As we celebrate the Maria Ressas of the world, let's not forget the Raman Kashyaps

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on October 14, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/10/14/as-we-celebrate-the-maria-ressas-of-the-world-lets-not-forget-the-raman-kashyaps

On October 3, Raman Kashyap, a journalist not known outside the place where he worked, was killed. He was covering a farmers' protest in Lakhimpur Kheri. He was one of the eight people killed when a car rammed into the protesters and in the violence that followed.

A week later, on October 8, the Nobel Prize Committee announced the recipients of this year's Peace Prize: two well-known journalists from the Philippines and Russia. Both have been recognised for their courageous journalism in their respective countries. Both have fallen foul of their governments. Both are determined to continue doing what they have been doing for years. As the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee said when announcing the award, they were chosen not just for their courage but also as “representatives of all journalists who stand up for this ideal in a world in which democracy and freedom of the press face increasingly adverse conditions.”

Maria Ressa and Dimitry Muratov's selection for the Nobel Peace Prize has sent out a strong message of encouragement to other journalists like them around the world, but also to governments who continue to deny press freedom that their actions are being noted.

There is much we can learn from the work of both these journalists. Apart from their courage and their persistence in doing what they see as their primary duty as journalists, to be unafraid to investigate and report the wrongdoings of the powerful, their life and work also illustrate the importance of building institutions with people who can make this kind of work possible.

Maria Ressa is one of the founders of the website Rappler that has taken on the Philippines government led by president Eduardo Duterte. Dimitry Muratov established Noyava Gazeta in 1993 and continues to write fearlessly despite living under the regime of Vladimir Putin that permits little by way of press freedom.

But even as we celebrate the Nobel Peace Prize for Ressa and Muratov, let's pause for a moment and think about 35-year-old Raman Kashyap. He was a freelance journalist who sent reports to a local TV channel, Sadhna TV. According to Wikipedia, Sadhna TV is "an Indian spiritual television network owned and operated by Sadhna Group. It was launched on 18 April 2003."

Kashyap had joined the channel just two months ago according to his family. His other job was as a schoolteacher. He was married with two children aged 11 and three. He earned around Rs 500 for every story he filed, if it was used.

There are thousands of Raman Kashyaps who are a part of the media scene in India. But they are hardly ever recognised or even acknowledged. Kashyap has gained more fame in his death than he ever would have had he lived and continued to work as a district journalist.

In fact, his death throws a light on this army of underpaid and even unpaid news-gatherers that are so vital to the news business.

Sevanti Ninan, in her seminal book Headlines from the Heartland (Sage, 2007) recorded the growth of this hidden army of news-gatherers. They are not even designated as journalists. Most of them are not trained. And many do other jobs and fill in as journalists, or stringers, when required.

This process of localisation of news, which began in the mid-1980s, really took off in the 1990s. By then private television channels had entered the media scene. They swept up a large chunk of advertising that would have gone to print media.

This is when regional newspapers, starting with Eenadu in Andhra Pradesh followed by big Hindi newspapers like Dainik Jagran, Dainik Bhaskar and Hindustan, began the process of localisation. Beginning with introducing pages that accommodated district news, they even went on to have district editions. The aim was to sweep up local advertising as well as readership. This was a strategy to leverage their reach into semi-urban and rural areas with the big consumer products companies that wanted to reach these markets.

The formula worked as was evident in the growing circulation of these papers. But alongside, this also spawned a new breed of journalist. These men were tasked not just to report, but also to bring in advertising. Payment was by way of commission based on the amount of advertising they brought in. The reporting was mostly unpaid. But the person got a visiting card that identified him as a representative of a media group. That was currency in these rural settings; it gave the person status and some legitimacy.

According to Ninan, "Without exception every localisation drive in India's Hindi heartland was riding on the willing backs of a host of largely unpaid stringers, filing quantities of miscellaneous news from their immediate neighbourhood." (page 116) She notes that newspapers like Dainik Jagran or Hindustan would have, at any time, from 200 to 1000 stringers in a state. Ninan's book is replete with many fascinating details about the localisation of news and is worth revisiting as we think of journalists like Kashyap.

Only around 2005 did these newspapers introduce some form of gate keeping, by authenticating the information coming in from their stringers. Given the caste and political hierarchies that operate in a rural setting, how would one know for sure that the information was legitimate? An important step taken was to relieve stringers of the task of collecting advertising, thus removing the very real possibility of conflict of interest.

The process of newsgathering by part-time journalists that began with newspapers continued with television channels, especially the smaller ones. And now, with the advent of the internet and social media, anyone with a smartphone can become a journalist. To have eyes and ears on the ground with minimal additional investment is something that most media houses would welcome. And that is what they do.

But when one such journalist lands in trouble, or is injured, or even killed, there is no one who comes to his or her aid. As Jitendra Singh, another local journalist from Lakhimpur Kheri tells Shivangi Saxena in this short video posted by Newslaundry on Twitter, no one cares. Even the events of Lakhimpur Kheri would have passed without creating such a stir had the video showing the men being mowed down, shot by a local journalist, not surfaced within a couple of days. It was delayed, as Singh points out, because the internet was shut down and those who had footage could not share it until a couple of days later. He says, "Big Media came after the violence. There wouldn't have been any proof of the violence had we not been there."

That visual proof that these local, poorly paid journalists provide has proven repeatedly to be the essential building block of a larger story. The most recent of these is Lakhimpur Kheri but there are many like this from the past. The reach of Big Media, as Jitendra Singh calls it, would be greatly reduced if these men were not feeding the news machine.

From the perspective of the big media houses, there is always the question of credibility and authenticity of the reports that come, by way of district stringers. But there are ways to double check. The inputs from these stringers provide a lead, much as news agencies with reporters in more places than even the largest newspaper chain have always done. This is what media houses need to acknowledge and back grassroots news-gatherers, many of whom take considerable risks while doing their jobs.

Dalit child’s ‘rape’ in Delhi shows all that’s wrong with our country

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on August 5, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/08/05/dalit-childs-rape-in-delhi-shows-all-thats-wrong-with-our-country

In his engagingly written August 3 frontpage story in the Indian Express, about the Indian Women's hockey team at the Olympics, Mihir Vasavda wrote, “Each player has overcome seemingly insurmountable odds to reach this far: prejudice, poverty and patriarchy." Those three words encapsulate the story of Indian women, not just the remarkable lot wielding hockey sticks in Tokyo.

Prejudice, poverty, patriarchy. All three came together on August 1, when a 9-year-old Dalit girl, the only child of poor parents, went to a nearby crematorium to fill cold water from the cooler there. She never returned. She was dead by the time her mother saw her. Told that her only child had been electrocuted, the mother watched helplessly as the priest at the crematorium proceeded to cremate the child. “Don’t shout,” he allegedly told her.

This happened in India of 2021, in its national capital, in a week when the parliament was in session, when the most powerful politicians of this country were present in the same city where this little girl lived and died.

Can we then discuss the state of the nation or its politics, or even the state of India's media, without addressing what this horrific crime represents for India and what it reflects about our society?

There are many layers to the story of this alleged rape and murder in Old Nangli village in Delhi. One of the first, and so far the best, report on it was by Nidhi Suresh of Newslaundry who was on the spot, spoke to the parents, the police, and witnesses. Her reporting, including the video, is heart-wrenching and chilling, especially as it reveals that the priest, who allegedly forcibly cremated the little girl's body, is one of the four men charged with her murder and gangrape.

The report also brings out the sense of entitlement and impunity that men like this priest have that they could confidently instruct the family of the child to cremate her rather than go to the police.

This incident also brings back memories of January 2018, when an eight-year-old Bakerwal girl, the daughter of shepherds in Kathua, Jammu and Kashmir, was gangraped and killed. The crime took place in a religious place, and the priest was one of the men charged with rape and convicted.

The Kathua case led to nationwide protests. The court had to intervene to remind the media that neither the name nor the photograph of the child can be used when reporting crimes against minors under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act. The media fell in line after the court's orders. By then, her name and face had already been splattered across publications.

This time, the media has followed the law, including ensuring that the faces of the girl's parents are obscured when they are interviewed on camera. In the past, even if the media did not name the victim, they gave away plenty of clues by naming the parents, identifying the exact locality where they lived and other such details. In other words, everything that would identify the victim barring her name.

As the girl was Dalit, inevitably comparisons are being drawn to the gangrape and murder of a 19-year-old Dalit woman in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh, in September 2020. In both cases, the body was cremated without the consent of the family; in Hathras by the police and in Delhi by the priest.

Apart from the similarities between this crime and other cases in the past, there are several aspects that are notable, especially where the media and politics are concerned.

The site of the atrocity, the national capital, inevitably draws far greater attention in terms of both the media gaze and politics. Although Dalit women are raped and killed in numbers every year, the few cases that come to light are those that the media can access, or chooses to do so.

While this unequal media gaze distorts the reality of the extent of crimes against women, in the past it has been helpful. Media attention pushes governments to act, at least in the short term. We have seen this repeatedly in rape cases, and most dramatically in 2012 after the gangrape in Delhi. That led to the appointment of the Justice Verma Committee and substantial changes in the law, including the introduction of the death penalty (which incidentally was not recommended by the committee). The media focus following the rape and murder of the eight-year-old in Kathua also resulted in the death penalty being introduced for rape of minors under the POCSO Act.

Yet, the experience of the parents of the 9-year-old in Delhi reminds us yet again that, despite the changes in the law, the systemic problems in the criminal justice system remain. Not only were the parents treated insensitively by the police when they went to register the complaint, the police booked the four men accused of their daughter’s rape and murder under fairly minor provisions of the law. Only once the case was publicised did they agree to add the stringent provisions under the POCSO Act and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act.

The incident also reminds us yet again that despite the introduction of the death penalty for rape, the incidents of rape have not declined. The latest National Crime Records Bureau figures (available only up to 2019) show 32,033 rapes in one year. This figure is likely a gross underestimation as it is now well established that the majority of rapes that take place inside homes, or are committed by men known to the survivor, are never reported.

We have to wait and watch whether this time the media will focus on the crime or, as in the Kathua and Hathras cases, politics will dominate, making what happened almost incidental. This is already evident in some of the television talk shows since August 1 where the debate centres on whether this or that politician ought to have gone to meet the child's family and also whether her being Dalit is the trigger for their concern.

What then is the role of the media? To document. To get all sides. To try and fill holes in the narrative. But more importantly, to follow-up and not let the story die once the political spotlight moves from it. Many of these stories are multi-layered. Each layer tells us about our society, about prejudice, about patriarchy, about the criminal justice system and its constant failures, and about poverty.

The media must avoid falling into the trap of whataboutery: what about other rapes all over the country, why only this one, etc? Every crime of this nature is precisely that, a crime that must be acknowledged and addressed. In an ideal world, every such crime ought to be noted and reported. But if we can report, investigate, follow up even one like the August 1 incident, without giving more pain to the family of the victim, without reinforcing stereotypes, without obfuscating about the real issues of caste and the reality of child sexual assaults, we will have done a lot.

I have deliberately chosen to focus on only this issue in this column for several reasons, principally because it brings out so much that we fail to acknowledge about this country.

It shows us how technology, economic growth, even education are not making a dent in either caste prejudice and hatred or patriarchy. That despite the uproar that followed the 2012 Delhi gangrape, the changes in the laws, the subsequent change in the POCSO Act following the Kathua rape, our criminal justice system repeatedly fails the poor and marginalised castes. That even as we celebrate the few medals our athletes have won in Tokyo, mostly by women, we must remember the real face of the country we inhabit is represented by the struggles of these women in sports, and the death of girls like the 9-year-old.

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.

What’s wrong with the Indian media’s election coverage?

Broken News (Published on October 22, 2020)

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/amp/story/2020%2F10%2F22%2Fwhats-wrong-with-the-indian-medias-election-coverage?__twitter_impression=true 

 

Elections are always challenging times for the media. Also exhilarating.  For they give us the opportunity to go out in the field and get a sense of not just the political temperature but also more specifically how India lives, and dies.

 

This year, with the imminent elections in Bihar, field reporting has posed many challenges due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite that, it is heartening that at least some newspapers, websites and television channels are running stories that go beyond politics in Bihar.

 

These however remain the exceptions.  The bulk of the reporting, predictably, is on the political persona, what they say, and the permutations and combinations that always give grist to the political mill in India. Bihar, in addition, has that other element -- caste; it takes specialised knowledge for people in other parts of the country to get a handle on the many acronyms of castes and sub-castes that come into play in Bihar's politics.

 

The absence of women's voices from even routine reports on political rallies, for instance, is striking.  In fact, given that Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has made women so much the focus of his government, we are not hearing enough from the women in Bihar.

 

Beyond the rallies and public events, far fewer this time, is the reality of the lives of the people in Bihar.  Supriya Sharma of Scroll.in captures this in a report from Muzaffarpur. She chooses to speak to the poorest, the Musahars, and writes: "The Musahars live on the brink of hunger even in the best of years. But this year hunger is all pervasive in Bihar. Everywhere you go, it is the same refrain: 'Koi kaam nahi, ghar baitha hain.' There is no work, we are sitting at home. 'Ek time kha raha hai ek time nahi kha raha hai.' We are skipping meals every other day.

In such a calamitous year, the state is holding assembly elections in early November."

 

Particularly heart-breaking is the photograph of a young girl, a widow, holding up the photograph of her 22-year-old husband who died. She looks no more than 12 or 14 years old. Yet, she already has two children.  Child marriage? Underage pregnancies?  This is the kind of reality check election coverage can provide.

 

Another such story is this one from Newslaundry titled, "Sushil Modi says Bihar is open defecation free. If only he looked outside his door."  The report debunks these claims and reminds us yet again of the wide gap between official claims and the reality on the ground. In this case, the residents of a Dalit colony that is half a kilometre from the Deputy Chief Minister, Sushil Modi's house in Patna, are compelled to defecate in the open because the toilets are unusable.

 

Routine "developmental" reporting, as it was once called, is now history.  Only when there is a calamity, or elections, do media houses send reporters out to find out what's going on beyond the obvious range of media reach.  As always there are exceptions.  Often such stories are by independent journalists with a passion to write about the voiceless.  They struggle to get their pieces published.

 

Yet, in the 1980s, "development" was actually a beat. Hindustan Times, at that time headed by the redoubtable B. G. Verghese, had adopted the village Chhatera, not far from Delhi in Haryana.  Reporters were sent out regularly to write about it.  Every fortnight, a full page titled "Our village, Chhatera" appeared in the paper's Sunday magazine.  It ran from 1969 to 1975 and only stopped when Verghese was sacked by the paper just before the Emergency was declared.  His editorial, questioning the Indian government's action of annexing the former kingdom of Sikkim had earned the ire of Indira Gandhi, who was then the prime minister.

 

In Indian Express, where I worked in the 1980s under the same editor, a special correspondent was assigned to travel anywhere in India to write about health, education, and other issues linked with people's survival.  Even if times have changed, as has the media, the issues that affect the poorest in this country remain unchanged. 

 

Every story that appears about the India outside the media glare reminds us of this. Such as this distressing report in Indian Express from Madhya Pradesh where a 45-year-old woman bled to death before giving birth to a still born 16th child. Her 23-year-old daughter could not persuade her to have a tubectomy two years ago, when she was pregnant for the 15th time, because the husband would not agree to it.  Hard to believe that in the India of 2020 this is happening. Or perhaps not.

 

Furthermore, as the story points out, there is no gynaecologist in the nearest hospital, a mere 5 km away.  The nurses are trained to conduct routine uncomplicated deliveries, but if there is a woman in a high-risk pregnancy, like this woman, there is no one around to intervene.  Qualified help is available at a hospital 40 km away.

 

On the importance of field reporting in these times, The Print carried this article by Ashutosh Bhardwaj.  Writing on what he calls the crisis in Indian media, Bhardwaj states:

 

"Journalism plummeted when social media became the preferred mode of journalistic expression and hashtags hijacked field reporting. The slide continued when the follower count started determining the worth of a journalist, and instead of toiling away in the field, they increasingly opted for provocative opinions in a few characters. It reached its nadir when selfies became an obsession, a complex reportage brought fewer rewards than Twitter outrage, and the holy adage ‘you are as good as your last byline’ stood replaced by ‘you are as good as your last tweet’."

 

While his general point is valid, I don't think the "hashtag journalists" he is referring to are the reporters who are still out in the field doing their job, such as those mentioned above.  Field reporting has suffered because media houses have decided it is not worth investing in this kind of in-depth reporting. On television in particular, opinion is much cheaper than reporting. Print media still devotes substantial space to reporting but if you scan newspapers from the 1980s or even 1990s, you will notice the stark difference.

 

With so many reporters being laid off as media houses downsize, we really cannot put the blame on reporters.  And if a small section of high profile journalists, living in the bubble created by social media, choose to resort to hashtag journalism, this is not a reflection on all journalists.

 

The crisis in the Indian media requires a much longer and detailed discussion. And it goes well beyond reporting, from the field. It is a crisis that has been exacerbated by a government that has made life impossible for any media choosing to report the reality.

 

Most shocking and condemnable has been the attack on the editor of Kashmir Times, Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal. This is the oldest English language newspaper in Kashmir, founded by her father Ved Bhasin, one of the most respected editors in India.

 

In the last month, Jamwal has had to face a physical intrusion into her home in Jammu, a place allotted to her as a journalist.  People forced themselves into her house claiming it had been allotted to them, turned things upside down and stole her personal belonging.

 

As if that was not enough, this week, the office allotted to Kashmir Times in Srinagar's Press Enclave was sealed by the Estates Department. All this because Jamwal remains an outspoken critic of the government's actions in Kashmir. She rightly calls this a "political vendetta".

 

The message this sends out to all media, not just in Kashmir, is clear.  If you cross a line, there is a price to pay. Either toe the line, or perish.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

Broken News

https://www.newslaundry.com/amp/story/2020%2F06%2F04%2Fmedia-isnt-in-the-positivity-business-its-job-is-to-show-the-ugly-truth?__twitter_impression=true

 

“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.

Why the media can’t let Delhi 2020 slip off its radar

Broken News

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2020/03/12/why-the-media-cant-let-delhi-2020-slip-off-its-radar
(Published on March 12, 2020)

The aim of the carnage was to send out a message to Muslims that there’s no space for them in the public square. We, as journalists, can’t afford to miss such a message.

   

The violence that convulsed North East Delhi in the last week of February might have slipped off the front pages of newspapers and disappeared altogether from television news channels. Yet the story about Delhi 2020, as the violence over those days is now being called, is far from over. In some ways it is just beginning.

Unfortunately, a major weakness of the media in this country is its unwillingness to follow up on issues. Only a few dogged reporters persist, often struggling to get their stories featured in mainstream media.

At such a time, it is gratifying that some digital news platforms, even those struggling to stay afloat financially, and a few newspapers are doing detailed reporting from the ground of what exactly happened over those three days. And the stories are horrifying. This, this, this and this are just a few such reports. They are important because they inform us about what could happen in the future. And there’s little doubt that there is a future for such conflagrations given that there has been no word of sympathy for those who suffered from the governing party at the Centre.

The most chilling of the recent reports from North East Delhi after the killings ended is the one by Arunabh Saikia of Scroll titled “‘I coloured my sword red’: Meet Delhi rioters who say they killed Muslims.” Saikia managed to speak to several men, including one who boasted about killing three Muslim men. Here’s an excerpt that gives a flavour of the article:

At around 10 am, Kumar said he got his first hit. “The Mohammadan was running,” he recalled. “The Hindu public was chasing him. I was leading the pack.”

“I was the first to catch up with him, and hit him with my rod on his head,” he continued, his voice turning shriller and his hands mimicking the strike. “Then he fell down, and the public pounced on him after that…de dhana dhan dhan.”

The story illustrates why what happened cannot be viewed as an aberration, a one-off that will not repeat itself. It underlines that such violence is not the result of one provocative speech, even if the BJP’s Kapil Mishra has to be held to account for the outright provocation in his speech of February 23. It tells us that the seeds of such visceral hatred that can send a man to kill strangers, men he does not know, only because they are “Mohammadan”, were laid over time. And the fruits of that effort are now evident.

A tangential but important detail in the story is the reporter acknowledging that these men spoke openly to him because they identified him as a Hindu by the thread he wore around his wrist.

Should journalists use their religious identity in such situations to gain access? This is not to say Saikia deliberately wore the thread around his wrist. But should journalists reveal their affiliation or identity, and use it to their advantage in certain situations? During the Delhi violence, many journalists were questioned about their religious identities. Others were simply attacked because they were journalists, irrespective of whether they were Hindu or Muslim, as reports on Newslaundry and other platforms have confirmed. But reporters covering communal conflict often face this dilemma.

Another reality that is only just emerging is the impact of communal conflict on women. The stories of what they face often take time to emerge. Women do not speak easily about this, particularly when entire families and neighbourhoods are traumatised and displaced.  But the stories emerge over time as this report suggests.

The details recounted in these reports filed after the violence ended allow us as mediapersons, and readers, to place Delhi 2020 within a larger perspective. For it is not the period of time over which the killings and arson took place, or even their location, but what the pattern of violence tells us about this particular conflagration and what it portends for the future.

Another vexing question that journalists, and media houses, face is the terms that should be used to describe what happened. In Delhi last month, as in several other conflagrations around India, it is virtually impossible to arrive at a definite term. It takes scholars and academics time to study the developments and then decide whether what happened should be described as a “riot”, “communal violence”, or a “pogrom”.

The discussion has already begun and many different perspectives have been articulated even as terms like riot, or pogrom, or sectarian or communal violence are used, often interchangeably, in the same piece.

Ashutosh Varshney, writing in the Indian Express, suggests that the first day of Delhi 2020 was a clash between two groups, pro-CAA and anti-CAA, and thus could be termed a riot, while day two and three “look like a pogrom, as the police watched attacks on the Muslims and was either unable to intervene, or unwilling to do so, while some cops clearly abetted the violence”.

The sociologist Satish Deshpande, on the other hand, in a powerful piece in The Hindu argues that what happened was neither a “riot”, nor “communal violence” nor a “pogrom”.  He writes: “The truth is that we do not have a single word or phrase yet that can name this phenomenon because it is really the newest stage of an ongoing project rather than a standalone event.”

By “ongoing project” Deshpande is referring not just to the period immediately before the violence erupted, but going back to when a justification started to be created for demonising and attacking a particular community, in this case Muslims.

Apart from finding the right term – it’s important and likely to be the subject of considerable debate and difference for some time to come – it is essential that the media unearths all aspects of those terrible three days in Delhi. Given that there are reports that the Delhi police appear to be actively discouraging reporters, and even relief workers, from visiting the worst-affected areas as reported here, there’s more reason to continue digging.

We also have yet to find a reasonable explanation for that strange action by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting against two Malayalam television channels Asianet News and Media One for reporting what they saw during the violence. These channels made no bones about explicitly stating the nature of the structures that were attacked, such as mosques. They also reported that the police stood by and did nothing, a fact noted and reported by several others, including the BBC. But by doing this, the ministry’s order stated, the two channels apparently violated “Rule 6(1)(c) of the Cable Television Networks Rules, 1994, which says that ‘no programme should be carried...which contains attack on religions or communities…’ and Rule 6(1)(e) that says “no programme should be carried...which is likely to encourage or incite violence…’,” according to a report in the Telegraph.

The I&B minister, Prakash Javadekar, claims the decision to suspend the two channels for 48 hours was taken without his consent. One of the channels, Asianet News, is owned by Rajeev Chandrasekhar, a BJP Rajya Sabha member, who is better known as the owner of Republic TV. After Javadekar’s intervention, both channels were restored.

But who gave the order? An overzealous babu? Why was it done in the first place? To send out a message that if the government chose to act in this way, it had the power to do so?

Delhi 2020 is a story that is far from over. From the reasons for the visible civic neglect as reflected in the drains where dead bodies were discovered to the unplanned manner in which such areas grow and flourish even as the rest of the city receives the munificence of tax funds, there is much more to investigate apart from the actual events over those days in February. 

As Satish Deshpande has emphasised, this is not a one-off event. The media needs to be conscious of this. If this is the one lesson to draw from Delhi 2020, it is this. That those days in February might well be the precursor to the days ahead, as the political mood in the country shifts perceptibly towards accepting that the aim of creating a Hindu Rashtra might already have been achieved.

When I asked an elderly Muslim taxi driver in Mumbai who had come to the city from Bihar in the 1980s what he was feeling after hearing about the violence in Delhi, he said, “Behen, what can I say? The Hindu Rashtra is already here. People like us have no place in it.” 

To me, that was the aim of Delhi 2020. To send out that message to Muslims, especially those who had found the courage to take to the street to protest against the CAA. That there was simply no space for them on that street. We, as journalists, cannot afford to miss such a message that speaks to us during and after such tragic events.