Breaking bread with bloodhounds.....the PM's breakfast with editors

I watched the Prime Minister's 'breakfast meeting' with 'senior' editors today on TV ( echoes of the Agra Summit, and Musharraf infamous breakfast meeting with editors, ofcourse, crossed my mind...)

Ordinarily, put any Prime Minister in a one-to-one interview with a journalist, and 99 times out of 100 he would come out well, because the journalist would be overawed, and would feel obliged, and also because on any given day, a Prime Minister generally has more information than a journo. And, it is not too difficult to "negotiate", and get to know the questions beforehand, and be prepared beforehand. Even some one as argumentative as David Frost was putty in Nixon hands, if one sees the documentary "Frost/Nixon".

But when a Prime Minister takes on two dozen editors, and that too, on live TV, group dynamics take over: they have to demonstrate to each other, and to the world, how leonine each one is, and how "independent" they are, and so, they proceed to outdo each other in aggression. After all, they have nothing to lose: all the suppressed anger at the humiliation each one get from his or her proprietor can be safely channeled and let out, in a heroic amount of indignation and independence. The Prime Minister (atleast not this one) is not going to order raids on their paper or channel, or cut off advertising.

That's what happened today: the Prime Minister was interrogated, and came off apologetic, eager to please, defensive, in front of a group of journalists who skewered him. Apart from the format of the interaction, the second problem, which anybody who is familiar with TV knows, is what kind of TV persona the subject has. Since the PM is not Ronald Reagan, with quick repartees, or Obama, with his made-for-TV eloquence, or even combative, the PR set-up, headed by Information Adviser, Harish Khare, should not gone in the first place for a televised event of this kind at all, in the first place.

But then, Harish Khare has been a press journalist, and after today's performance, it is clear that a newspaper journalist has no business to be Information Adviser in today's TV age. If Prime Ministers before had HK Dua or Baru or Ashok Tandon, it was because TV had still not achieved the kind of prominence it does today.

If the whole idea was to project the message that the Prime Minister and the government are in control, and to tell the government's side of the story, it did not work: it seemed at times that all the editors out there had come off straight from the daily 3 pm BJP briefing to grill the Prime Minister.

Not even Doordarshan was on the PM's side, with its  "senior" editor asking a question on, what else, corruption. Neelam Sharma is a TV presenter, with no reporting experience, and I wonder whose idea it was to send her to the "breakfast' meeting. A big number of anchors and presenters on DD News are still selected with zero journalism experience, with their looks being paramount, in the old-fashioned way, and boy, did it show....

All in all, a worthy successor to Musharraf's breakfast meeting.......

The Usual Platitudes at PM's Presser

As I blog this, a rare event is on: the Prime Minister's Press Conference. After 4 years, the PM has deigned to have a press conference in the Capital. This seems to be part of the strategy of all prime ministers: namely, not have detailed interactions with the press, and confine themselves to brief off-the-cuff remarks at impromptu occasions created by Investiture ceremonies, on-board occasions on the Prime Ministerial plane, or Iftar parties. This is so different from how it works in other democracies: Obama exposes himself to the White House Press Corps on a almost weekly basis, and so do the British leaders.

Anyhow, tough questions were asked, to which the usual platitudes were trotted out. Since our newspersons do not hunt in packs, there were no follow-up questions asked to those platitudes. Of course nobody is allowed to ask a second question, but the follow-up could have come from someone else. Alas, we let the PM off the hook despite the puerile replies.

It was tough watching the live telecast: between failure of the live feed from Vigyan Bhavan, to power failures of the local cable operators, interruption of the viewing was the order of the day.Guess some heads will roll in DD in the coming days. 

Not surprisingly, the tough question came from the rude and combative Sunil Prabhu, a virtual "rowdy" in Tamil style: "Are you going to step down later in the term, and allow Rahul Gandhi to become the PM?" 

As anyone who has been a part of the Delhi press corps knows, there is no louder voice than the Sunil Prabhu foghorn. I've seen entire pressers being hijacked by him. The PM, to his credit, gave a shy smile, and said , I'm always willing to do whatever the party wants...

Though the PM started off looking slow and rusty, he improved as the presser went on. That makes a case for more frequent interactions. That would also make the pressers easier, as the press would find a more regular vent for their questions, than compress it for years, and then open a sudden valve like this...

One  surprising thing was his discomfort with Hindi. Even to questions in Hindi, he answered in English. Surprising because this was not a Tamil-bound Azhagiri, but a Punjabi settled in Delhi for many a decade.