The awaited return of Arnab Goswami

Republic TV will climb to the top spot easily, but at the cost of important, deserving news

The brilliant anchor and editor Arnab Goswami is to launch his news television station, Republic TV, next month. The station was originally named just Republic (possibly so that Mr Goswami could tweak his famous signature line to “the Republic wants to know”). On January 31, Business Standard reported the word “TV” had to be added after the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Subramanian Swamy complained that merely “Republic” violated the Emblems and Names Act, which protects certain words from commercial use.

Having worked in many newspapers I can tell the reader that getting the single word name “Republic” approved and registered in the first instance would have meant either that Mr Goswami is supremely lucky or very influential. Most new media products seeking registry must submit names having three words or more because either the titles have been previously registered or the government takes offense to the particular name. And so we have newspaper names such as Afternoon Despatch & Courier and Daily News and Analysis. I don’t know if this is very different for television stations but I don’t see why that should be.

Once Mr Goswami launches his station, I predict it will soon become Number 1, just as Times Now became during his decade-long stint there. This is for the following reasons.

First, though no major media house is backing the project (Mr Goswami has got a few investors, including apparently a member of Parliament from the National Democratic Alliance), this lack of substantial backing is not really a problem. The capital costs required to start a television station are not that much these days. About Rs 250 crore is needed in all and the equipment used to broadcast and edit is getting cheaper every year. As someone who appears regularly on TV, I can say that the large outdoor broadcast vans that used to be parked outside my home are gone, replaced by hand held devices with multiple SIM cards that can transmit the material to the studio just as efficiently.

Second, the running costs can be trimmed if one is clear about what the content is intended to achieve. Some TV networks have up to 1,000 staff. However, there is not that much value addition that comes out of having many reporters in television because the primary offering of these stations is opinion and not reportage. In any case, material may be solicited from viewers who have shot stuff on their phones. So it is very likely Republic TV will have a much smaller staff than other major English news stations. And its very name likely means that it will solicit content from viewers aggressively. 

Third, the important time band for ratings is 8-11 pm. The rest of the day doesn’t really matter. In this space, Mr Goswami is the master. He has imitators, but they are not as good as he is. He has rivals who have tried to remain focused on old style anchoring and he has absolutely trounced them. He has abandoned the idea of an anchor doing journalism (meaning limiting his role to polite questioning) that some of his older colleagues have had. He has made his shows squarely about his personal position and opinion on the issue of importance for the day, as decided by him. This can be the Sheena murder case or the perfidy of non-profit organisations. But very often it has to do with terrorism and Pakistan and the sort of thing where the upper Anglicised classes have a consensus view. Mr Goswami absolutely owns this space because he created it and he is its most competent executor.

Illustration by Binay Sinha

Fourth, news television has become appointment viewing, just as a sports match or serial would be. The characters are important and people tune in to watch Mr Goswami. The material he is working on is incidental. He recognises this and on Republic TV’s Twitter feed every single tweet features Mr Goswami. This is journalism done in messianic form. The goodwill he accrued over the decade at Times Now he will carry and transfer to his new station. This is why I think it will not take very long for him to establish his supremacy again in that 8-11 pm space and the ratings will reflect that in a matter of a few weeks.

What does this mean for TV news and what is the likely fallout? The obvious one will be that in trying to compete with or outdo Republic TV, the other stations will become even more loopy than they currently are. If this be hard to imagine for most readers of this paper touched as it is by sobriety, you don’t have too long to wait. The debates to come will be more intense than what we have seen.

That is so far as the presentation goes. Anchors totally uninterested in the nuance of the subject at hand or the opinions of those holding a different view will work harder to make themselves more obnoxious.
 

This is of course entertainment and if one is getting one’s news from watching television then one does not really mind this sort of thing. However, the damage proper will come to India’s more serious issues being abandoned. Irrelevant things will continue to take up the space that other, more deserving, more vital, issues need. This government and the ones before it, get away with little or no focus on actual governance where it is needed.

For example, in improving India’s public health network or its education system or its justice system. Instead the government of the day will march out its dozen spokesmen and women to the studios to talk about something asinine. I don’t have to illustrate this: One can just turn the TV set on tonight to find out what I mean. It is surely a relief to the state that it has to defend its record not on malnutrition or about falling levels of literacy, but about whether Padmavati was real or fictional.

The government will thus be as eager as Mr Goswami’s fans are as they await the return of the angry young man to television.