Political debates : The Farce of 24x7 News Channels

My favorite time pass in this election season is watching all 24x7 news channels. In particular debates. They are as much sensational as they are humorous. All of them have some common preys for their sensational journalism . BJP and its relatively less eloquent speakers are those preys.

There are some very common things in most of the political debates organised by these 24x7 news channels. The participant from BJP will be less eloquent compared to the opposition . Usually the preys will be Prakash Javdekar,Balbir Punj or some one of that caliber and the opposition will be Kapil Sipal or Jeyanthi Natarajan.Not surprisingly most of the audience will be from the same school of thought. I need not tell you which school of thought. Some times their cohesiveness will make you think that whether they are hand picked.

You can sense the bias of the atmosphere from the very beginning. Kapil Sipal will crack some jokes and the audience will start to laugh. The camera will be focussed on youth showing all their teeth. Some of the youth will shout louder that "We are no more hindus, we are indians and we hate communalism", how ever the topic of the debate will not at all be relevant to this comment . After some time you will get a feeling of watching a typical south indian masala movie where hero thrashes villain at every encounter. What ever may be the points raised by our preys and no matter how valid they are , they have one single answer "You and your party is communal".

Highlight of all these mockeries is a fact that today's debate will be tomorrow's headline. Take CNN-IBN's debate on "As Indian as a Gandhi: Sonia, foreigner no more?" and one of their head lines for next day is "Sonia files nomination, foreign origin non-issue now". They will rise a issue , they will debate on it and they will declare it as a non issue on the very next day. Very funny, isn't it?. One may think that I'm picking on some little aberrations , but watch regularly and you will find that this is what they are doing 24x7. Now you may ask "then why the hell you are watching this?". I've this peculiar habit of watching pre planned things. I watch WWE also, knowing that its a drama. There is some thrill in it. But there is a large diffenence between both. Incase of WWE both players receive for the sake of drama where as in our 24x7 debates the blows are unidirectional.