Allaying Fears

I am always intrigued by the jargon used by our journalist fraternity. 25 feared killed in landslide. Disaster strikes Maryland. Town heaves sigh of relief as tornado passes it by. Government allays fears about the H1N1 epidemic.

These are a small sample of headlines going about the 'newsy' rooms and on to the printed pages. What if they got really daring, and started to become bold (if not beautiful) and report what they truly felt, minus the jargon? We might see something like these reports-

He claimed a lot of things, but the audience knew it was hocus-pocus.

The news reporters in the press conference were clueless, and ill-prepared to ask intelligent questions, including this reporter.

The speech did not make any sense, but the audience clapped anyway.

There was no news to report on our beat, so we made up some.

The same old parade- looked more like a charade.

The roads had the same number of potholes as yesterday. So we did not bother to go out today.

It rained incessantly, so we let the TV channels go out there to report the 'reality' while writing our stories by watching them, sipping some hot tea with samosas in the office.