When Press Council of India chief, retired Supreme Court judge Markandey Katju, in his controversial interview said that Roman emperors used to often say ‘If you cannot give the people bread, give them circuses,’ it set me thinking about TV news.

Do we really require 24-hour news channels? That too nearly 120 of them, spewing the same breaking news from dawn to dusk. Time was when all the national and international news could be summed up in prime time news bulletins. The world cannot have changed so much in the last 15 years that the quantum of really important news has suddenly multiplied a zillion times that we now require minute-by-minute coverage to get through it. Just keep switching on the TV at different times of the day and you’ll find that a lead news item that breaks in the morning usually keeps getting repeated right into the afternoon and sometimes well into the evening.

So why in heaven’s name can’t it be broadcast just once or twice or thrice a day? What’s the point in endlessly running it? Let’s take this Tuesday, November 8. It started with a headline at around 9 am about the impending meeting of Trinamool Congress MPs with the prime minister about the petrol price hike. In the afternoon, some channels started speculating on whether Mamata Banerjee would withdraw support if the PM refused to rollback prices. At around 7.30 pm, the anti-climax was reported as ‘breaking news’ — the PM had given no assurances but the TMC had not withdrawn support. Predictably at prime time all the panel discussions tried to valiantly stoke the by now redundant debate about Mamata’s course of action the next time fuel prices are hiked and the financial package the Bengal CM may have negotiated as the price for her continuing support.

The question is would it have made an iota of difference to you and me, if we got to know about all this late in the evening, instead of in three acts? The answer is certainly not. So much for the day’s most important news. Something more newsworthy did happen later in the day — the stampede at Haridwar that resulted in 16 deaths. But to be brutally honest, to most of us it wasn’t earth shattering enough to want to switch on the TV immediately, was it?

Because it’s not as if we crave news all the time. It’s not as if we are all the while actively looking forward to hearing about disaster striking or accidents happening or terrorists attacking or tragedies occurring or interminable updates on scam stories. Most of us, most of the time are quite unbothered as long as things are fine in our immediate surroundings, or city or country and have no direct impact on us personally. As a rule, human beings do not like to be burdened with ball-by-ball coverage of all that is going wrong with the world every minute. We have enough bad news to contend with in our own lives.

So what then is the rationale behind 24-hour news channels? Isn’t it just a colossal waste of time and effort collecting and broadcasting information that adds very little value to most people? Isn’t it a huge overdose of that element that human beings require only in small quantities? People need news to gain a perspective of what’s happening around them— some of it as information on current affairs, some of it just to shake off the dullness of being, some of it to react with interest or emotion including a wee bit of schadenfreude.

Wait a minute. Or is it that I am completely missing the point beguiled by the nomenclature? Maybe the truth is that 24-hour news channels are nothing but entertainment packaged as television journalism. Like proxy advertising — soda or mineral water instead of liquor. That would explain a lot — propaganda style reporting, sensational shows, gladiatorial panel discussions, adrenalin pumping hyperbole, distortion of facts, etc, etc.

Even so, does anyone really want to watch pedestrian news all the time — even if it’s sexed up to pornographic proportions? The fact that only two of the listed TV news companies made profits last year is a telling indicator. But that was before Team Anna’s show started.

May be Justice Katju should have gone a step further and said that 24x7 news is news of the morons, by the morons for the morons!

Salil Desai is Pune-based author and film-maker