Let’s face
it, we all make mistakes. Even the best of experts make mistakes. It’s just
that some mistakes can be honest and not be so harmful and some are deliberate
and fraudulent. Some mistakes can be hilarious and some can be very damaging or
offensive to others. Watch this video (1.42 mins) from BBC 24Hours where the anchor interviews Guy Kewney an IT expert
over the Apple (Beatles Music Co.) V Apple Computers case. (Do watch the video
before you proceed further):
Guy answered
all the questions the anchor raised without batting an eyelid. The ‘Guy’ in the video is remarkable for his
composure considering he wasn’t the ‘Guy’
the BBC wanted. The real Guy Kewney
is the one in the pic on the left. The Guy that the anchor interviewed was a
taxi-driver who was hanging around in the BBC reception area waiting for an
interview for a job at the station. His name is Guy Goma who became more famous after the goof-up. What is
hilarious is that Goma not only carried himself brilliantly during the
interview but even as a taxi-driver he gave some very convincing answers. That
tells you how even ordinary folks are up to speed on issues. But that doesn’t say
much for the BBC or the anchor does it? Poor lady didn’t even know what Guy
Kewney looked like. Considering Kewney was an IT journalist till his death in
2010 one would have expected an anchor to know about or at least have seen a
pic of Kewney. That’s the ‘expertise’
and ‘general knowledge’ of anchors. The
best part? The anchor thought she had an “expert” as her guest, while Goma
thought this was an interview for the job he was seeking.
In Goma’s
case all ended well and everybody had a good laugh and no one suffered any
damage. Life would be boring without such genuinely honest mistakes. But what
about the viciously deliberate frauds that TV channels perpetrate on viewers?
Take a look at the pics below:
These are
screen shots of a semi-porn video aired by TV9
and SuvarnaTV in Karnataka. These
channels and others never stop lecturing people about vulgar displays by and of
women and porn and so on. Yet such cheap titillation is passed off as news
item. There can hardly be any doubt that the material is offensive and in poor
taste. What does one do with such airings? The man who sent these images
(@Surnell) protested to the Broadcasting
Content Complaints Council (BCCC) with an email attaching these pics. The
BCCC then directed him to address the complaint to News Broadcasters’ Association
since these were “news channels”. Yeah… that’s the NBA which I often refer to as the Union of Snakes. By the time
@Surnell gets anywhere with his complaints he will find the NBA is like any
other govt body.
Let’s talk
about Anderson Cooper of CNN. Cooper
rose to prominence for his reporting from conflict zones as a freelancer. Today,
he is the superstar of CNN and probably a superstar among TV anchors in the US.
Cooper’s rise in CNN was quite quick and his most promoted show is AC360.
Still, despite being a famous studio anchor every time there’s a natural
calamity or disaster, Cooper returns to report from the ground. He has mostly
been in all hurricanes, tornadoes and floods as the following images would tell
you:
Our big
media celebs are too lazy to get their asses off their studio seats and get to
the ground. For 3 days when the Uttarakhand flood was causing damage they were
in their studios gossiping on the BJP-JDU break-up endlessly and beyond
reasonable limits. Yes, for 3 days –
June 15, 16, 17 – celebrities like Rajdeep, Arnab, Barkha, Sagarika, Kanwal and
their siblings in other news channels didn’t have time for Uttarakhand.
When they finally found time they sent some junior reporters to cover the
tragedy. CNN-IBN sent Priyali Sur to one spot just to show they were “on ground
zero” before they could send others to cover the severe damage caused by the
floods. In such a situation there isn’t any doubt that reporting isn’t easy and
no reporter should be put in harm’s way. But in the absence of visuals some
channels just resorted to fraudulent reporting. Take a look at this image
flashed by NDTV on June 18 (Via
@unurag):
NDTV just
picked up a video from Youtube from June 2010 and used it to report the
Uttarakhand floods of June 2013. They were just 3 years late it seems. I have
mentioned in the past the fall of TV journalism owes a great debt to NDTV and
its “alleged” journalists. Twisting
news, unverifiable sources for headlines, spin-doctoring – you name it, NDTV
has got it. But this kind of bogus videos/images being used is an outright
fraud on the viewers. One person actually tweeted me that he wanted to sue NDTV
because he was alarmed by the image. As far as I know NDTV hasn’t even
apologised for this serious lapse. They probably had a good laugh at having
fooled the people for a while. Well, NDTV isn’t alone! Here’s another one from
a lazy news channel called ABPNews
(Formerly StarNews, the fountain that spawned Prannoy Roy, Barkha, Rajdeep and
Arnab):
The ABP
folks picked up a video of a bus falling off a cliff in Bolivia (Via
@_SiddharthRao). Bolivia? The only
thing I know about Bolivia is it’s the country which shot dead Che Guevara. ABP
must have thought nobody would think of Bolivia to detect their fraud. That’s
not all! The fraudsters even scroll
their logo across the video to show it was some “exclusive” stuff they were providing the viewers. How clever! Both
NDTV and ABP doesn’t seem to learn that Social Media is a watchdog over them
and they can’t get away with such frauds anymore.
How sick can
these channels get? Even in a time of tragedy they resort to gimmickry and
fraud in their rush to cover up their failures of not having original shots of
the flood fury in Uttarakhand. They want to bedazzle you with BS! The Twitter
friend who was alarmed and annoyed at these bogus pics really wanted to sue
these channels. There are air-passengers associations, rail-passengers
associations so maybe it’s time for a ‘news-viewers’ association that will
indeed take on these news channels for bogus news and images. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be sued and penalised for
their floody frauds.
