hard and soft news: kalimpong
Some time back when Maninder Pal Singh Kohli,prime suspect in the Hannah Foster rape/murder case, was arrested in this rather somnolent little town I met some young reporters who had charged upto Kalimpong along with their huge antenna sprouting, satellite connected vehicles. And during my discourse with them I learnt that there were such things as "hard" and "soft" news. Soft news was a totally forgettable report on a bookfair somewhere and hard news was what jerked you out of bed and made you switch on the TV.
So Kohli was "hard news", an international criminal hiding behind the skirts of an innocent young woman whom he managed to beguile and marry in a small & otherwise unheard of town and hard news was the annual flooding which ravaged the north east with predictable regularity. In other words hard news is sensational and it sells.
But in their obsession for what sells, it is deplorable that the metro-centric media more often than not finds nothing else worth reporting in the north-east than the Kohlis or the insurgency or now Manipur.
I had written in the Outlook magazine (22Dec2003 issue) that unless the Centre, the Ambanis and the media give more attention to the North East, the sense of alienation which these states already feel will turn to open hostility. So while watching the hard news boiling out of Manipur and so many other North Eastern states and hearing that Indian goods are being boycotted there, I feel a grim sense of foreboding that perhaps my prediction is becoming a reality too soon.
So Kohli was "hard news", an international criminal hiding behind the skirts of an innocent young woman whom he managed to beguile and marry in a small & otherwise unheard of town and hard news was the annual flooding which ravaged the north east with predictable regularity. In other words hard news is sensational and it sells.
But in their obsession for what sells, it is deplorable that the metro-centric media more often than not finds nothing else worth reporting in the north-east than the Kohlis or the insurgency or now Manipur.
I had written in the Outlook magazine (22Dec2003 issue) that unless the Centre, the Ambanis and the media give more attention to the North East, the sense of alienation which these states already feel will turn to open hostility. So while watching the hard news boiling out of Manipur and so many other North Eastern states and hearing that Indian goods are being boycotted there, I feel a grim sense of foreboding that perhaps my prediction is becoming a reality too soon.
posted by praful at 5:12 AM
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