Rendezvous With Rajdeep Sardesai

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Rendezvous With Rajdeep Sardesai - Part 2

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Raghu Nath 14 Feb 2010

With minutes after meeting Rajdeep, invariably the question on top of my mind was his famous communication on Twitter about Kings XI Punjab being bought out by Hero Honda. I discovered that he has no discomfort on the issue and clearly, his effervescence gave me the courage to plunge headlong into this topic!

Here are the excerpts from my interaction with Rajdeep:

Raghu: Your tweet on KXI being sold to Hero Honda caused a flutter. It is amazing how media people pick information and how people react to it if it turns out to be false.

Rajdeep: Oh my! One information I sent out and I received hundreds of abusive mails. Even @realprietyzonta, a person I have never met in my life, took me to task for having sent that communication out.

Raghu: To add to that you have people like me – in order to give credit to you for “breaking news”, I posted it on the Royal Challengers site with a screenshot of your tweet. But I was quick enough to take it off and modify my post when I started seeing the denials.

Rajdeep: Twitter has now become the primary medium and platform for communication. Everybody is on it, I am on it whenever I get time or whenever I need to communicate something I strongly feel about or something special! And it is so easy to spread the information, it sometimes works to our advantage and sometimes to our disadvantage.

Raghu: But how do you get this kind of information and how do you ascertain the reliability of the information. Is this due to the syndrome of “me first” among the channels and the TRP race that drives the channels to do this?

Rajdeep: Well, we are in the information industry and being media people, we would have our sources of getting info. I do not say they are always reliable, but we do get half truths that we try to make sense of. In this case too, it is one of those half truths. These are half truths that can't be and don't need to be verified. Depending on who you are, and where you belong to, you either believe it or reject it.

( I have to take a deep sigh, decide who I am and where I belong to, for he has made a significant statement! Meanwhile, he says a few more things and I decide to not probe further.).

Rajdeep: I have received a number of calls from a number of people after I sent out the tweet. Its amazing what I hear from them!

Our industry is like that. It is a very competitive situation, we need to act on what we hear. Even on social issues like suicides, crime, corruption, etc. – we have to create the hype to make people watch and listen. The industry is like that or we are dead. Channel wars are real and we have to be on our toes all the time to survive. It is a tough situation.
Many tell us that some of the stories we air are harmful to the minds of viewers. If media research agencies like TAM can tell us the correlation between TRPs and the stories we broadcast and prove such “theories”, we can look into it. But we do believe in being honest, our role is to present information and not create information.

TO BE CONTINUED ....

Disclaimer: This article has been written and presented by the author based on information collected by him on his own initiative and Royal Challengers Bangalore is neither liable nor takes responsibility for the accuracy or otherwise of the contents of this article.