Occasionally, they raise their raise hand to speak like we did in the school room - the anchor chooses to either let them talk or simply ignores them.Īlso read: Karnataka sets up 24×7 control rooms to monitor TV channels
(Please listen to last Sunday’s debate and you’ll understand).Ĭurrently, all Indian news anchors behave like the chief guest on their own shows: they deliver the main address (aka sermon), and panelists listen meekly and impassively. Not like the likes of Republic TV’s Arnab Goswami: as panelists watch, he shouts “everyone quiet” before pronouncing lengthy judgments on the CAA and the NRC and the “dirty lies” of the Congress he interrupts panelists the second they begin to speak and allows then allows them to shout simultaneously so that they all sound incomprehensible. If we absolutely must have prime time debates - many news anchors would be jobless otherwise and may raise the already alarming unemployment rate - then can we have debates of the kind we watch on Mirror Now, ET Now’s ‘India Development Debate’ or NDTV 24×7’s ‘The Big Fight’ – debates where each panelist is given sufficient time to voice an opinion before yielding the microphone to another person? So why can’t Indian news channels do it? Why can’t they just broadcast hourly bulletins of news about events and developments across the country and the world, like they used to do a decade ago? Just some good old-fashioned ground reporting by local and state correspondents who know the lay of the land?Īlso read: Guess what Times Now and Republic TV, often carrying identical content, finally disagreed on What would the news channels telecast, instead?Įr, the news, maybe? BBC does it CNN International does it too. Imagine no news anchors (sing this to the tune of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’): bye-bye Anjana Om Kashyap, Rubika Liyaquat, Sudhir Chaudhary, Rajat Sharma, Rohit Sardana, Ravish Kumar, Amish Devgn, Sreenivasan Jain, Nidhi Razdan, Rahul Shivshankar, Navika Kumar, Rajdeep Sardesai, Gaurav C. Sawant, Zakka Jacob, Bhupendra Chaubey, Arnab Goswami and Arnab Goswami… If that’s too radical a detox for TV addicts, how about we just ban prime time news debates? Isn’t that a genius idea? Imagine an evening without TV news anchors who endlessly talk and never run out of words?