For Eyeballs Giving News Credibility a Knock, Say TV Journalists at FICCI-FRAMES 2008

Is news entertainment? The answer is a big No. But when the battle is for eyeballs, when 'fun' seems to be the only currency for stickiness on TV, when news degenerates into entertainment, honest journalism and credibility of a TV network is the first casualty.
The panelists -- Mr. G Krishnan, CEO, TV Today Network; Mr. Sanjay Ahirwal, Executive Editor, NDTV India; Mr. Satinder Bindra, Correspondent, CNN; Mr. Rajiv K. Bajaj, Vice-President, Sahara Samay; and Ms. Jill Grinda, Director, Worldwide Distribution, Euronews - shepherded by Vishnu Som, Associate Editor, NDTV, put their thinking caps on to debate what's news and what's entertainment.
Mr. Vishnu Som set the ball rolling by posing the question: What constitutes news? Is there a standing, static definition for news or is it open-ended? The whole issue, he said, was of TV content.
Mr. G Krishnan pointed out that today hard breaking news coexists with 'tabloid' coverage on television. He highlighted the 4 C's of news television: cricket, cinema, comedy and crime, where 'fun' seems to be the only guiding factor for grabbing eyeballs.
Mr. Sanjay Ahirwal said TV newsgathering is expensive business. Whether it is reportage of the Kargil war or the welcome accorded by Bhutan to democracy yesterday, the bottomline is that most of the networks are not ready to spend the amounts required for journalists to reach out to remote places.
Mr. Rajiv K. Bajaj spoke of the paradigm shift in the way news is perceived during the last five or six years. Citing the example for of the story of 'Prince', the evacuation of a little boy from a borewell by the Indian army troops and the evacuation of 4 lakh Indians from Beirut by Indian naval ships, Mr. Bajaj said, the former grabbed the eyeballs while the latter went almost unreported.
Mr. Satinder Bindra said news has to be informative, educational and inspirational to goad the authorities into thinking and action, with credibility being sacrosanct. Ms. Jill Grinda said Euronews, Europe premier TV news network, presents unfiltered news to its viewers, leaving it to them to form their own judgments.