How the war-mongering news anchor used #PulwamaAttack

For those who followed the coverage after Uri and India’s surgical strikes, the latest season of war-mongering on TV news is just a repeat telecast. None of what we’ve seen on television news over the past two days is new (or news).

It’ll be unfair to tarnish all TV news channels and journalists, so let’s speak of specifics.

If you were to tune into Republic TV at 9 pm, you wouldn’t be informed about any of the details of the Pulwama attack.

The channel’s Commander-in-Chief spent a mere minute or five informing his audience of the wheres and whats, before moving on to choreograph shouting-matches between his panellists who were divided into various groups: “Pak Will Pay” lobby, “Govt To Blame” lobby, “Stop Aman Ki Asha” lobby, “Just Lip Service” lobby. These were actual labels plastered over his panellists’ heads.

Goswami used the Pulwama attack to take a jab at his previous employer for organising Aman Ki Asha, a Times of India peace initiative with Pakistan. He used it to punch his favourite punching bags: he wanted answers from Umar Khalid, Shehla Rashid, Kanhaiya Kumar, Arundhati Roy, and so on.

He wanted traitors and potential traitors to be “marked out”. If you are familiar with Goswami’s nightly harangues, you’d know that anyone from rival channel anchors to JNU students to Opposition leaders have been traitors at some point or the other. In fact, it is safe to say that anyone against Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a traitor in Goswami’s worldview.

It is ordinary for primetime TV anchors to be in love with their voice. But in Goswami’s case, this love has reached a dangerous, all-consuming proportion. His well-wishers need to tell him that even to carry out his propaganda, he should have a story to tell. At least tell us what happened before you start shouting at us, telling us how we should feel about it.

Two men from Maharashtra are among the more than 40 soldiers who were killed. If the Commander-in-Chief so cared, he could have stepped out of his studio in Mumbai and featured their stories and voices of their families in his primetime debate instead of the little boxes of national and anti-national panellists. But then who will get to play class monitor?

Over at Times Now, the channel did what it does best: Be second to Republic TV.

Anchors Navika Kumar and Rahul Shivshankar are such bores to watch because they aren’t Republic TV’s Commander-in-Chief and all their nightly outings just seem like an endless effort to be him.

Kumar’s legitimate question on her #EndCoverLobby debate was: How will we avenge the death of our braves? To give you an understanding of the quality of the show, it had on board panellists like Sushil Pandit, who pedalled conspiracy theories on the rape of an eight-year-old girl, John Dayal, who was recently kicked out of Republic TV, and RSN Singh, who goes around claiming to be a defence expert but was eased out of RAW for non-performance and  incompetence.

There must be a special mention here of news anchors at other channels like ABP News, Aaj Tak, India Today and CNN News18, but it’s so much of the same that it’s boring to even remark on it. Essentially, Goswami has set the template that all of them try and ape. The next time you blame him for the death of TV news, please ask what the rest were up to.

At Zee News, we were informed that a Kargil War veteran who spoke sense was told that he did so because he wasn’t familiar with the gruesome images of the Pulwama attack.

What the Major should have told the anchor is that he speaks sense because he has seen War. To tweak a quote: War-mongering anchors desire war because they haven’t the slightest intention of fighting it themselves, and they haven’t the slightest idea what it is.