BBC is a good place to turn to if you want news TV interpretation of death of icons. It’s not just that sombreness with a measure of sophistication comes so naturally to Beeb’s anchors. It’s also Beeb’s sense of news history. How extravagantly talented Michael Jackson was, what a tangle his life was and where does he figure in the cultural iconography of our times — news TV is not the best medium to extract the complexities these questions pose but BBC is probably the best bet of all news TV choices, including other non-Indian broadcasters we are familiar with. BBC’s Jackson montage, to take a small example, was better by a considerable margin than everything else I saw. If Jackson the artist and the man enthralled and intrigued you, you may want to do what I did, bookmark the Jackson montage video from Beeb’s web site.

On news TV before Jackson, and from the home front, I have four curious cases to report.

1. The curious case of a good discussion not driven by the anchor: On Times Now’s pre-budget chat, the panelists, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Rahul Bajaj and Swaminathan Aiyar talked among themselves and produced that news TV rarity, especially when economic policy is discussed: points you can take away and mull over. The show’s anchoring was marked by (a) long periods of silence and (b) questions that frequently bore a loose relationship to the panelists’ interventions.

2. The curioser case of a good discussion driven by anchors: I don’t know about you but my expectations in terms of quality discussions are especially low as far as news bulletins go. But the double anchor team on CNN-IBN’s Thursday evening news show did a good job of quizzing Kapil Sibal on his plans for education. Almost every question demanded a substantive answer. Example: isn’t the Xth standard board exam crucial for rural children who want to switch to vocational courses?

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