How TV channels covered Manmohan Singh’s Press Conference

Sunil Saxena

10 years ago

The live Press Conference by Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, on January 3 had the Indian media in thrall. Expectedly, every news channel went live, competing for more eyeballs.

The channels sectioned their screens to run captions and comments. A few even asked their viewers to rate the speech and tweet questions that would be answered later by their star anchors.

The dominant window was reserved for the live feed from the Press Conference venue. The rest of the screen was sectioned to highlight the Prime Minister’s answers.

# Question to TV channels

A question that came to mind while watching the live telecast was:

How do TV channels expect the viewers to read the captions without missing out what the PM is saying?

Remember, this was a live telecast. The viewer could have done only one thing:

a. Listen to what the Prime Minister was saying;
b. Read the captions that highlighted the answers being given by him.

Interestingly, the English channels packed their screens with more information. The Hindi TV channels had cleaner screens, and were relatively easier to follow.

The government broadcaster Doordarshan and Rajya Sabha TV ran captions in Hindi and English. The other channels limited their captions to Hindi or English.

# Screenshots of 12 television channels

Here are screenshots of how 12 television channels covered the Prime Minister’s Press Conference. You can decide which channel would have been easiest to follow.

The screenshots are arranged in the order of least cluttered to most cluttered.

Aaj Tak