By
Randeep
Wadehra
Recent coverage of certain incidents and events impel us to
ponder over our media’s intended role in the evolving milieu. This is
especially true of television news channels, where views are churned out almost
simultaneously with retailing of news. There is hardly any attempt at sifting
grain from chaff. Consequently, more often than not, grain is discarded and
chaff served. It has happened in Sarabjit’s case, too. The news TV went hammer
and tongs after Pakistani panelists whenever the latter tried to point out that
Sarabjit was a convict in the eyes of Pakistani judiciary. We were prepared to
accept the Indian government’s tepid explanation that Sarabjit had mistakenly
crossed over to the Pakistani side while returning home from fields in an
inebriated condition. Did our talk show anchors even pause and ponder over this
excuse? Sarabjit’s murder was certainly unjustified and our media rightly
denounced it as a case of human rights violation. However, the manner in which
some of our anchors behaved with Pakistani panelists on the Sarabjit issue was
undesirable. They were not the ones who had perpetrated the fatal attack. The
Pakistani guests had every right to defend what they thought was the incident’s
correct version. High decibel condemnation cannot be a credible alternative to
truth. For example, in the Times Now debate, the Pakistanis were supposed to
accept mere allegations as proof; not that their conduct was exemplary. Moreover, when Sanaullah Ranjay was fatally
attacked in the Jammu jail, the sense of outrage of our media and human rights
wallas became conspicuously somnolent – barring the NDTV. Shouldn’t there be an
expression of indignation in this case, too? This is where a journalist’s
professional ethics come into play. It is not too late. Rahul Kanwal and Arnab
Goswami et al must redeem their profession’s ethical standards by interrogating
the concerned Indian officials with the same vehemence and sharpness in the
Sanaullah case. As for Sarabjit being anointed as martyr, now we will have to
redefine the statuses of the likes of Bhagat Singh, Abdul Hameed (remember
him?) and countless others who voluntarily laid their lives for their country,
and not strayed into another country in an “inebriated state”.
To be fair, TV debates have their positive moments, too.
Since India has a rich tradition of public discourse going back to the Vedic
times, it has strengthened, and not just tolerated, the traditional right to dissent.
Consequently, the process of influencing and even gauging public opinion
through TV debates has become a powerful element in the country’s political
matrix. Often, we watch debates that are highly critical of the governments in
power in various states as well as at the centre. At the same time,
pro-government views too get fair amount of airtime. In the process,
heterogeneity becomes the hallmark of Indian political and socioeconomic
debates. Even at the height of anti-China jingoism in the recent Daulat Beg Oldi
confrontation, one witnessed panelists counseling restraint as also palpable
hesitation on the part of leftist politicians to unambiguously castigate the
Chinese intrusion. In any other country – democratic or not – this would have
been damned as leftist perfidy, triggering off public outrage and convulsions
on the political firmament.
Moreover, even as the media tries to speak for the
“inarticulate and the submerged” it often becomes a facilitator for the
emergence of new vested interests that eventually prove to be no better than
the established ones. Let us hark back to the Anna Hazare Movement, when the
entire political establishment went into a tizzy in its attempts to negotiate
this new challenge. The media lionized Anna, but forgot to investigate some of
his acolytes who, later on, proved to be mere opportunists, reaching for power
by riding onto Anna’s shoulders. This new group has quickly adapted itself to
Delhi’s self-serving political culture. Now, while Anna has been more or less
placed in the freezer, his former acolytes are using every trick to retain
media attention in the hope of notching a few Lok Sabha seats in the 2014 elections.
However, no TV media journalist has yet asked the AAP worthies such
uncomfortable questions that they usually fire at other politicos. Kid-glove
treatment?
Admittedly, the staid, textbook process of newsgathering and
dissemination is now obsolete. The content need not be authentic. Its source
may be dubious, or the “news” item itself may well be a piece of fiction, but
as long as it serves the main purpose of attracting eyeballs, it will be aired.
Ethics be damned. The tendency to sensationalize flourishes. The Arushi case is
a prime example. One really wonders what would have been the fate of those
domestics, who were first damned by the media as murderers, had not the police
and CBI investigations been fair and impartial. There have been so many other
instances where media pundits had prejudged issues or taken sides – their biases
being the offspring of socio-ideological predilections, the function of vested
interests or plain callousness; or, even a deliberate resort to sensationalism
to augment viewership.
In 1949, the then Daily Mirror editor, Sylvester Bolam, had
written that sensationalism “does not mean distorting the truth… It means the
vivid and dramatic presentation of events to give them a forceful impact on the
mind of the reader. It means big headlines, vigorous writing, simplification
into familiar everyday language.” He had also contended that it was “a
necessary and valuable public service”. Our new age TV journalists subscribing
to such views will do well to revisit the fate of the News of the World
scandal its subsequent shutdown, and remember that Bolam was jailed for
indulging in sensationalism. Sensationalism obfuscates and thus hides, if not
kills, truth.
The electronic media has once again come under the scanner
even as it tries to investigate others, raising in the process all those
questions again that have remained unanswered so far, or elicited
unsatisfactory responses. What exactly is the role of various news channels in
a democracy like India? Does it speak for the “inarticulate and the submerged”?
Or, has it become a platform for unbridled sensationalism? All those headlines
featuring murders, rapes, and rubbish… one is unable to understand their
purpose. Is it to inform or merely excite or, more insidiously, demoralize the
general Indian public? We await the answers.
Published in The Financial World dated May 10, 2013
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