Why is English news so bad on Indian TV channels?

Photo by Amanna Avena on Unsplash

 Anyone with a half bad command of the English language would know that what passes on as English news on Indian TV channels is English only in the opinion of the people who mouth the gibberish that issues from their mouths. They might as well be speaking Hindi, Tamil, Punjabi or whatever their mother tongue is. Don’t get me wrong here. All of our Indian languages are amazingly beautiful and boast the most incredibly rich and diverse literature of any language in the world, but so does English and you have got to respect that or the flavour of the language does not come across. Don’t we make fun of foreigners when they speak our languages in a funny manner?

I object to the fact that the news readers and anchors who deliver the news on our TV channels don’t know how the language is to be used. Not a single one of them. Even the most exalted ones can’t pronounce Europe right and pronounce it the same way that one says rope. Israel is pronounced as Israeel and with so much conceited confidence as if they are the font of all wisdom in the world. Instead of speaking softly in a low-pitched and polite voice, they screech, harangue, hector and sermonize with messianic zeal. Like they are on to something, even though they come across as crass dolts.

There was a time when TV news in India in English sounded like English. News readers like Tejaswar Singh, Neethi Ravindran, Geetanjali Iyer, and Sunit Tandon read the news without fuss and without murdering the English language. News readers, news anchors or performers call them what you will have no business reading the English news if they don’t have a clue about the words they spout.

It is sad that many of the owners of such channels who are so erudite themselves, don’t seem to care about quality going down the drain, as long as they can line their pockets. It is a case of the blind leading the blind (no offence meant to the visually impaired-am using only an old English idiom) and nobody really being bothered about the impact it will have on the viewers, especially those of an impressionable age.

This encouragement of mediocrity, where everyone imagines that they are extraordinarily good, when they are plain incompetent and ignorant will not lead us to be the world leader that we aspire to be.

A good command of the English language has always been a quality that many Indians have possessed since a very long time ago indeed. They have brought great glory to the nation in that many Indian writers are counted amongst the best in the world. It is also a fact that most of our countrymen know the language only partially and could always look for some improvement. English is after all a foreign language, even though it has been around for a couple of centuries now.

My point is that you cannot have people speak and write an English language that they have themselves manufactured. Imagine, if you were taught the kind of pidgin English that many of us speak due to a lack of the right kind of exposure, in our schools and colleges. That would be disastrous, right? So, how can they be allowed to have such horrible English spoken on Indian TV channels, by people who are supposed to be anchors and news readers? Just look at the English language channels of non-English speaking countries like France and Germany and you will understand what I mean.

This malaise of mutilating a language to suit the pathetic language skills of low-quality English news readers and anchors is thankfully confined to the electronic media. Print media for now continues to provide us news in correct English. That’s the last bastion standing.