The Trials and Tribulations of Tolerating Twenty-four-hour TV Transmissions
I am often intrigued by the attitude and approach of some of our TV channels and their anchors, even in these trying times. After all, old habits die hard, as they say.
Proclaiming themselves as “watch dogs” and arrogating to themselves the sole rights of championing the cause of the poor, distressed and the needy, their only job is to keep deriding, denouncing, demeaning and downgrading whatever the governments at the centre and states do. Do they have solutions or sane advice? Nah... they are fountain heads of knowledge and wisdom, born with the exclusive proprietorship to just ask questions. It’s the job of lowly mortals [read: politicians (they are answerable to the electorate every 5 years!), policy makers, professionals, practitioners] to find answers. If migrant laborers start walking to their home-towns, our anchors shout from rooftop why transport is not being provided. If the governments arrange for buses, they arraign them for ‘giving a go by’ to social-distancing. Damned if you do; damned if you don’t. They are the petitioner, jury and the judge. Never the respondent. To keep their 24-hour channel humming, they have four panelists every hour and four times that number as questions. Their “arduous” and “challenging” task is to keep repeating these questions ad nauseam. Never mind, if those “insightful” and “incisive” questions have already been answered multiple times over, in the same discussion.
TV anchoring appears to be the most enviable profession to be in. If you are in any other discipline, the rigor and relevance of your domain knowledge and skills are often called into question. As a TV anchor, all you have to do is to just poll from one panelist to the other. Take what the first person said to the second. Seek his/her view. Get back to the first one with that. Thus goes the ping pong. Those of us with a smattering of math would readily recognize it as nc2 – number of ways of selecting two objects at a time, from n objects... A real-life example to make the students understand the concept!
Michael Dummett, British Philosopher, once said this on the “Philosophy of Mathematics” of the German Philosopher and Mathematician Gottlob Frege: “Every learned book, every learned article, adds to the weight of others to read, and thereby reduces the chance of their reading other books or articles. Its publication is therefore not automatically justified by having some merit: the merit must be great enough to outweigh the disservice done by its being published at all”.
Transpose this to some of our TV channels and their anchors. Nothing can describe them better.