KLF 2019 | ‘It was good not to have breaking news,’ says Rajdeep Sardesai

News made into spectacle: Sardesai

Rajdeep Sardesai had gone to bed after covering a rally in Nagpur on May 21, 1991, and his telephone receiver had been kept off the hook. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated an hour later at Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu.

He received a call from his editor the next morning wondering where he had been the previous night as he had wanted to send him to Sriperumbudur. “He asked me how a journalist could put his phone off?” the well-known television journalist said at a session at the Kerala Literature Festival here on Sunday, when being asked about journalism in the pre-mobile phone era.

“There was no breaking news and that was the good thing,” he said. Mr. Sardesai said that now news had been converted into a medium of entertainment. It was meant to be a medium of information. “That is where the problem starts, because that is where the political leader also sees value, their being seen with film stars. Because the video will go viral,” he said.

The other day, the Prime Minister took a selfie with 15 film stars. He would not do it with 15 farmers. “We are converting our media into a

tamasha . Every night, you will see 10 people fighting with each other on a TV screen... It gets ratings. We are looking at making a normal news story into a spectacle,” he noted. By this, the real issues such as unemployment were not being touched by the media because it was difficult to convert them into a spectacle. Television had lost its moral compass due to competition, he claimed.

Social media

Mr. Sardesai said social media had given the citizen more opportunity to participate in our polarised politics. “As a newsman that is what worries me. Everything is being put in black and white. That makes me uncomfortable as a journalist. I am being pushed to do something that I would not have done 20-23 years ago,” he said.