Last week, when national newsrooms in the country furiously cornered the Leftist students from JNU who allegedly indulged in an anti-India sloganeering in the campus, regional news broadcasters from Kerala – the land of foremost Left ideology, took no initiative to deliberate any discussion on the issue.
A bunch of JNU Left union members allegedly exhorted incendiary slogans in the campus last week on the eve of Afzal Guru’s execution anniversary. While the national television called out at the students to ‘expose’ their anti-national sentiments, Kerala media was still busy with Oommen Chandy, Saritha and P Jayarajan.
Newsrooms in Kerala are currently entwined in ‘popular’ scam-related discussions in the hope of retaining a large chunk of viewers in front of their television panels for longer time periods.
Be it to condone or castigate acts such as the one in JNU, experts in the field of media and communication say that the Kerala media has apparently de-prioritized its commitments.
“The JNU-issue has largely been obliterated in the Kerala media, not particularly because of their lack of interest in it, but because the absence of a ‘scandal’ angle in it makes it unattractive for them to give it a central place,” said T T Sreekumar, writer and professor, Communication department of Institute of Strategic Marketing and Communication, Ahmedabad.
When speaking about the veracity-cum-originality of the claims spewed out by newsroom panellists on the television, credibility of these people, who are often labelled as ‘ Left think tank’ or ‘political pundits’, need to be questioned.
Prominent features of these newsroom panellists — who would normally belong to either the UDF or the LDF camps — could be attributed as “mostly male, violent and dismissive of other perspectives”.
“The fact that these people are unable to find common grey areas of democratic engagement is providing Sangh parivar new space of visibility and unprecedented rhetorical advantages,” Sreekumar went on to say.
Finally, when Malayalam new media decided to conduct panel debates on the JNU incident, Hindu hardliner Rahul Easwar was seen giving an extempore on one of the television news channels.
In the debate, he tried to explain how unbecoming it was of the JNU Leftists to sloganeer against the country that provided them subsidised education in the university. While it is unfair to say that Easwar failed to convey popular sentiments against the incident, it was just a Malayalam translation of what Times Now’s editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami said last week while he grilled the JNU union leaders. The arguments of Easwar were devoid of original observations.
