The Arnab Goswami Juggernaut

It’s something like the old soap ‘Bold and the Beautiful’ that many mocked but all secretly watched. The glitterati couldn’t be caught alive at a party without having seen the previous night’s dose, lest they lost the nuances of the coming divorce on Beverley Hills. Arnab Goswami’s ‘News Hour’ is a similar kind of phenomenon. Among some of the English-speaking news junkies he is hated and reviled. Some threaten to slap him. But for a majority of the middle class, he is their evening drawing room appointment; a celebrity, an iconic newsman.

If eyeballs are the voting mode, Arnab Goswami is Narendra Modi. Times Now, the channel, and ‘News Hour’ his show is miles ahead of all others; and he has managed to maintain the lead for a staggering 7 years. We took the October 2015 to April 2016 period, and found Times Now had an audience share of 34 per cent of the English news universe, compared to its nearest rival India Today Television’s 15 per cent. What props up this large shareholding was Arnab’s own show — ‘News Hour’ — that held 53 per cent of audience share in the 9 PM to 11 PM slot compared to closest competitor India Today’s 14 per cent (BARC India ratings data).

Now see what happens when Arnab goes on a holiday. TV audience meter BARC Ratings zeroed down on two days last year where the anchor was off News Hour. On 23 September, viewership for Times Now plummeted 37 per cent; on 1 October, the channel lost 33 per cent.

With eyeballs comes ad revenue, and with 60-65 per cent of Times Now’s advertising bucks coming from News Hour, it is difficult for Arnab to take a holiday. Word has it when the news anchor was tending to his unwell father in Guwahati, he worked out of a borrowed studio in the city.

It is all about the format and the line. When vanilla news became monotonous, he brought the talk show format, dissecting and shredding news, to the fore. It is a hit because it is not goody-goody; it is raucous, strident and even hysterical. There’s always that one squirming politician on the show who is being skewered. Millions would want to do it themselves; but it is almost as good watching Goswami do it for them. Other channels have attempted to come in too, but have never been able to covert the format as well as he does. Perhaps, something learnt from Fox TV. Neutrality is boring. It is all about deciding on a clear line in advance and hammering it in with a loud voice, threats and gestures through the show.

The CEO of TV audience tracker BARC, Partho Dasgupta makes an interesting point. For English News channels the breaking news format is passé; all those smart guys with smart phones have their news alerts coming in every 5 seconds. Hindi channels still live on ‘breaking news’ but not the English ones. So what better than having someone being skinned every day!

So are we moving towards television being dominated by what NDTV’s Prannoy Roy calls ‘tabloidisation’ of news? Where viewers are left with no choice and have to search the net for alternatives.

Roasting the scamster or the politician taking foreign junkets on taxpayer money is laudable. But is it only whipping and skewering that will make up TV content? Is there no room for reporting and analysis? And will the favourite whipping boy going to continue to be Gandhi Junior, and the Congress? After all they lost power 2 years ago and now there are a new set of people at the helm. How do spurious and dangerous videos like the Kanhaiya one find their way on air? And how long should we play with jingoism by swatting two blabbering retired Pakistani generals across the border?

Indeed, along with the eyeballs comes the disquiet and the questions that all good journalists like Arnab must answer.