Why India Today’s JNU sting did more harm than good

Broken News

(Link: https://newslaundry.com/2020/01/15/india-today-jnu-sting-abvp-violence-left)

By attempting to be balanced and condemning all sides equally, the media is simply reinforcing the narrative of the state. That is not our job.

From the swirl of accusations, viral videos, injured students and teachers following the attack by a group of masked men and at least one woman in Jawaharlal Nehru University on January 5, several questions related to the media have arisen.

There is already considerable analysis of the way TV news channels have covered the JNU violence, including on Newslaundry.

What has not been talked about is the ethics of the sting operation conducted by India Today, what the news channel calls the “JNU tapes”. On January 10, even as a Delhi police spokesperson was telling the media that an investigation into the violence had begun and nine students had been identified (seven from the Left groups and two from the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, although the spokesperson inexplicably failed to mention this fact), India Today reported that it had identified two of the “assailants” from January 5.  And that both these students were with the ABVP.

The tapes showed a young man, a first-year student in French named Akshat Awasthi, boasting about what he did on the evening of January 5: how he beat up a man with a beard he thought was Kashmiri, how he trashed parts of the Sabarmati hostel, and how he was responsible for rounding up another 20 students who joined him.  With him was another first-year student named Rohit Shah, who said very little except that he had given Akshat his helmet to prevent him from being injured. 

The sting also included a short statement by Geeta Kumari, from one of the Left groups, who admitted that they had shut down the server room to prevent students from registering for the new semester. In fact, students from Left groups had already admitted this publicly and were openly squatting in front of the server room to block access. 

So what did India Today achieve by this sting? Predictably, the ABVP denied that Awasthi was a member or office-bearer of the group.  Not much was heard about the other student. Alt News, the diligent fact-checking website run by Pratik Sinha, however, did establish Awasthi’s association with the ABVP, something that India Today did not do. 

The sting reiterated what was already known by the time it was shown, that the ABVP was responsible for the violence that occurred in the evening on January 5. In fact, even the police acknowledged this when they named two people from the ABVP, Shiv Mandal and Vikas Patel, amongst the culprits.  Despite the absence of footage from CCTV cameras, which the police claim did not work because the server room had been shut down, they could zero in on these men because the media had posted photographs and videos of them from which they were easily identified.

Yet, why did the police name more people from the Left groups, including Aishe Ghosh, president of the JNU Students' Union, who suffered a serious head injury? That is a story that’s still unfolding.  In response to a petition by three JNU professors, the Delhi High Court has instructed the police to identify the people on two WhatsApp groups – Friends of RSS and Unity Against Left.  Within a day of the violence, print and online media had already broken this story and reported the messages being exchanged on these groups just before the violence. The court has asked the police to confiscate their phones. If and when the Delhi police do this, the number of ABVP members named ought to exceed the seven from the Left.  But for that we must wait.

The question that needs to be asked about the India Today sting is that if the involvement of the ABVP had already been exposed by the story on the WhatsApp groups, and two of their members had been identified by the media, what did their exposé achieve?

The main problem, in my view, was the false equivalence the channel sought in the name of being “balanced”. The public acknowledgement of a member of the Left about the server room was juxtaposed with a video that had been posted by an ABVP member on social media. This showed Ghosh and some hooded and masked students, none of them carrying sticks or any other potential weapon (with the strapline “masked mob”), running towards one of the hostels. There is nothing in that video to establish that this so-called "mob" was responsible for any violence.

Meanwhile, the anchor, Rahul Kanwal, asked this question: “Was this the trigger for violence on January 5?” This was clearly an attempt to suggest that both sides were equally responsible for the violence later that day.  And as if to confirm this, when Awasthi is asked on hidden camera why they went about beating up people, he says, “It was a reaction to their action.” Where have we heard this before? The man who said words to this effect in Gujarat in 2002 is now the prime minister of India.

Thus, there are basically two troubling questions about the India Today sting. One is the sting itself and the old debate on whether this is journalism. It is a question that has been discussed in India and elsewhere and the jury is still out. The Poytner Institute has four basic precepts it suggests should govern those deciding to use this method.  They are:

●     The information revealed should be of profound public interest or prevent harm to individuals.

●     A sting should be used only as a last resort – a recourse after all other means of reporting have been exhausted.

●     The journalist and news organization methods should reflect excellent journalistic practice and commitment to truth.

●     The value of information revealed through subterfuge should outweigh any harm caused by the act of deception.

Those who wish to read more on this and can do so here.

The Readers’ Editor of The Hindu, AS Pannerselvan, also argues, “Apart from the ethics and accepted norms, I also feel that this technique exposes only the gullible, who are not at the top of the political pyramid.” This is relevant in this instance as the sting exposed two young men, lightweight members of the group responsible for the violence. No one from the ABVP is going to come to the aid of Awasthi or Shah. One of them is reportedly absconding for fear of being arrested. Meanwhile, the real masterminds have still to be exposed.

The other is that of false equivalence in the name of balance. India Today kept repeating that what happened on January 5 was not a question of “Left vs Right, but Right vs Wrong”. Such a formulation is not just disingenuous but also dangerous. It leaves open the question of who decides what and who is wrong and what and who is right. Not surprisingly, in Mumbai, this was picked up by the BJP spokesperson Shaina NC and displayed on a banner outside her office on Marine Drive.

It is unfortunate that some in the media are linking the violence of January 5 in JNU to the events of the previous days. While the latter establish the long simmering tension between ideologically opposed student groups (nothing new in JNU), the violence on the evening of January 5 speaks to a planned attack by students and outsiders, of a university administration that failed to intervene, and of the police that just stood by and allowed the mayhem to continue. There is simply no equivalence between the two. 

By attempting to be balanced and condemning all sides equally, the media is simply reinforcing the narrative of the state. That is not our job.

Is this the beginning of the irrelevance of Big Media?

Broken News

(Here's the link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2019/12/31/kalpana-sharma-broken-news-is-this-the-beginning-of-the-irrelevance-of-big-media)

Perhaps I should rename this column "Heart-breaking News".  For as 2019 winds down, we are inundated with stories from Uttar Pradesh that are not just heart-breaking, but are also a frightening illustration of a state gone rogue. 

The videos, the news reports in newspapers and on digital news websites, have made it amply clear that the UP government and its police force are going full tilt to implement the order of "badla" or revenge against Muslims protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). And not just those protesting. Even those passing by, or hiding from the police in their homes, or well-known social workers, have been arrested, beaten up, harassed, shot at or had their homes vandalized.

As 2019 ends, there is human tragedy in abundance, but also hope in the way ordinary people in so many parts of the country are coming out on the streets to protest and demand a repeal of the CAA.

This is no ordinary moment in this country's history. Those of us who have lived through the years of the Emergency, from 1975-77, cannot remember another time when such a cross-section of people have come out on the streets. In 1977, people demanded the restoration of democracy. Today, they are asking the government to adhere to the fundamental values enshrined in the Indian Constitution, especially secularism and equality.

The full extent of this resistance and protest has, perhaps, not been fully communicated by the media. For one, mainstream media feels compelled to give space to official pronouncements.  So even as people raise their voices and question the CAA, space and time is given to interviews and statements by different members of the Bharatiya Janata Party, including union ministers who go to great lengths to explain the harmlessness of the CAA. Even though they contradict each other, the purpose is served: to create confusion and doubt in the minds of those sitting on the fence. Despite this, however, the thousands opposing the law are not convinced, as is evident from the continuing protest marches and meetings.

Although at least some of mainstream media, and practically all the digital news media, has reported the anti-CAA demonstrations around the country, the mood on the ground has not been fully captured.  What motivates those who are walking on the streets, holding placards that they have made themselves?  We hear the voices of celebrities, but not enough of ordinary people. Yet, their voices are extraordinary. Talk to anyone. You will hear a cogent and reasoned explanation about why they oppose the CAA. 

I went to Mumbai's August Kranti Maidan on December 19 and to Azad Maidan on December 27 to judge for myself why people from all walks of life felt compelled to step out of their comfort zones to protest.

I spoke to students and young professionals. A student doing his PhD at the Indian Institute of Technology explained how many of them had been disturbed in 2016, after the suicide of Rohith Vemula in the University of Hyderabad. That is when students from different universities came together. And what began then has continued.

This year, after the curtailment of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir, they sensed that steps to alienate the Muslim minority would accelerate.  But although they protested, they did not come out of their campuses. The CAA, he said, was literally the last straw, and many students felt they just could not hold back.

For a Muslim student from Jawaharlal Nehru University, who also attended the Azad Maidan rally, the Supreme Court's ruling on the Babri Masjid case was the inflection point. She said till then, she still had faith in the judiciary.  After the judgment, she and others like her felt there was no institution left that understood their fears. And the CAA just confirmed this, she said.

Many young professionals from different fields, people who had never participated in any public demonstration also turned up.  Design professionals used their skills to make posters, a standup comic held a placard that read: "I am from Gujarat. My documents burned in 2002". Another poster stated: "BJP is great at maths as they can divide 1.3 bn in no time". Such irony and humour has rarely been seen during protests in recent times.

I thought the point made by the IIT student, that the process of mobilising had already begun in 2016, was particularly significant.

For instance, many people have commented on the prominence of women students in the protests, particularly in Delhi, suggesting that this was something new and unusual.  There is a hidden assumption that women only come out to protest when the issue affects them directly. It is as if women are not 'citizens'!

The strong participation of women in the anti-CAA protests did not come about overnight. It has been part of several processes, such as the one initiated by a group called Pinjra Tod in 2015, coincidentally in the same Jamia Millia Islamia that is in the news today.  Then they fought against curfew hours imposed by their colleges on women students living in the hostel.  Since then they have intervened on many other issues on college campuses. 

Today, you see these women leading the protests with calm determination, and infectious innovation. For instance, there is a video clip of women students taking out a march after protesting outside the RSS Bhawan in New Delhi on December 25. When a police officer comes up to stop them, they break into song holding a banner stating that women will destroy Hindu Rashtra!  The expression on the face of the police officer is priceless.

So the participation of women, without any political affiliation, is not an overnight phenomenon.  It began some time back but because we in the media are so fixated on events, we often miss out on the process.  This article by Neha Dixit explains this clearly.

It is not just the process that the media is failing to follow.  In the case of the anti-CAA protests, much of mainstream media is either distorting the nature of the protests, by constantly highlighting incidents of violence, or simply ignoring them.  Or delegitimizing them, as this report illustrates.

This has led to considerable resentment in the people who are participating in the protests towards the media.  It manifests itself in derision and comments about "godi" media.  In Azad Maidan, a young woman stood steadfastly near the stage with a placard that read: "Arre yeh bikk gayi hai Media" and below these words the symbols of Republic TV, Z News, ABP, Aaj Tak and TOI (Times of India). Although there have been some incidents of journalists being attacked, as reported on this website, I felt that there was more disdain than anger towards the media in general.

We must remember that both in 2012, after the Delhi gang rape case, and in 2013, during the India Against Corruption campaigns in Delhi and other cities, news channels played an active role in amplifying the protests.  In both cases, this worked.  The government of the day had to pay heed.

This time, the majority of news channels have not obliged.  Yet, despite this, it is remarkable that the protests continue and clearly, this government is unable to ignore them. 

Perhaps, this is the beginning of the irrelevance of Big Media and of those in it who think they can ultimately control and even dictate the national narrative.