Rajdeep Sardesai

`TV is being asked to play God but is seen as the sinner’

Barkha Dutt:

`Channels the public hate the most are the ones watched the most. How so?’

•Seema Chishti: There's a kind of anonymous journalist, the quiet scribe, deified by the Economist. On TV news you now have a very visible journalist. What are the advantages of the medium?

Barkha Dutt: There's an assumption made about TV that there's a deliberate end to anonymity. But the nature of the medium is real time and so there's much more intimacy with someone you see on TV. The person is a kind of filter between what's going on and the viewer. It’s unfair to suggest that people are in TV to create personas of themselves. No one enters with a deliberate strategy saying, I'm going to be bigger than the story. But we do bring our personalities into our reporting. That’s as true for print as it is for TV. So the assumption that TV is about the person and not the issue is a false accusation. The intimacy TV brings can be disadvantageous because it brings with it much more scrutiny of the claustrophobic kind. Things get magnified and amplified on TV in ways that the person speaking does not intend.

Rajdeep Sardesai: There are strengths and constraints of a 24-hour format. TV can create a very personal connection between the reporter and the viewer. But there is a danger -- and it can't be minimized -- that at times the reporter becomes the story. We have to guard against that. Many years ago the venerable BBC broadcaster Robin Day said, TV is a tabloid medium at its best when there's war, disaster, etc. Possibly because the dramatic image speaks. TV is at its most powerful when there is that dramatic image.

... contd.