Heaven knows there are plenty of things wrong in Bharat that was India as it turns its head towards the “ramparts of the Red Fort” one more time. But if there’s one institution that needs urgent fixing in the name of the nation this Independence Day, it is news television. A dead dodo that used to faithfully live up to the nickname ‘idiot box’ in the hands of state-owned DD, it is now a raging free-market bull, rampaging across the republic and insulting the intelligence of decent citizens in all 15 scheduled languages and some more. And now, after having denuded it of all sanity, sobriety, balance, substance, nuance, restraint and responsibility, TV’s blowhards—whose disproportionate stardom has led them to the delusion that the solar system revolves around their rants, tweets and open letters—are now at each other’s throats, terrorising each other from the first refuge of every swami and Goswami: hyper-nationalism. Marshall McLuhan was right: the medium is the message.