Television and Representation
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: September 26 2015 -

Despite the availability of more avenues for representation today, at least theoretically, with the advent of multiple television channels, the Northeast has remained on the “periphery of news and entertainment discourse”.

Media scholars have observed that despite efforts to cover the Northeast differently from how the government owned national television did earlier, many of the new channels still fall prey to stereotypical representations of the region.

Given the quest for the exotic or the unseen in the ever-expanding television networks, unending bandhs, strikes, bomb blasts, political and ethnic unrest find pride of place in the headlines of prime time news programmes.

It is not just the difficulties and inadequacies of television to deliver what is considered “news” that constitutes the problem.

The reasons behind the indifference to the region could be the perception that it does not constitute a numerically large audience and sometimes not an audience at all for the Target Rating Points or TRP obsessed channels.

The contribution of the public service television supported by the state is no better.

Instead of salvaging the situation, Doordarshan (DD) seems to have been caught in a kind of time warp burdened with the agenda of national integration and state control.

Since the inauguration of a centre by the state controlled DD at Guwahati in 1985 and subsequent expansion post-1990s, there are now a dozen programme production centres of DD in the Northeast.

Studios have been established in almost all the capital cities of the region with additional centres at some district headquarters.

It is even more perplexing to understand how the state controlled broadcasters get the idea of programming that would be of interest to all the people in the Northeast with the multifarious ethnic communities and their own predominant socio-cultural moorings amidst the variegated political turmoil.

The purported aim of these programmes is promoting and nurturing local talents and projecting arts, music and literary culture of the region.

In trying to do these, most of these programmes end up exoticising cultures and placing them out of economic, social and political context, that too in a format and quality that can hardly match the ones attempted by private owned satellite television channels.

The news broadcast by DD is even more constrained by the fact that the content is mostly shaped by government sources committed to the dominant ideology of the majority propagated by the nation-state.

This convention has resulted in news bulletins, even if they are read in various ethnic languages in the conflict ridden Northeast, shaped only by the state’s understanding and approach to “insurgency” and “backwardness”.