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Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Trapped child is channel's darling!

The wife says, “Why this big fuss about a child trapped in a borewell for forty-nine hours? Why this twenty-four hour coverage on television and newspapers when children are begging on the streets, working non-stop in virtual imprisonment?”


I scratch my head and turn back to those screaming headlines. “May be because his name is Prince, may be, he is related to some big shot. May be that day the channel didn’t have anything better to show. So they were caught up in a race to show more and more about a trivial affair that should have found a mention on the back page of some daily,” I mumble. I don’t have an answer.


All the above reasons are plausible. News channels are known to exploit feats by children. Sometime back I had written about a channel’s obsessive coverage of a child who liked to drink every evening in front of his obliging parents.


And today the answer stares me right in the face in newspaper headlines. Seems the bookies had bet Rs 150 crores ( Rs 1500 million) on whether the child would survive or not. So that was the reason. Money was involved, lots of it, and big money! I read news like this and grow more and more cynical.
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yikes, the wager gives it a nasty turn.

I suppose another difference is that once the child is pulled out, the child stays out of the hole but children in situation poverty may fall in and out regularly over the next decade or so, assuming you can pull them out at all.

Unknown said...

Hi Pearl,

Rightly said! What is disgusting is that the channels can devote time, equipment, personnel to a story that could have been given a few minutes of exposure.

They went into the overkill since they had sent all their costly stuff over there.

Print media reporting is better any day in these circumstances! But I could be wrong!

J

J