Why I do not watch TV news anymore

That Indian TV news viewer prefers the viciousness on display in top channels is a worrisome trend

What do the ratings of our television news channels reveal about us, their viewers? The Broadcast Audience Research Council’s data for the week ending August 18 is in and it showed Republic TV at Number 1 with 1.04 million weekly impressions and Times Now at Number 2 with 1.03 million impressions. In Hindi it is Aaj Tak on top with 15 million, followed by Zee News which had 10.9 million.

Remember these are weekly impressions, so presumably one divides them by seven to get average daily impressions. This means two things: First that top Hindi channel is watched by 15 times more people than the top English one, which is not surprising. What is surprising is that even the leading English news channel is not watched by more than a few hundred thousand people a day. 

It is a small number of people viewing news television with outsized influence. There has already been some reporting on this issue in the media, and that is not what this piece is about. What is interesting is the nature and content of the two channels on top.

On February 3, in this column (“The awaited return of Arnab Goswami”) I had written that “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.”

I had sketched out some reasons for believing this, mostly on the side of how the television business is structured today and how low capital costs were and so on. But my primary reason for believing that this would happen, as it has, was on the side of the audience: Indian society.

Before we get into the details of what is meant, let’s take a look at the other English channel numbers. 

As we have seen, both Republic and Times Now have a million impressions a week. The other three main channels have only about a third of that. India Today has 366,000 a week, NDTV has 352,000 and CNN News 18 has 290,000.

NDTV has been around for two decades and is defined by its sobriety and lack of hysteria. It is also hesitant to fling in its lot with the channels that colour people traitors and anti-nationals and so on. This is essentially the reason why it has a limited reach and viewership. The fact is that the Indian television news viewer prefers the stupidity and viciousness of Republic and Times Now.

Stupidity I do not have a problem with, and I suppose when one is forced to churn out material every minute of the day (which is what 24/7 means) mistakes will happen. What is dismaying and dangerous is the viciousness. It manifests in many forms. For example, Mr Goswami’s personal dislike of Congress leader Shashi Tharoor and stalking of him. That is an example of an individual being harmed, or at least an attempt made to harm him. 

The other is the majoritarianism. It shows in the programmes that are focussed on demonising India’s 180 million Muslims. And in such positions as the valourising of terror suspects merely because they are Hindu. 

The important thing to note here is that this is validated and endorsed and subscribed to by the audience: Us. The fact that more Indians, many more, choose to watch this garbage says something deeply troubling about us. 

The preference for dark material has meant that the space for good journalism on television has actually shrunk. Karan Thapar and Barkha Dutt are off the air, presumably because no channel wants them, and that is incredible to me. They are among the five best English TV journalists we have even seen in India.

This has meant that for those Indians who want balanced, factual and unsensational anchoring on serious subjects, there are fewer places to go to. 

Illustration by Ajay Mohanty

Look at a parallel development in the United States. This week, for the first time, the ratings war for news shows on cable television was won by Rachel Maddow. She is a liberal (which I suppose in America means anti-racism, pro-individual rights) who had 2.78 million viewers. This put her ahead of Fox’s Sean Hannity who had 2.68 millions.

Americans, like Indians, are also being put through a period of torment and trauma by right wing violence and rhetoric. But those that are opposed to this are rallying in large (and even larger) numbers as Ms Maddow’s success shows. In India, it is the opposite. The continuous demonisation of Muslims by the ideology of India’s largest political party has been given approval by the English channel-watching elite.

The liberals (strange word for those who are just seeking humane treatment under the Constitution for all Indians and the stopping of hate-mongering) are in such small numbers as to be irrelevant.

If you are alarmed by this development, you should know that it will increase. The reason is that the success of the nasty channels and their content will pull other channels towards similar material. Media is a business and its currency is audience size. There is no running away from that. In my February piece I had written: “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.”

I have stopped watching news television entirely (a book and a drink offer a much more agreeable evening experience) but those of you who are watching will likely testify that this is true.

We have entered dangerous waters and I fear for what is ahead.