In conversation with Mid-day's The Bombay Film Story, actress Sonali Bendre spoke about her equation with media and how it changed post The Broken News
Sonali Bendre
Bollywood actress Sonali Bendre played the role of a news anchor in two seasons of the web series ‘The Broken News’. Playing the role has also changed her perception about the profession, especially entertainment journalist. Having been a star of the 90s and having dealt with the media of the time, the actress had a completely different opinion and understanding of entertainment journalists.
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Talking on Mid-day’s The Bombay Film Story, Sonali shared her equation with journalists. “From my point of view, most of the time I saw them as adversaries. They were always on your set and usually were catering to somebody on the set. Hence they were definitely not catering to me. It never served the purpose to put my point of view across or that I could have one. So I've had a very adversarial equation with the journalists.”
She further spoke about how she was treated during interviews and her way of dealing with them. “For the longest time, exactly 10 questions would be asked and nobody wanted to know anything beyond that. The 10 questions included ‘when did you start? How did you start? Who was your favorite actor? Which is your favorite color?’ They didn't even bother asking you if you were reading a book because they didn't think you were reading. So that was also not there. But in that situation, for the same magazine over a period of time I have given them randomly different answers. They've never caught it. And for me, that was the entertainment. But now I understand that's a passive-aggressive way of dealing with them," the 'Sarfarosh actress said.
However, after playing the role of a news anchor in 'The Broken News', her perception about the profession and what journalists have to go through changed. “But today, after doing Broken News, I really understand the kind of pressures that journalists go through. What is being read is what we need to provide. A rookie reporter probably will take a story to the editor who will say, 'yeh kya boring cheez hai, yeh affair kiske saath hai woh lao'. It will probably be thrown at them. So I understand that now and so there's a lot of respect," she said.