Hindustan Times
All about elections
You and I may not like politicians, but lets face it, don’t we love the game called politics specially during elections?
The sound bytes, the claims and counterclaims, repeated invocation of the higher power called the “high command” and, sadly, the losers. There is a certain magic about elections. And newspapers had a monopoly on it till, let’s say, 15 to 20 years ago.
People had no choice but to go with the printed pictures and stories. Editors would exhort younger colleagues to bring more colour into their copy.
This was all anybody could see of the elections.
Then came Doordarshan, and people got to see moving pictures of politicians – how they talked and walked. It was nice. But DD was, and remains, its worst enemy. It steadfastly stayed away from covering elections the way they ought to have been.
Elections meant equal propaganda time on air for all parties. Then came NDTV, followed shortly by hordes of news channels in as many languages as India could understand.
They brought home into living rooms, the elections are they are fought – the colour, the noise and, some times, gore.
Newspapers fought back with more colour in their pages, stories, graphics and headlines. The channels were surely missing something. The channels had everything – bytes straight from the players – the contestants, the leaders, the winners and the losers.
And to leave even less room for newspapers, they brought on the heavy hitters – the experts, and all of them and more.
So what do we in the newspapers do?
We try and do what we do best – saturation coverage. Cover everything, do everything, analyse everything, pack in enough numbers and pictures. We target an average person, who is not a news junkie and who doesn’t watch every news channel.
We try and put things in perspective. So, okay, now that the Congress has won the two (or three) states, what will it do? How will it change things? Does it work for you?
Do you have a better idea?
(4 votes, average: 2.5 out of 5)
Loading ...Posted by Yashwant Raj on Friday, October 23, 2009 at 12:10 am
Filed under Media · Tagged counterclaims, Doordarshan, high command, ndtv, pictures, politicians, politics, saturation coverag, sound bytes
newspaper has its own charm. Unlike news channels, one is not interrupted by advertisements in newspaper.added to this i personally do not like the continued jabbering and creating a hype around some useless piece of news by the news channels.
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well to be honest, reading even election news in newspapers is more exciting than television for me. being the more immediate of the two mediums obviously works for television but then the frenzy and the monotony also make it quite dull & irritating at times. newspapers at least leave us room to choose what story or part of story we might want to read………& nowadays the static coverage of a newspaper provides relief & a break from breathless news reports & anallysis on tv..
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