The no vision television news channels of Andhra Pradesh

I know that I am supposed to get back to the serialized story "My take on agitations". But there are a couple of other thoughts that I want to get rid of before getting back to the main theme. This time it has everything to do with the Telugu television news channels. Perhaps due to investments being comparatively less, there has been a surfeit of news channels in the Telugu language. They have also come into being for another reason, and that is to propagate their own desires (I refuse to call that ideology). Today every political party in Andhra Pradesh has either a channel of its own or a channel set up to sympathize with and propagate its (the political parties) views or both as in some cases. In some cases, the news channels also double up to serve the purpose of certain caste interests as well. Someone may then ask me, why are you titling this the "no vision...". The no vision refers to the myopic vision. I am sure all would agree that short-sightedness hardly qualifies as vision. Now that the problem of semantics has been disposed of, let me give you some concrete examples of idiotic behaviour of television channels.

A couple of years ago, a span of a flyover under construction in Hyderabad collapsed. Needless to say, the TV channels were all there in strength. As the TV crews were trying to get closer to the accident site, a certain conversation was heard on one of the channels. There was a policeman imploring with the TV crew to stay a distance from the accident site so as to enable the police to get on with their job. The reply from the TV crew was "we are also doing our job".

I personally found this amusing. Just look at it. The policeman's job is to attend to the problems created by the collapse of the span and the TV crew's job; to hinder the policeman's job.

The last month and a half, the only thing that is happening as far as the TV channels are concerned is the Telangana agitation. There are other developments happening in the world but those do not carry any significance for the Telugu news channels, except one. That channel is ETV 2 and is opposed to a separate Telangana. So when the Telangana activity is at its peak, the ETV 2 mainly shows programming about the feeding habits of dolphins or sea lions or something like that. When the movement for United Andhra Pradesh started, then it started showing the politics of that, while the sympathizers of Telangana switched over to showing their audiences the jewelery preferences of both men and women during the Inca or Zoque periods in human history. These TV channels also have 'panelists' who are expert "Academicians" with "vast knowledge" in the atrocities that have been committed by one region over the other. The "discussions" drag on forever over the same point and in order to "enlighten" viewers about the problems of one region or the other, these programmes with the "Expert-Knowledgeable-Academicians" in discussion are repeated over and over again. This is reminiscent of the stories of propaganda-driven regimes of the old Eastern Europe and Castro's Cuba. Most interestingly, I am told that there are actually people glued to TV sets to listen to this constant drivel. Well apart from making a statement about their own intellectual prowess (in this case the lack of it) these avid TV watchers are not establishing anything else. And here I end my analysis of the TV medium.