Do we seriously need such “news”? We live in the twenty first century. People talk of life on other planets, the technology is advancing, new discoveries in every field are made everyday and here we are stuck with the ghost of a queen who betrayed her husband. What knowledge can we possibly gain from knowing how an actress made out with her boyfriend? But the biggest question of all, should the “news channels” actually be given the permission to term such trash “news”?

I do not think it’s required to show such “news items” just to increase a news channels’ ratings. Instead of showing such cheap, indecent and to some level superstitious reports, they can arrange for relevant talk shows, debates or maybe start off with an educational program which will help increase a viewer’s general knowledge, when there is no news available.

Just to sell their channel or make it “the most viewed” channel, people go to any extent. On one hand, they’ll condemn a particular act strongly like how they condemned the dancers or cheerleaders in a recent cricket tournament. On the other hand, they won’t stop showing them off. There will be an hour long “special reports” on those very cheerleaders and how colourful and “sensual” cricket has become due to them.

News is something that keeps us informed as to what goes on in our city, in our country and around the world. It is meant to keep us updated and aware. But, just for the sake of filling up slots where these news channels do not have a good story, I don’t think they should stoop to such levels where they are terming the most irrelevant nonsense as news.