From Gaza to Dhaka: Missing Indian lens in global reportage

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on October 4, 2024

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/10/04/from-gaza-to-dhaka-missing-indian-lens-in-global-reportage

October 7 marks one year since the attack on Israel by Hamas and the ongoing war on Gaza. Thousands of Palestinians, including children, have been killed in this past year, and much of Gaza has been reduced to a pile of rubble. Meanwhile, many of the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas after its attack remain in captivity.

The world has watched this war through the media’s coverage. The heart of the conflict zone, that is Gaza, has been inaccessible to most journalists except those based there. We have seen their reports even as they came under fire. Their reports, often circulated through social media, gave us an unfiltered view of the devastation. And we know of the many who died while reporting or were targeted by the Israelis even when they were off duty. 

Since October last year, much has been written and analysed about the coverage of this conflict by Western media, including the words used to describe the devastation. For instance, when leading newspapers like the New York Times report that X number of people “died” in Gaza, the use of that word hides the ugly reality that these people, including small children, were “killed” by Israeli bombardment on civilian areas. They did not just die. 

Pointing this out is not nitpicking. It is essential to understand how what appears as factual, unbiased reporting can colour the understanding of the reader or viewer of a war. 

But this column is not about the reporting on the Israel-Palestine conflict, but on how we as Indians view what is going on. What is the filter through which we get our information when war breaks out outside our immediate region? Would we have paid more attention if journalists from Indian media organisations had also been reporting from the region? If we do not see Indian bylines in the reportage from there, why is that so?   

If you look at the “World” page of any major Indian newspaper, you will notice that most of the stories are from international news agencies like Reuters or by the news service of major Western newspapers like the New York Times. Rarely do you see an Indian byline.

One could argue that the Israel-Palestine conflict does not touch most Indians. Hence, media houses would not be interested in investing in sending journalists to cover the conflict. However, it must be noted that two small independent digital platforms, The News Minute and Newslaundry, have raised funds to send veteran television journalist Sreenivasan Jain to report from the region. Here’s a link to his first report.

Even if mainstream news organisations in India conclude that their average reader or viewer is not interested in a war taking place in some other part of the world, what about our immediate neighbourhood? Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal.

There was a time when several national newspapers had correspondents in all these countries. That did not last long. It was only The Hindu that persisted and sent correspondents to report from our neighbouring countries.

For decades, Haroon Habib, a veteran Bangladeshi journalist, reported for The Hindu from Dhaka. His reports were nuanced. They had context, and for anyone wanting to understand the developments in that country, Habib’s reports were a must. He stopped reporting some years ago. And since then, despite the recent tumultuous developments in that country, neither The Hindu nor any other paper has had a full-time correspondent in Dhaka.

In Sri Lanka too, The Hindu has always had a correspondent, and today, it is the only one that has one in Colombo. In fact, with the election of President Anura Kumar Dissanayake last month, it was The Hindu’s reporting that provided important insights into the impact of this change on relations between Sri Lanka and India. This comes through in this podcast featuring Amit Barua, who worked with The Hindu till recently, Nirupama Subramanian, a former Sri Lanka correspondent of the publication, and Meera Srinivasan, who is currently based there.

The Hindu also had a presence in Pakistan for decades. But in 2014, its correspondent and the journalist representing PTI were asked to leave by the Pakistani government. Since then, there has been no Indian reporter in the country, although PTI has a local journalist who files stories. As a result, all we read is agency copy, usually on statements by politicians, unlike in the past when at least The Hindu carried stories on the different aspects of life in Pakistan, including arts and culture. 

Even in Nepal, which is easily accessible to Indians, no Indian newspaper has had a full-time correspondent stationed there. We get news of disasters and changes of government, but little else.

The result is that even when there are dramatic developments, as in Sri Lanka two years ago and last month in the presidential elections, and more recently in Bangladesh, the news coverage is at best perfunctory. Agency copy gives us the bare facts. Rarely does it have adequate background or context that a correspondent based there can provide.

Apart from our immediate neighbours, Indian newspapers don’t at present have anyone reporting from China, a country that is constantly in the news on various counts. Again, in the past, most major newspapers stationed journalists in Beijing. The reason was obvious. An Indian journalist would be able to sift what news would interest Indian readers. 

Coming back to West Asia, for years The Hindu had a correspondent based in Dubai whose remit was to cover the region. He had the resources to travel and report. The bylines of journalists like Kesava Menon and Atul Aneja were known to the readers of The Hindu. Today, you will not find an Indian byline for any story on the Israel-Palestine conflict or even from Iran that has now been drawn into this rapidly escalating conflict.

A major reason for this drastic reduction in people reporting from around the world is economics. Print media has faced drastic cuts in advertising revenue. As a result, barring those media houses that dominate a particular market, most have had to scale down news coverage.

Context, of course, is needed in all news coverage. Take, for instance, the dramatic developments before Gandhi Jayanti, October 2, in Delhi, when the march led by Sonam Wangchuk from Ladakh was stopped at the Delhi border. Wangchuk has been leading the demand for full statehood for Ladakh ever since it was reduced to a Union Territory in 2019 along with Jammu and Kashmir with the reading down of Article 370. His latest demand is for Ladakh to be included in Schedule 6 of the Constitution, which will give the people of Ladakh the right to decide how their natural resources will be used. While the political demand has featured in the reports, not enough is known about the latter.

This article in Scroll explains why pastoralists in Ladakh are objecting to the plan to set up a 13-gigawatt integrated renewable energy project with solar farms and windmills. The energy generated will be used not in Ladakh but outside the region. Setting up this kind of project, which will occupy vast tracts of land, will deny these people access to their traditional pasture lands and affect their migration routes. This is one of the reasons the people of Ladakh want the right to decide whether they want or need these kinds of projects. 

Such stories illustrate how essential it is for the media to have feet on the ground, in India, and in our neighbourhood.

After the hysteria

The Hoot

Second Take

By Kalpana Sharma

Namaste Obama, So Long Obama.  And now, for the rest of the news. 

For three days, news died in India.  There was only one story, the first visit of President Barack Obama to India.  For three days, that is all you saw.  Obama landing, Obama walking down the steps of Air Force One, Maharashtra CM Ashok Chavan greeting him (with TV channels immediately speculating whether he broke protocol) and the President’s helicopter, Marine One, making its way through the Mumbai smog toward the Taj Mahal Hotel. 

Did Indian news television channels need to give the US President’s visit such “blanket” coverage and a “ball-by-ball” commentary?

It is evident that it is the nature of this coverage, and the compulsion to keep up the chatter and micro-analyze everything, that led to the extraordinary turn of events within an hour of Obama’s arrival.  His 10-minute speech at the Taj Mahal Hotel at a function to commemorate the victims of 26/11 sprouted the most amazing instant analysis. Usually, you comment on what a person says.  But the media took off on what Obama did not say, that he did not take the “P” word, did not name Pakistan specifically as being responsible for the 26/11 terror attack.  Given that the journalists anchoring the shows were experienced, should have been aware of diplomacy, geopolitics and the fact that it was highly unlikely that a domestically beleaguered American President was going to launch an attack on Pakistan within minutes of landing in India, it was an entertaining spectacle to watch practically every channel taking off on this issue.

And of course, the over-the-top and instant response by the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Rudi Pratap Singh that was later retracted was probably partly as a result of this concerted harangue by the television channels.

By the end of the third day, NDTV virtually acknowledged that the media might have been a little too obsessive on the Pakistan question and demanding that the US President name Pakistan.  Other channels were not so honest.  In fact, Times Now just stopped short of patting itself on the back when Obama finally uttered the “P” word!

Arnab Goswami of Times Now was, of course, his predictable and entertaining self.  On the first day, the channel kept flashing how the US President was “soft on terror”.  True to style, for the first two days, the channel kept up its tirade about why Obama was not naming Pakistan despite the sentiments of “the people of India”. By day three, and after President Obama’s address to the joint Houses of Parliament, the channel did an about turn.  Suddenly, Goswami decided that this was indeed a “historic” visit and went to the extent of saying that he believed that Obama was a “hawk”!  All this because the American President finally obliged by using the “P” word!

The other issue that media focused on to the exclusion of almost everything else was whether the US would back India’s attempt to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council.  If you listened to some of the discussions on this, and were uninformed about the complexities of the UN system, you would be led to believe that all it needed was a nod from the United States for this to happen.  As a result, when the US President did say in his speech to Parliament that the US would welcome India’s entry into the Security Council, people would have thought that this was the end of the story.  The fact that even this endorsement by the US President is only part of a long and complex process that does not guarantee India a seat barely came across. 

If the Indian media obsessed about the fact that the US President did not use the “P” word, it completely missed the fact that he did not use the “C” word, or China.  As far as the region is concerned, and the economies of both India and the US, China looms large and extremely important on the horizon and simply cannot be ignored in any discussion on the future of the world economy.  The Indian media’s focus on Pakistan detracts completely from an important and informed debate that is needed on China.

While there was routine reporting of the $10 billion in business deals that were struck on the very first day between Indian and American businesses, there was no time to analyze what they actually mean for India because the chatter on the television channels – barring the business channels -- was almost exclusively on the Pakistan factor.  President Obama used the business deals to speak to his constituency at home by emphasizing the 50,000 jobs these deals would create.  But how many jobs will they create in India?  No one asked that question.

It is interesting that at least some American newspapers reported the demonstrations by the Bhopal victims about the failure of the US to help in the extradition of Warren Anderson of Union Carbide.  Again, an important issue like this that actually speaks to the absence of adequate regulation in the early years when American companies did set up shop in India was not addressed in the media discussion at all.

Against the background of the agrarian crisis in India, Obama’s promise of another green revolution – an “evergreen” revolution – with the help of American agro-technology was acknowledged by just one channel that thought this important enough.  NewsX invited Devinder Sharma, a specialist in this area, to comment on the issue of American technology and the Indian economy.

And although President Obama did mention climate change in his speech to Parliament, there was practically no discussion on it on the news channels.  Yet, anyone who has followed this issue knows how crucial is the role of the US.  With a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, there could be more problems pushing through legislation in the US to cut down greenhouse gases.  Climate change affects our agriculture, our climate patterns, and the livelihood of millions of people dependent on natural resources.  Yet, it featured nowhere in the television discussions.

But coming back to the first question: was such blanket coverage really necessary? The US President has announced that India has “arrived” as a “global power”.  TV pundits kept emphasizing that the equation between India and the US has now changed and we are now on a more equal footing.  Yet, if you look at the media coverage of the Obama visit, you would wonder.

(To read the original, click on the link above)

Is our neighbour's tragedy not our own?

So why did the Indian media choose to ignore a huge human tragedy which, by virtue of its proportions, has to be considered “breaking news” by any objective criteria, asks KALPANA SHARMA

Posted Wednesday, Aug 11 23:50:10, 2010

SECOND TAKE KALPANA SHARMA    On August 6, the BBC carried extensive reports on the terrible floods in Pakistan.  The estimated number of people affected stood at an incredible 12 million.  The number increases by the day and at last count stood at 14 million. That evening I checked the main news bulletins on three English news channels, Times Now, NDTV and CNN/IBN. There was not a word on any of these channels about the devastation in our neighbouring country. The next day, August 7, I checked five Mumbai editions of English language newspapers ' The Times of India, Indian Express, Hindustan Times, DNA and Mint—as well as The Hindu on the net.  Barring The Hindu, the only Indian newspaper with a correspondent in Pakistan, not a single paper even mentioned the floods although all carried news of Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari's visit to the UK and his meeting with British Prime Minister David Cameron. By August 8, some reports did appear but more often than not they emphasized the political angle, such as the criticism in Pakistan over Zardari's absence from the country, rather than the enormous humanitarian and ecological catastrophe.  For details on that, one had to read papers and websites outside India. So why did the Indian media choose to ignore a huge human tragedy which, by virtue of its proportions, has to be considered “breaking news” by any objective criteria? Going by a traditional understanding of events considered newsworthy, any natural disaster affecting such a large population anywhere in the world would fall into this category. Disasters closer home merit even greater interest. Hence Pakistan's proximity also makes the floods there eminently newsworthy. One could argue that floods are an annual phenomenon in vast swathes of the subcontinent and a media now obsessed with the exceptional or sensational is bound to treat such events as routine.  Indeed, two years ago the floods in Bihar that displaced 2.5 million people got more coverage outside India than in our media. Yet one cannot fail to notice that torrential rain and mudslides in China were reported within a day of their occurrence while Pakistan's worst floods in 80 years had to wait longer for the Indian media to take note. Even when reports appeared, they spoke of an angle that presumably would interest Indian readers, such as “terror” groups collecting funds for relief efforts much as they did for the Kashmir earthquake in 2005. Does this, in fact, illustrate how the media on both sides of the border contributes to a narrow and limited picture that remains firmly fixated on the areas of dispute and conflict whereas our two countries, virtually joined at the hip, share much more in common than we care to admit?  The aam admi and aurat have similar problems. The natural environment is a mirror image in some parts, not to speak of overlaps in cultural heritage. Yet there is precious little of this other Pakistan in our media ' or of the other India in theirs. If we read reports about the devastation caused by these floods, the problems of getting across relief, the misappropriation of relief funds, the efforts of civil society groups and the disappointment and anger against politicians, we would realise that our experiences during such natural disasters is not that different from theirs. What is different is the trenchant and frank criticism of their leaders.  We tend to be far more polite. Read Café Pyala for a brutally frank take on current developments inPakistan and the role of the media. Here is a quote: “So Zardari was an insensitive ass. But is that such breaking news that the media focus shifts entirely to undermining him? Were he not the president, would the suffering of the affectees of the biggest floods in Pakistan's history be any less? Would the administration become super-efficient? Isn't the issue of the inherent lack of capacity of the Pakistani state to deal with such crises a bigger issue than Zardari and his jaunts? Criticise him by all means but is a man chucking a couple of shoes in his direction really a bigger story than the tens of millions displaced from their homes? Or have we become so blinded by our rage and the cult of personality that we are willing to jettison all sense of proportion?” Clearly, politics and entertainment and politics asentertainment have become far more important to media on both sides than the sudden and perennial tragedies that affect millions of ordinary people. I want to end this column with a quote from Basharat Peer's searing “Letter to an unknown Indian” in the Economic Times (August 9, 2010). It addresses a similar issue, what the media chooses to report, what it chooses to ignore: “When pain makes it difficult to articulate coherently, quiet remembrance helps. Like many other Kashmiris, I have been in silence, committing to memory, the deed, the date. The faces of the murdered boys, the colour of their shirts, their grieving fathers — these might disappear from the headlines, but they have already found their place in our collective memory. Kashmir remembers what is done in your name, in the name of your democracy, whether its full import ever reaches your drawing rooms and offices or not. Your soldiers of reason carrying their press cards might dissuade you from seeing it, comfort you with their cynical use of academic categories and interpretations of Kashmir, they might rerun the carefully chosen, convenient images on TV, but Kashmir sees the unedited Kashmir.” Unedited Kashmir, unedited Pakistan, unedited India. Given current media realities, is this ever possible?