The Barkha Dutt Interview: 'People say news has become tamasha but don't stop watching it'
Akash Banerjee · for Scroll.in 17-08-2015· 09:15 am
Her designation may have changed to Consulting Editor at NDTV, but Barkha Dutt is as feisty and news hungry as ever. Soon after being nominated for the prestigious Emmy Awards for an episode of The Buck Stops Here, she sat down to talk about her 20 years in journalism, the digital future she’s charting, her most painful professional moments, the social media rumours that refuse to die down and how she’s outgrown trolls, backbiting and vicious slander.
AB: For 20 years you have seen and reported amidst a changing media landscape. While growth has now become stagnant in the media, respectability is at an all-time low. What ails the media?
BD: When we started out, our job was to tell good stories, be the bridge where the viewer can’t be, tsunami or Kargil, for example. Our job was also to speak up on issues that others were too uncomfortable to speak on, to speak up for marginalised, to speak up for gay rights, to speak up against discrimination and on corruption.
Of these, the media has done a sterling job to speak out against corruption, but on the rest we have become too elitist. We are all stuck in the ratings game and only want to do things that will “sell” to “our” audience. So if “our” audience doesn’t want to see a story on malnutrition, we usually wouldn’t show it. The content would be urban and include what I call, the “dialectics of artificial confrontation on television”.
News is tamasha and what really bothers me is that people criticise it, but still watch it. People like to watch tamasha.
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Mumbai Press Club
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Article posted on 17/08/2015
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