Rajpal's Column

26th July 1998

What's news? a coming out party? or CNN bulletins?

By Rajpal Abeynayake

It is difficult not to be intrigued by news that says a couple plan to give birth live on the Internet. That's supposed to have happened recently – and now another twosome want to lose their virginity/virginitys on the net as well.

So what is the event going to be called? A coming out party? Eye opener? Its not earthshaking to us peripheral creatures who essentially still think that Internet is something that is out there for the deviant.

But for a person who was complaining that there are twenty nine channels on television and nothing to see (me, a couple of weeks back in this column) the developments on Internet bring some mixed feelings to bear on the matter of what news is all about.

News has certainly evolved. It has gone from being hard news and development news (a girl meets tractor in Kebbilithigollawa) to being Infotainment, which has meant that television channels particularly are purveying a great deal of glamour and hype with what used to be called hard news.

Nothing particularly wrong with that, except that this means it is essentially becoming more difficult for those who convey the news to be faithful to the truth.

Infotainment is also a phenomenon or a by -product of globalisation which means that "fun news'' comes to us generally from CNN, BBC etc., which are all international channels.

The Gulf War, for example, was one of the first events that was beamed via CNN in this country, at least if I remember right. That was Infotainment that definitely was explosive, scud missiles murdering mullah scares and all.

Then, CNN gradually sunk in, and the channel like the television set itself became a part of the furniture (Well, almost) The novelty of Infotainment almost incrementally decreased after the Gulf War, it seemed.

This is of course barring the occasional excesses like the melodramatic infotainment orgy of the Diana funeral for example.

But, CNN BBC, and all channels which copy their styles over here, appeared with each day (at least to me) to be attempting to convince the viewers that there is after all something to get excited about in the news, only if you look at it excitedly.

When Veronica Petrosa raises her voice by a decibel, you are supposed to slide to the edge of your chair. But, in real life things do not happen that way at all.

Increase of the decibel levels by the TV anchor/announcer, now usually is accompanied by the reflex action of changing the channel or decreasing the volume.

Or at best, imagining tongue-in-cheek what the next bit of hyperbole is going to be all about.

In this context and backdrop at least, what would normally be repugnant news, that live births are going to be shown on the Internet, would become interesting in a fundamental intellectual sense.

Its not merely a question of jaded sensibilities of a viewer who has had a surfeit of Infotainment. It is more a question of what shape 'news' is going to take in the future.

If you subscribe to the view that people are more important than events (though that sounds an oversimplified position) , then perhaps it is worth getting excited about the new phenomenon that is unfolding on the net.

What's happening on the net is hopefully the beginning of a transition of news from what is event centered and exaggerated, to news that is about real people and real situations which therefore does not have to be artificially elevated to dramatic pathos.

A photographer (Cartier Bresson he wasn't) did a series, I think for LIFE entitled the 'Private life of a Yorkshire woman,' or a woman from some private part, no pun intended, of England.

His series of pictures had stills of the woman bleeding from the nose, mouthing "some of the choicest southern expletives"" because apparently the woman regularly bleeds from the nose in the morning.

The photographs were a hit, probably because more people had empathy with this woman than they would have had with Yasser Arafat trying to make peace with one Nethanyahu on a brutal Tuesday morning.

Losing virginity and giving birth on the web may be the most basic and base forms of getting away from the Infotainment trap. But, if its a start, it may herald a change in the way in which mankind perceives news, and what affects its daily existence.

If private lives and private happenings (say a stormy relationship between a father and a college going kid) would replace the news, on a regular daily basis, perhaps there will be a real bridge between information (what people really want to know about real life) and what people want to enjoy (entertainment).

If anybody wants to watch news, then, there will be a neglected relegated channel called CNN for specialists in international affairs.

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