Media isn’t in the 'positivity' business. Its job is to show the ugly truth

Broken News

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“Negativity, negativity, negativity,” intoned India's solicitor general, Tushar Mehta, in the Supreme Court on May 28. He was referring to the media and others critical of the government during hearings on the notice that the apex court had taken up suo motu on the worker exodus. 

"Positivity, positivity, positivity," was the advice Narendra Modi's government gave to media owners before the first national lockdown to contain the spread of Covid-19 was announced on March 24.

Between these two dates, and the expression of these two sentiments lies the chasm between the government’s understanding of the role of the media in a democracy, and what the media understands as its role in a functioning democracy.

This negative-positive binary that this government in particular seems determined to pursue, not just in relation to the media but also to any opposition to its ideas and plans, is something that all of us need to be worried about. For civil society critics, there is the real and present danger of being arrested on all manner of charges ranging from sedition to terrorism.

As for the media, for the six years that the Modi government has held office, much of mainstream media has chosen the "positivity" message, finding no contradiction in openly cheerleading for the government.  Fortunately, a few continue to cling on to what they perceive as their role of holding the government to account. But their numbers are dwindling as economic and political pressures chip away at their resilience.

Coming back to the solicitor general’s “negativity” rant, should the media be considered “negative” because it has persisted with the story of the exodus of workers from our cities? This story has refused to disappear for over two months after the first batch of workers began to find ways to return to their homes. It is a story that could not be avoided, need alone be faked as the government suggested at one point. In its sheer magnitude and its many tragic outcomes, no journalist or media house worth their salt could have turned their gaze away.

In fact, because the stories continue to pour in, the visuals are still printed on a daily basis and the moving images are shared on social media, India's highest court was compelled to wake up and take suo motu cognisance of the unprecedented tragedy unfolding in this country.

Why has the media persisted with the story?

Even if one goes by the cynical criteria of what mainstream media chooses to cover, this is one story that fits the bill. In its size – literally thousands of people on the move; its pathos – the way they chose to travel; and the tragedy – of the people who died enroute or just after they got to their destination. Also proximity – the fact that the workers left from large metropolitan centres where the media is based. This ensured that the story could not be missed.

Imagine if the situation was in the reverse. That because of hunger, starvation and lack of work, thousands of people had set off on foot from their villages to the cities. They would still be deemed “migrants” because they were migrating to another place in search of sustenance. But it would have taken a while longer for the media to wake up to what was happening because it was not in their backyard.

Yet, I would argue, even in this reverse hypothetical scenario, the story would have had to be covered. And even if this imagined exodus had been triggered by callous government policy, as it has been in the present instance, it would not matter. The politics of individual media houses would not be able to obscure this "event", given its size and spread.

Something similar is happening in the United States in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd by a policeman in Minneapolis. Even media houses that are generally supportive of President Donald Trump, such as Fox News, have covered the protests extensively.

In both India and the US, although the stories are very different, the government, or its agents, is choosing to literally shoot the messenger instead of paying heed to the substance of the stories.

In India, journalists have not been attacked by the police for covering the worker exodus story. But the solicitor general compared journalists to “vultures” in his intervention in the Supreme Court. This is an old and tired trope based on the iconic image of a starving child and a vulture in famine-gripped South Sudan shot in 1993 by the late Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Kevin Carter.

That Mehta brought this up is not surprising, but it is more than a little amusing that he got his facts wrong because they were based on a WhatsApp message that was being circulated, as this story in AltNews points out.

The comparison between vultures and news gatherers has persisted through decades. It is not always a simple choice for a journalist on the beat to decide whether to intervene in a humanitarian crisis or during conflict before filing the story, or to wait until the story is out and then see how to help.

Dar Yasin, one of the three Associated Press photographers from Jammu and Kashmir who recently won a Pulitzer, chose to intervene in 2017 when he put aside his camera and carried an injured girl to safety during a violent incident in Kashmir. 

On the other hand, if the information does not get out at that instance, there is also a possibility of many more lives lost, or greater tragedies unfolding. So it is a tough choice that journalists make and live with. Furthermore, the mental stress that they encounter is not fully recognised or addressed. And there are those who cannot live with it, as in Carter's case who took his own life within months of winning the Pulitzer.

In the case of the worker exodus story in India, the image that lingers is that of the child pulling at the blanket that covered his dead mother at the Muzaffarpur station. The video was seen widely, it was not shot by a journalist, but its authenticity was not in doubt. Journalists spoke to the woman's brother-in-law with whom she was travelling and followed up with the family after they managed to return to their village. 

Often, a few such images memorialise an entire story.  What is “negative” about them, in the government's language? I would argue that telling such a story is the “positive” of a free press in a democracy. This story, amongst many others, has shaken even the most indifferent into "seeing" the invisible millions that are also citizens of this country.

Similarly, if ordinary people had not filmed George Floyd's killing in Minneapolis, and the media had not taken it on, we would not have witnessed the outpouring on the streets across the US as people demand an end to the brutality of the police and the entrenched racism in the law-enforcing machinery.

The media that set out to cover these demonstrations has also been targeted by the police, but selectively. This report in the Washington Post states: "For black journalists, the civil unrest in cities across America isn’t just a big story. It’s personal." The story recounts the number of incidents where black reporters were specifically targeted by the police, including the now famous incident of CNN reporter Omar Jiminez being arrested even as he was politely negotiating with the police about where he and his crew should stand to report.

In the US, these incidents have yet again exposed the persistence of racial bias in all spheres, including in the media. In fact, as the Post story points out, despite the 1968 Kerner Commission that exposed the problems with a white-dominated media, and the efforts since then to make newsrooms more diverse, an analysis of newsroom composition in 2018 showed that 77 percent of employees are white. An analysis of newsrooms in India throws up similar statistics of the domination of upper caste Hindus.

It is not entirely paradoxical that the media in the US and India face similar challenges. In the US, the media has to contend with a president who is constantly deriding it and dismissing anything critical as fake. In India, we have a government that is not averse to using its powers to enforce "positivity" and patriotism in the media, and insisting that anything else is untrue and unpatriotic.

Pulitzer reminder to India’s media: Always tell the stories the powerful don’t want told

Broken News

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2020/05/07/pulitzer-reminder-to-indias-media-always-tell-the-stories-the-powerful-dont-want-told

As long as these stories continue to be told, there’s hope that the media in this country has not dug its own grave.

Once again, Kashmir is in the news. For all the right reasons. And the wrong ones too.

When the Pulitzer Prize winners for 2020 were declared in New York on May 5, the big news for India was the choice of three photojournalists from Jammu and Kashmir, Dar Yasin, Mukhtar Khan and Channi Anand, all working for the Associated Press. They were commended for their photographs taken after India abrogated Kashmir's special status on August 5, 2019.

Apart from the fact that all three are outstanding photographers, the significance of their photographs was that they revealed to us in India, and the world, the blatant untruth in the official narrative. 

We were asked to believe that there was no real opposition to the Indian government's actions. Countering this proved a herculean task for the media given that the government had clamped down hard, shut off the internet and phones, both mobile and terrestrial, and placed the entire region under curfew. Under these circumstances, it was remarkable that information did get out, with Kashmir-based journalists using a variety of strategies to get their stories out.

Photographers were even more challenged, as it was impossible for them to transmit their images without access to broadband. Yet, these three and others succeeded. Those that worked for international news agencies were more fortunate as their organisations were willing to pay for them to either fly down to Delhi to file or upload their pictures. Many of them requested passengers travelling to Delhi to carry their flash drives and memory cards with the images.

The images that succeeded in getting out, such as those for which these three photographers have been honoured, told the other story, one that the Indian government would have preferred remained unrecorded. This is their real significance; they are an unimpeachable record of those days, with each picture literally speaking more than a thousand words.

Anyone who views these images dispassionately cannot but be moved. But in the vitiated politics of today, rather than congratulating the photographers, and celebrating their professionalism and bravery, BJP leaders and their followers used the occasion to engage in the usual whataboutery on Twitter, asking why these photographs and not others, of Indian soldiers and their grieving families for instance, were recognised.

https://twitter.com/sambitswaraj/status/1257610956399656960

The use of the term "India controlled Kashmir" in the captions and a wrongly worded reference in the citation about Kashmir's "independence" being revoked on August 5 sparked another row. The photographers were called "anti-national" for projecting India in a "bad light".  Another suggested that the Booker Prize, which Arundhati Roy won, the Pulitzer and the Magsaysay, won by Ravish Kumar, should all be banned because they were "rigged to support the anti-India narrative”.

https://twitter.com/noconversion/status/1257747768807997441

https://twitter.com/NotAnyKapoor/status/1257950186388598791

And, predictably the volume of the diatribe grew exponentially once Rahul Gandhi decided to congratulate the photographers.

https://twitter.com/shikhar_ji/status/1257653402139611138

It is evident that the professionalism of journalists or photographers simply doing their jobs under difficult circumstances just cannot be appreciated by people averse to any other political perspective barring their own.

Be that as it may, the Pulitzer is a recognition that is well deserved, and certainly a shot in the arm for all journalists working in Jammu and Kashmir under challenging conditions that are not transitory, but virtually permanent. Even as I write this, internet and mobile phone connectivity has again been snapped with the recent uptick in gunfights between security forces and militants.

Those covering the Covid-19 pandemic do not face the kind of daily challenges faced by journalists in Kashmir, but for them too there are hurdles. The story is not an easy one to tell when it consists of numbers and figures on the one hand and tragic personal stories on the other.

By now, the average reader's eyes would be glazing over at the daily headlines of how many more positive cases have been recorded, and how many deaths. These numbers have to be reported – more so after the diktat by the Supreme Court that the media "must" publish the official version.  But this daily dose of statistics can sometimes obscure the real problems on the ground. For instance, the dangers facing frontline workers without adequate safety gear, the quality of the protective gear that India is trying to procure, the attitude of private hospitals in accommodating infected people, the shortages of beds, the unsatisfactory nature of testing, the daily struggles of the urban poor to access healthcare.

It is commendable that some in print and digital media, as well as television, have continued to report such stories and, thereby, exposed the real situation on the ground beyond statistics. A pandemic after all is the story of the lives of people, their fears and anxieties, their ability or inability to access healthcare. Unfortunately, the government still prefers to talk about "positive" and "negative" reports, failing to understand that the media's job is not to project one or the other, but to tell it as it is.

And that is the other uncomfortable reality that the government just cannot turn its face away from because of the media's continuous and determined coverage of the migrant workers story. It has not ended yet, nor will it disappear for some time to come.

We still see hundreds of them setting out on foot with their meagre belongings, men, women, children, determined to traverse hundreds of kilometres. Every story speaks of hopelessness and desperation.

We have also read the stories of hope and heartbreak when the government finally announced, after extending the national lockdown on May 3 by two weeks, that it would arrange trains to take migrants to their home states.

There again, had it not been for the detailed reports in the media that revealed that migrants were not only being charged for the journey, but were also being fleeced by local doctors for the mandatory medical certificate they needed before boarding the trains, the government could have got away with pretending it was doing the migrants a great favour. Only after Congress president Sonia Gandhi offered to pay for the migrants to travel home was there a mad scramble to cover up with more obfuscation about railway subsidies and that 15 percent of the cost was supposed to be borne by state governments. Once again, the record stands in black and white. Thousands of migrants were issued tickets and they paid for them with borrowed funds.

The latest turn in the migrant workers story is even more ghastly: the Karnataka government has decided to stop them from leaving because the local construction industry wants labour to restart projects. It is as if these migrant workers are non-people, slaves who can be put to any task by their masters. That they chose to leave because they had not been paid and did not wish to continue living in pitiable conditions is not acknowledged.

Visit any construction site in the country. You will be horrified at the way workers live, not for a week or two, but for months, even years on end. If after virtually starving for weeks, they pack their bags and leave, should their decision not be respected? How can a government decide otherwise?  Are these not citizens with a free choice about where they work, where they live, and how they live?  How have we come to such a pass that we can actually contemplate treating fellow citizens in this way?

These fault lines in our society, callous governments and an indifferent society that has virtually invisibilised millions of Indian citizens have to be recorded and reported by the media. As long as these stories continue to be told, despite the pressures to under-report or not report at all, there is some hope that the media in this country has not dug its own grave.