Why Can’t “Talking Heads” Stop Talking?

 

Why Can’t “Talking Heads” Stop Talking?

A stupid question, the title is. Why would a “Talking Head” insult their profession that mandates continuous talking? It might be gibberish, but still they are talking!

I like to read my news and not it being read to me. Hearing gibberish started out as a hobby for me, identifying it on TV news channels. My eyes and ears do not coordinate themselves quite so strongly.

 Some of the newsreaders on Indian channels overdo their, “I am not a stiff-upper-lip Brit...” act just a bit too much; if I were to concentrate more visually, I think I will see their tonsils! By the time they close their lips, the sound from them have reached the nearest star and have returned.

On the US based networks like MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, some of the presenters are wannabe Brits. Sounds from their mouths come out as staccato bytes. I am tuned to the slow drawl of the US south and my mind is not as flexible at 70 years old. So, I keep falling through cracks as I change channels, seeking variety.

Then, it became a little more serious. As I surf TV channels, I realized that I lose the chain of what the commentariat is saying. It appears to me that the interviewer is, along with their body language expressing nothing, use complex sentences as de rigueur. That could be OK, if only what is being queried about is a complex issue. It never is. Ill-composed complex sentences are there merely to make the host sound intelligent, yet the question remains unintelligible.

Shifting from the differences in the mechanism of production of sound in and by various readers/presenters, let me now turn to the content. The sentences are always long winded, grammatically complex, and when they are questions, the addressee is often left wondering where the question started and where it ended.  This appears OK with the addressees, who are the experts in anything they open their mouth about (domestic politics, geopolitics, sociology, law making and breaking, environment, climate, weather, sports...). They hardly hear the hosts’ questions, but out comes the answers, not pat but again long-winded; chasing a hit to the left field by the right fielder.   

The experts do not understand what the question is and the viewing public is left clueless as to what was said. It is even, all around. So far so good.

Twenty four hour news channels are the bane of civil society. I remember when my father, an anglophile he was, waited for the chimes on AIR News at 9:00 PM to reset his watch (a couple of times a week), and listen to the news. Just from hearing the well toned sounds from our valve radio, I improved, I think, my spoken English, including grammar. My vocabulary must have also expanded as my father forced me to go to the dictionary when I asked for the meaning of a word I heard.

 I also listened to, before I left for school, Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s tennis and cricket commentary. A possible benefit could have been my ability to translate information from words into images: a pull shot to square leg, be the batsman a left or a right hander, a right handed player sending a cross court forehand to the extreme back hand of the left handed receiver in tennis. Aces down the middle – no problem; a wide serve to the right handed player’s wide forehand in the deuce court. And, so on ...

TV commentators are in the same pile of shit as news readers. They feel compelled to fill up each frame with their voice with inanities spewing forth.

Only when “Talking Heads” give due credit to their listeners will they improve the quality of the news. If they treated their audience as dunce, there would be no chance of the presenters becoming intelligent. They would remain what they think their viewers are, dunces.

One way forward: force them to listen to their voices (no videos) every day of their performance the previous day. Doctors must operate on themselves.

Raghuram Ekambaram