Barking news

India’s television news is in meltdown. Channels are fighting among themselves.

- BARKHA DUTT

The relationship between television hosts is as volatile as that between India and Pakistan. And the audience is sniggering at the circus, where the media itself has become the main entertainer. I joked the other day to the razor-sharp stand-up comedian Anuvab Pal that his job was in danger. Prime time anchors, I warned him, might be funnier than he is—and without even intending to be.

Then I amended my words. The difference, I said, self-correcting, is that the news hosts are both funny and dangerous, whereas satirists were benign, if occasionally acerbic.