Tamil Nadu monsoon fury blacked out by national channels

Chennai: It’s been a tale of two tragedies. One, man made; the other, an act of God. One, wiping out 128 lives; the other over 71 and counting. One, hopefully over; the other still developing.

As a former TV journalist, I’ve been disturbed by the almost blanking out of this natural disaster in Tamil Nadu on national TV channels. I do concede that the Paris terror attack was a big international story. But in a half hour news wheel, don’t tell me that three minutes for a live or pre-recorded report, or footage with updates and a headline was too much for the unfolding monsoon fury in Tamil Nadu? Had Delhi or Mumbai been in the same state, would the news editors in those North- centric newsrooms have been so dismissive?

I know of instances when mere ankle deep water in Delhi, would be headlined as ‘Life Comes To A Standstill In The Capital’. All this within the first hour of inundation. Tamil Nadu has been batttered for more than a week, schools & colleges and some private companies have been shut, boats are out, the NDRF has been deployed and yet there has been mere token coverage. Only now have many of them woken up.

On Monday night, one channel showcased as the ‘Image of the day’, footage of Amitabh Bachchan travelling on a local train with his team singing, ironically, a song on showers - ‘Rang Barase’! Most channels had lengthy panel discussions on the Paris investigation, with the same looped images, live reports with no real updates and the usual panelists outshouting each other in the studio. The other day, one channel headlined a day’s play of a cricket match being washed out due to rain. More important than seventy plus lives being washed out?

A former colleague in the distribution line once shared a shocking statistic: Over 50 per cent of viewership of English national TV channels was in South India. What then explains this ‘trickle’ of coverage? For starters, South India and the North-East (ditto during the Assam floods not too long ago) are like Cinderella regions and ‘national’ news channels have become notional channels that cannot look beyond their backyard.

Newsrooms are about ‘control’ and there’s very little decentralisation or editorial freedom given to state bureaus. So, don’t blame the overworked bureau chiefs or reporters, some of whom today have been unfairly reduced to the position of sound byte collectors and guest coordinators for prime time shows.

Even if they had sent information about the floods, they may not have been allowed to follow the story. Or, even if they had waded through waist deep water, the story may not have been aired. It may have been telecast at midnight or at 6 am when hardly anyone watches.

Is prime time between 8 and 10 pm too dangerous a thing to be left to the bureaus? An advertising head honcho once told me that the reason for saturation coverage of Delhi and Mumbai is that big spenders live there. The South and the North-East are arguably not a ‘catchment’ area.

However, if you put your foot down, it’s possible to convince the managing editors to allocate special slots for big developing stories.

There’s still so much to cover. Stories of sorrow. Of a dead grandmother lying on the floor because with power failure there is no freezer box and priests cannot make it for the last rites. Of Facebook posts triggering collection drives of food and essential items.

National TV coverage of disasters is important because it provides instant proof of devastation automatically making a case for allocation of central funds for relief.