Should Indian media constantly call out the powerful for peddling falsehoods?

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on June 24, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/06/24/should-indian-media-constantly-call-out-the-powerful-for-peddling-falsehoods

How does a half-truth or an outright lie become a "fact"? When it is uttered by a politician or a celebrity and amplified unquestioningly by the media.

That is one of many challenges facing India's media. How often should you call out the powerful when what they are saying is patently untrue?

The media in the United States did not spend much time debating this when they regularly fact-checked every utterance of former president Donald Trump, who had a habit of being rather liberal with facts. Leading newspapers and TV channels regularly ran fact-checks to inform readers and viewers of the exaggerations and lies that were routinely mouthed by their president even as they had to report what he said. In some instances, television networks chose to stop live relays of his speech when what he said was particularly problematic during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

We have not seen the media doing this in India. The pronouncements of the powerful are routinely telecast or reproduced in print. The next day, an opposition politician might point out that what was said was untrue. If that is reported at all, it will pass without notice. Or an expert could write an article on the edit page contradicting the politician. This again would be read only by the converted, so to speak. Thus, what lives on in public memory is what the powerful person has said.

Does fact-checking the public pronouncements of the powerful even matter?

According to Prof Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University and author of the recently released 2021 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, many Indians thought that much of the misinformation about the pandemic often came from the top. In an edit page piece in the Hindu, he writes, "Study after study around the world has found such 'network propaganda', where misinformation is spread by some top politicians, nakedly partisan news media who cheer them on, and well-organised communities of political supporters active on social media and messaging applications."

Nielsen's advice to the Indian authorities if they want to check misinformation is to " take a cue from the fact that much of the Indian public clearly recognise that misinformation often comes from the top", and "spend less time worrying about activists, journalists, and Twitter".

Indians already paid a heavy price for believing the messages that "come from the top" earlier this year when we were told that the coronavirus crisis was behind us. The media ought to have been more vigilant and could have amplified the voices of those advocating caution and pointing out that even countries with good healthcare infrastructure in the West had been hit by a second and even a third wave of the pandemic. Given the poor state of India's health infrastructure, there was simply no place for the message of Indian exceptionalism that was being propagated.

The impact of the second wave was horrific and sudden only because the warning signs were not heeded. For the media, the story was so stark that it could not be ignored. From the oxygen crisis in Delhi to the half-buried corpses along the Ganga, no self-respecting media house could look the other way and ignore what was going on. As the editors of Dainik Bhaskar, one of the largest Indian newspapers, told Newslaundry, you had to report what you saw.

The paper's Gujarati edition, Divya Bhaskar, was one of the first to track the discrepancy between the official death toll and what its reporters saw on the ground. Since then, apart from Dainik Bhaskar, several mainstream English language papers such as the Hindu have been doing the data crunching to put forward the real number of deaths. Experts and biostatisticians had been predicting that the real numbers would be at least 10 lakh and not the 3.9 lakh officially acknowledged by the government. The persistent stories in different media have not just reiterated these projections, they suggest the total could be even higher.

Yet, there has been no acknowledgment so far from the different state governments, or the central government, that the death data needs drastic revision.

The Reuters Institute report focuses on misinformation with regard to the pandemic. But in the last month, we have seen other forms of misinformation such as about India's vaccination policy. We still have to estimate how much the union government's constantly changing vaccination policy has cost the country in terms of avoiding hospitalizations and deaths and also contributing to vaccine hesitancy.

We are constantly being told that this government has been exceptional in its vaccination policy and if there have been hurdles they have been placed by the obduracy and unreasonable demands of the opposition-ruled states.

We are also told by none other than the prime minister that this is the first time India is producing vaccines. On June 7, in his televised address to the nation, Narendra Modi said, “If you look at the history of vaccinations in India, whether it was a vaccine for smallpox, hepatitis B or polio, you will see that India would have to wait decades for procuring vaccines from abroad. When vaccination programmes ended in other countries, it wouldn't have even begun in our country.”

Is this true? As Jacob Koshy politely points out in the Hindu, this view of India's vaccination policy is "at odds with the facts”. He goes on to list the smallpox vaccine and the polio vaccine as examples of how India manufactured vaccines even before Independence.

That is not all. In his speech, Modi also said that since 2014, that is, since his party came to power and he became the prime minister, under the Indradhanush programme launched by his government, the percentage of children being vaccinated had increased from 60 percent to 90 percent. Yet, this too flies in the face of facts as according to the latest National Family Health Survey, none of the 17 states and five union territories surveyed had touched 90 percent in child vaccination. In fact, reports Koshy, only five states – Himachal Pradesh, West Bengal, Karnataka, Goa and Sikkim – exceeded 80 percent and only Himachal Pradesh touched 89 percent.

Why should this embroidering of history and facts matter? Because if they are not called out, this is what millions of Indians will believe, that only now is India "atmanirbhar", is producing vaccines indigenously and that the current government has given a boost to routine vaccinations too.

All this then flows seamlessly onto June 21, when India is supposed to have broken a "world record" in vaccinating over 86 lakh people in a day. Actually even this so-called "fact" is not true. But the reality of how this even happened is what makes the apparent achievement that the government boasted about more interesting.

For even as various ministers were busy crediting the prime minister and thanking him profusely for this achievement, the story of how it came about was already unravelling in the media. Supriya Sharma in Scroll exposed how the vaccination numbers were noticeably low in the states that hit a high mark on June 21 and that most of these states were ruled by the BJP. For instance, on June 20, Madhya Pradesh had vaccinated only 692 persons. Yet on June 21, it administered 16.9 lakh doses only to sink back to under 5,000 the very next day.

Although initially most mainstream newspapers ran uncritical frontpage stories on this “achievement”, in the days that followed many of them, including the Hindu and the Times of India, were more sceptical. They ran the data of the vaccine shots administered in the days before and after June 21. The figures spoke louder than words: the one-day miracle was only possible because stocks had been hoarded in previous weeks in some states.

The media also pointed out the huge discrepancy between the availability of vaccines, which will not exceed 40 lakh even if the Indian manufacturers operate at maximum capacity, and the requirement to maintain a daily target of 80 lakh or more. Where is the rest of the supply coming from? The government has yet to answer that question.

Then there is the myth of the "free vaccines". Unless constantly reminded, people forget that all vaccines have been free in India, from the smallpox one to BCG to polio. So providing Covid vaccines free to Indians is neither new nor an exceptional achievement of this government.

The reason such fact-checking is even noticed today is because it did not take place sufficiently in the past, and particularly over the last seven years. This has contributed to myth building, to the belief of one leader being not just invincible but also infallible. This myth has helped him and his party ride through multiple mistakes and bad policies that have placed such an enormous economic burden on Indians, especially the poor, apart from mismanaging the ongoing pandemic.

Calling out those who get free airtime merely because they are in power is the duty of a free press. It cannot be otherwise.

Why, despite SC’s Vinod Dua ruling, dissenting journalists won’t be safe

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on June 10, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/06/10/why-despite-scs-vinod-dua-ruling-dissenting-journalists-wont-be-safe

One cheer for the Supreme Court of India. Why only one? Because we still have some way to go before all arbitrary and unreasonable obstructions to freedom of expression are removed in this country.

The June 3 Supreme Court ruling in the Vinod Dua case came as much-needed good news in an otherwise grim year. In their 117-page judgement, Justices UU Lalit and Vineet Saran stated, "Every journalist will be entitled to protection in terms of Kedar Nath Singh, as every prosecution under Sections 124A and 505 of the IPC must be in strict conformity with the scope and ambit of said Sections as explained in, and completely in tune with the law laid down in Kedar Nath Singh."‬

Put simply, this means governments cannot slap sedition cases against journalists who question or criticise policy or report or expose gaps in government performance. That's great and is something about which we in the media ought to be happy and relieved.

Except that this was already established as far back as 1962, that is almost 60 years ago, in the case the judges mention, Kedar Nath Singh vs State of Bihar. Yet, six decades later, neither governments nor the police at the thana level appear to understand what that judgement means given the ease with which Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code dealing with sedition continues to be used against journalists and others.

In fact, a database assembled by the news website Article-14 shows a rise in sedition cases since the BJP took power in 2014. It points out that there was an increase of 28 percent in sedition cases filed between 2014 and 2020.

The case against Dua follows a pattern. In March last year, a BJP politician filed a case against the veteran journalist in Kumarsain, Shimla. He held that on his Vinod Dua Show on YouTube, the journalist made "unfounded and bizarre allegations" against the prime minister and the government. This, he held, was punishable under Sections 124A, 268, 501 and 505 of the Indian Penal Code.

Dua is based in Delhi. The case was filed in Himachal Pradesh. By then, a national lockdown in view of the pandemic had been declared. Movement between states was restricted. Filing a case in a place other than where the journalist resides is the first common feature of such cases.

Dua was luckier than most. He could file a plea in the Supreme Court to quash the case against him. Most other journalists, particularly those based in smaller towns, do not have that ability. For them, just to deal with the first steps of countering such a case is punishment.

So regardless of the case going in Dua's favour in this instance, it is important to remember that the Supreme Court's directions from 60 years ago are regularly flouted and the only way to enforce them is for the aggrieved person to rush to court to appeal.

Secondly, independent journalists, reporting without the backing of large media houses and often from small towns, do not have the resources to fight cases slapped on them even at the first level, leave aside going up to the Supreme Court. If the case is filed in a place other than the one from which you operate, the very process of fighting it becomes expensive and arduous. You have to locate lawyers and spend your own money if the court requires your presence.

Additionally, 124A is only one of several draconian laws that are used against journalists and dissenters. For instance, the Uttar Pradesh chief minister is on record threatening journalists that the National Security Act will be used to arrest anyone reporting what the government considers "false claims", such as the very real shortage of oxygen that occurred in April at the height of the second wave of the pandemic.

Or take the case of the journalist Siddique Kappan, who went to report on the Hathras rape case, but instead was arrested by the Uttar Pradesh police and remains imprisoned over 200 days later on sedition charges and under the anti-terror law UAPA.

In fact, according to this report about the challenges journalists face in UP, even Section 66A of the IT Act (sending "offensive" messages on the internet), which had been struck down by the Supreme Court in 2015, continues to be used.

Hence, when governments have an arsenal of draconian laws that they can use against individuals who dissent, or who report and write critically, the protection provided by a ruling by the Supreme Court is simply not enough. The court cannot monitor every case that is filed in this country. And if cases are filed in small-town police stations on purpose to harass the individual or the journalist, there is nothing that can be done to stop it. By the time the individual fights to get the case heard, he or she has already been punished by the process.

That is why there is every reason to demand, as the Editors Guild of India and other organisations representing journalists have, that this antiquated colonial law should be consigned to the dustbin of history. If India wants to be considered a functioning democracy with an unfettered and free press, there is no place for such laws.

This is what the constitutional law expert Faizan Mustafa argues persuasively in a recent article in the Indian Express. He points out that according to data from the National Crimes Record Bureau, "between 2016 to 2019, there has been a whopping 160 per cent increase in the filing of sedition charges with a conviction rate of just 3.3 per cent. Of the 96 people charged in 2019, only two could be convicted”. These figures are more proof of how the provision is used for harassment even though the chances of conviction are slim.

Why is this happening when as far back as 1962, in the Kedar Nath Singh case, the limits of what constitutes sedition had already been laid out? Has this deterred the misuse of this section in the intervening years? Certainly not if we look at the database assembled by Article-14, referred to earlier.

In any case, the problem with the way this provision is used affects not only journalists but ordinary citizens who use the right granted to them under the Indian constitution to criticise and oppose government policies and programmes. In 2016, I personally saw the bewilderment on the faces of the feisty women from the fishing community of Idinthakarai in Tamil Nadu who were protesting peacefully against the Kudankulam nuclear plant when they were told they had been charged with sedition. Eventually, the Supreme Court granted them relief.

It is surprising, or perhaps not, that there has not been a stronger demand from the media for the sedition law to be declared unconstitutional. The Telegraph has made this demand in its editorial titled "Hurrah". But most editorial positions have been restrained, welcoming the court's ruling but not dissecting why an earlier ruling made no difference in curtailing the misuse of this provision.

The Supreme Court's ruling in the Vinod Dua case is significant, even historic. It might stay the hand of the state for a while in using the sedition law against journalists. But, as in the past, as long as it stays on the statute, its chances of being misused remain strong because at heart most governments want laws that can curb dissent and questioning.

Riverside graves of the Covid dead tell a story of the media’s failure

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on May 27, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/05/27/riverside-graves-of-the-covid-dead-tell-a-story-of-the-medias-failure

The defining image of this second wave of the pandemic in India has now become the hundreds of shallow graves along the Ganga and other rivers, replacing the searing images of burning pyres. These graves are a stark reminder not just of the discrepancy in death data between the official and the actual, but they also hint at a deeper distress in rural India that has been obscured from our view.

We have to be grateful that there are journalists who continue to doggedly pursue this sad and disturbing story of unaccounted deaths. From journalists going around in a car, filming these graves and recording what people have to say, such as Barkha Dutt, to mainstream regional media outlets like Divya Bhaskar and Sandesh in Gujarat refusing to obfuscate and telling the story as it is, to young women journalists like Shivangi Saxena and Akanksha Kumar from Newslaundry, such documentation will form an essential part of the history of these terrible years. Without this, there would have been a veil of disinformation pulled over the eyes of citizens. And false narratives, so beloved of this government, regularly amplified by the media groups beholden to it. And Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath, who continues to maintain that all is well in his state where these shallow graves abound, would not have been called out.

Try as it might, the government simply has no place to hide now as journalists, experts and the international media continue to focus on the discrepancies in the data on deaths and incidence of disease. The latest of these is a data presentation by the New York Times that asks, "Just How Big Could India’s True Covid Toll Be?" Its conservative estimate is that there have been six lakh deaths from Covid but says the more likely number is 16 lakh. The official figure on May 24 was three lakh deaths. That is the extent of the discrepancy.

Indian newspapers have also been writing about this, with Chinmay Tumbe, author of The Age of Pandemics, looking closely at Gujarat's data in the Indian Express and Rukmini S writing about Chennai in the Hindu. Tumbe concludes that "even the most conservative extrapolations from the available excess mortality data take the all-India death toll of the second wave to over a million”. In sum, all these articles are saying the same thing, that both the extent of the spread of the virus and the deaths resulting from it are far in excess of what is revealed by government data.

Even if we were to assume that this is not being done deliberately, in the face of growing evidence, one would have expected a word of acknowledgment from officials that something has gone wrong and needs to be corrected. Instead, there is silence. Or efforts to divert the conversation elsewhere, to "positivity", which in the current context is just another term for denial.

The fact remains that while some newspapers, digital platforms and a couple of TV news channels have focused on this data mismatch, much of mainstream Indian media is not highlighting these facts.

Perhaps Manoj Kumar Jha, the Rashtriya Janata Dal member of the Rajya Sabha, is wrong to brandish the entire Indian media in a scathing oped in the Indian Express when he writes that it has "asphyxiated democracy at a time when the breathless nation is struggling hard to save its loved ones”. Yet, it is difficult to argue against his reflection that "mainstream media houses shamefully defending the indefensible must remember that the annals of history shall be much more objective and ruthless in judging their role than the system to which they are plugged into for reasons known to everyone. They amplified the discourse of the failure of 'the system', giving much-needed leeway to those who have knowingly imperiled the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. Instead of identifying, highlighting specific governance failures, and seeking accountability, the mainstream media is following the command of the faces behind the system as they enjoin people to 'talk positivity', 'spread positivity', etc."

Besides the story about inaccurate data on Covid deaths, the saffron shrouds on those shallow graves are obscuring another story that we in the media need to be reporting. That of immense economic distress and hunger that is leading families to abandon their loved ones in these shallow graves rather than conducting the ritual cremation. It is not difficult to imagine the extent of poverty and desperation if people cannot rustle up a few thousand rupees to buy wood and pay a priest to conduct the ritual.

A hint of this distress is coming through in some reports. But while economists will analyse the reasons for this continuing economic distress, it is for journalists to put a name and a face to it.

Last year, the migrant exodus gave us many faces to remember of the millions of people who subsist at the margins in this country. It was a story that was in your face; it could not be ignored.

This time around, there is no drama of that kind. Yet it is dramatic in its own way because it tells us that a year down the line, millions of families are broken, with no hope of finding a source of income, and little by way of government assistance to tide them over. Compounding this is their continuing invisibility in mainstream media reporting.

This story by Supriya Sharma in Scroll, for instance, paints a grim picture of what urban migrants are facing at this time in our big cities.

She writes, "If the lockdown last year came down as a hammer, this year, it feels like a thousand cuts. Obscured by the dramatic and distressing images of death in the second wave of the pandemic, a slow drip of distress is going unnoticed, not just by the government, but even by other citizens, leaving the urban poor to fend for themselves."

The migrants who left last year came back to the cities after their long trek home, only to be left high and dry once again. And this time, as Sharma records, civil society interventions appear more muted. I would argue that this has happened because their distress has been rendered invisible by the media. Without us digging out and amplifying this story, there is no hope for people living perennially on the margins to get either government aid or that from voluntary groups.

Sharma also reports on how even what the urban poor are entitled to, such as extra rations under different state and central programmes, is not available. To cover daily expenses, people are compelled to borrow money, probably at usurious rates, just to be able to buy provisions on the open market at much higher prices than they would have got if the ration shops had the supplies. The central government is failing not just on the vaccination front, it is also proving incompetent in executing the welfare programmes which have been in place for more than a year.

Anshu Gupta, founder of the organisation Goonj, also emphasises the crisis of hunger in this article in the Indian Express. He writes that last year the poor gained attention because the media reported on the exodus, but as soon as they reached their villages they were virtually forgotten. This time around, the crisis has focused on the medical emergency, on the need for oxygen and medicines. But the crisis of deepening hunger has been virtually overlooked by everyone, including the media.

Gupta writes, "It is important to understand that while the second wave is about health, it doesn’t mean that hunger is not an issue. The second wave is about ventilators and oxygen to keep people alive, but...for millions today, access to simple dal chawal is no lesser than access to oxygen.”

It is also more difficult to provide assistance this time around because with trains and buses still functioning, many migrants left voluntarily for their homes. We know now that part of the reason for the spread of the disease to rural areas was because the system of quarantining returning migrants last year was not implemented this time around. As a result, they brought back the infection. And given the dire economic crisis facing their families, there was no one around to help or record either infection or death.

This is the story those shallow graves are telling us, one that still needs to be reported.