By Sanjay Pinto
When television news took the media industry by storm, there were those
initial doubts about the electronic and print media coexisting. There were
those cartoons (oops, that’s a bad word today!) and one liners: “Today’s TV
bulletin is tomorrow’s newspaper front page.” Time has been the best ‘feeler’!
Today, if a TV report is like an FIR, a newspaper or magazine story is like a
chargesheet. One, immediate and slightly superficial; and the other, more in
depth.
Enter the social media. There is a surfeit of resentment over the
mainstream media. Yet, the two end up as rather strange bedfellows. They
complement each other. And there is no question of one gobbling up the other.
While the television and print media are a convenient and sometimes justifiable
whipping post, facebook and twitter are an instantaneous source of raw
information, not always entirely accurate.
As someone who is active in both worlds; riding as I do, a horse and a
pony, let me give you a classic example. The bus falling off the flyover in
Chennai. The story broke first on twitter. News desks were franctically
copying, pasting and mailing tweets from eyewitnesses. And before camera teams
and outdoor broadcast vans could weave through the traffic jam and reach the
spot, there were a few twitter savvy passers by who managed to click pictures
of the accident site and upload them. But just how accurate were the tweets?
This is where perception is so easily allowed to cloud reality. The sight of an
almost overturned bus and ten ambulances with blaring sirens is alarming but
need not necessarily mean twenty five deaths. A smashed parapet wall need not
leave a question mark over the structural stability of the flyover. An
onlooker’s version about the bus driver clutching a mobile phone need not imply
that he was talking on the mobile phone while driving over the flyover. There
were tweets that suggested all the above. First off the block can also mean way
off the mark! The only casualty here was accuracy. The twitterati are
accountable to no one. The mainstream media is accountable to readers, viewers,
regulatory bodies and the law of the land.
While the reliability of information in a breaking or evolving news
story may be an issue, we just cannot afford to brush aside the collective
intelligence of the social media. I’ve come across some of the wittiest
comments, the most novel ideas and great perspective on this platform. Not long
ago, when I was like a Ranji team skipper of a metro television channel,
calling the shots and playing my own innings; as opposed to a twelfth man
carrying drinks to the field in a national side (!) I had introduced a small
segment ‘Writing On The Wall’, exclusively on facebook wallposts and tweets.
The ratings were quite encouraging. An indication of the quality of content in
this space.
Good stuff spreads fast, with either ‘likes’ (yes, the demand for the
‘dislike’ button on facebook is still alive) or tweets being ‘favourited’ or
‘retweeted’.
A few years ago, a television channel had a show called ‘My News’, where
viewers played ‘News Editor’ by ranking stories of their choice. Today, there
are programmes based on what is ‘trending’ online. Why, there is even a show
called ‘Trending’! Not only has the social media crept into the media mindset,
it is now also an inevitable part of news jargon.
If at all there is any part of the mainstream media that must be feeling
the heat, it would be the news wires, which incidentally, are now hyperactive
on twitter.
Where the social media scores over the mainstream media is in
prioritising news. There is no ‘Republic Of South India’ here! No Delhi or
Mumbai centric slant. All regions are even Stevens. So on the day of the bus
accident, when national channels dropped live reports due to a Rehman
Malik press conference and went overboard with discussions on Pakistan and
Sania Mirza’s outburst, the only saving grace was facebook and twitter. Now you
know why I prefaced 'whipping post' with 'justifiable' ?
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