Breaking news, not views

By Seema Goswami

As the media brouhaha about the television coverage of the Mumbai attacks rages, it’s time to stop being defensive and to try and understand just why people are so upset.

The words used — in social discourse, on the internet and in the print media — to describe the coverage are telling. Over the top, sensationalist, exploitative and melodramatic — these are just some of the adjectives being thrown about.

But the fury of the response and the venom of the attacks suggest that this is not a one-off thing. This resentment over the way TV channels cover events has been building for a while. The 26/11 attacks were just a catalyst for people to express long-standing grievances.

At the root of this anger lurks the resentment of the viewing public about the assumption of journalists that their opinions are the only ones that matter. As offensive is their presumption in inserting their own views into the narrative of whatever story they happen to be covering.

What is under attack here is the constant contamination of the news by the views of those who disseminate it on television. As the cliché goes, comment may be free but facts are sacred. And when it comes to the news space, they need to be kept apart. The problem with TV is that there is a constant blurring of the lines so that one never quite knows where the news ends and the views begin. 

God knows the print media has its own problems and it often gets things wrong. But where it scores is that the dividing line between opinion and fact is always very clear. Opinion belongs on the edit and op-ed page — and in the feature and style sections. The news appears on all the other pages, uncontaminated by the views of those reporting it.

Yes, newspaper columnists can be as self-indulgent and self-obsessed as TV reporters (and I’m guilty as charged for my weekly column in Brunch), but on the whole they restrict themselves to the spaces reserved for the venting of opinion.

In TV that is hardly ever the case. Newscasters start editorialising in the middle of a news broadcast, anchors of panel discussions are more interested in holding forth than eliciting the opinions of their guests, and interviewers routinely interrupt their subjects in mid-sentence only to insert their own agendas.

And that’s what viewers resent the most: being told how to feel or how to think. We are not imbeciles sitting at home that you have to tell us over and over again that an event is a national tragedy. We can work it out for ourselves.

Is it really surprising then that the viewing public has finally snapped and said: Don’t tell us how to feel about things. Don’t even tell us how you feel about things. Just give us the facts and let us make up our own minds.

But while it is easy to knock TV journalists, let’s not forget that some of these problems are inherent in the medium itself. In the print media, when you sit down at a computer terminal to write your story, you are already one step removed from the event. And that in itself lends some distance and hence, some perspective to your report.

Television journalists don’t have that luxury. The nature of their job demands that they report from the thick of things in real time. And when there are flames billowing behind you, grenades exploding, bullets being fired, feelings running high, it is difficult to step back from the event so that you can report it dispassionately.

But it is easy to start to think that you are part of the story. It is easy to con yourself into believing that it’s all happening to you rather than around you. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that your emotions, your reactions matter — that your pain, your anger, your anguish are part of the narrative.

Only they’re not. Your job is to tell the story, not become the story. More important, it’s your job is to tell the story as an objective observer in a manner devoid of hyperbole. The event is big enough; you don’t need to magnify it through needless hysteria.

As the post-mortems on the TV coverage of 26/11 get under way, one thing is clear. What people resent most is getting the news through the prism of someone else's emotions.

A reporter is supposed to be the filter not the funnel between the news and the viewer. A filter helps keep all the extraneous clutter out so that you can concentrate on the essential details of the story. A funnel on the other hand just pushes everything through without bothering about the contents too much.

All of us in the media — both print and TV — need to treat the news as a sacred space inviolable by opinion. And just as we exhort the government to keep church and state apart, we need to draw a line between news and views — and make sure that we never violate it.

The message from the public is loud and clear. And we journalists ignore it at our own peril.

Seema Goswami writes the Sunday column ‘Spectator’ in Brunch

Media and civil society

By Sevanti Ninan

Public opinion originates from what we call civil society that has a love-hate relationship with the media.

ONCE again, public opinion is polarised between the liberal, human-rights-upholding types and what we euphemistically describe as the majoritarian view. Which means Hindus feeling bullish about their religion, and indignant about the ascendance of pesky minorities. It finds expression in the media, this polarity. It also vents its spleen on the media. Liberals bash the Hindutva brigade in newspapers and TV channels, the majoritarians bash the rest of us. The rest of the time we sit on panel discussions and in seminars and bash ourselves. 

Our alleged sins of commission are long. We are shallow, anti-poor and sensational — we devote acres of newsprint and hours of TV time to upper class deaths, killings, suicides. We are shamelessly driven by the market. We never do enough follow-up on issues which concern people. We are guilty of sham liberalism. We focus on the pogroms in Gujarat but do not investigate what happened on the Sabarmati Express at Godhra with equal fervour. But we are also guilty of blatant communalism. Ask Sitaram Yechury or Mani Shankar Aiyar. 

And who knows, may be we are also to blame for "Lagaan's" no-win. Aren't we the ones who helped the nation convince itself that we were going to take the Oscars by storm? Critics of the media have convinced me that a lot of the problems that this country has would disappear if my tribe took a collective flying jump into the Arabian Sea. 

Public opinion originates from what we call civil society. (Even when it is being horrendously uncivil.) They are a concomitant of the media, we wouldn't exist if they weren't there to read us or watch us. It is civil society that has a love-hate relationship with the media. Lately, the liberals and pinkos among them love us for telling it like we saw it in Gujarat, the right-leaning majority view is that the media sucks. Tarun Vijay, editor of Panchjanya, put it colourfully when he said we are in the grip of the Marxist Mullah combine. 

And the pinko-liberals among us worry about what we should do when we are getting squeezed between a middle class that is steadily moving right, and the demands of the market. Both belong to civil society. The curious thing is that all the sins laid at our door originate from trying to please those whom our circulation and channel managers tell us we must please. And the mainstream channels and big metro newspapers are not the only ones. Go to Rajasthan, or Andhra Pradesh, or Gujarat and you will find leading newspapers both whipping up communal sentiment (doubtless in the belief that they are pandering to readers) as well as coming up with colour sections that could give the froth in the Delhi Times or HT City a run for their money. 

If the media doesn't waste its breath on the problems of the marginalised, it is because those who consume it are not interested. Neither in Bombay, nor in Jamshedpur nor in Coimbatore. Star News used to have a daily feature at the end of the news called "India Matters". It carried either heart warming or heart wrenching stories about The Real India. But the channel concluded that it was only watched by researchers and activists. It never got sponsors for that segment, which they claimed not to mind, but when they found that people were reaching for their remotes (so they said) they dropped it and incorporated those kinds of stories in the main news bulletin. 

Similarly, at a self-flagellating media discussion last fortnight the audience was told that it used to be said in the Bombay Times of India that there was no need to write about the problems of Dharavi because the paper's readers did not live there. 

Besides the sins of omission, there are also sins of commission. Mindless serials churned out by Ekta Kapoor dominate prime time. However Star Plus sent around its viewership ratings for the first week of March to show that these have a 22.26 per cent share of prime time viewing in nine cities. Sony comes next with exactly the same kind of riveting drivel. And a study released in Delhi by the Centre for Advocacy and Research last week showed that children in big and small cities in this country watch as much as five and a half hours of television every day, 50 per cent of it adult fare, in the company of their parents. Did we hear civil society blaming the media for being a bad influence? 

Then there is this business of feedback. Channel decides what sells on the basis of television rating points, which cover only a miniscule number of households in sizeable towns and cities. Also on the basis of letters. The more high-minded among us don't write to TV channels and give them feedback. Do we protest when Aaj Tak carries a close up of Natasha Singh's battered face or clips of the Hindi film "Baazigar" to demonstrate how she might have died? Instead the channel is flooded with advertisements, which is the only kind of approval it is looking for. Advertisers are also part of civil society. Do we ever ask them why they do not support less regressive programming? 

In between are some sins that originate from the nature of the medium. Star News anchor Arnab Goswami said about discussions on news bulletins, "We never get the moderate voices — they are not good television." Besides, in six or seven minutes there was no time for the moderates, he said. He was speaking at a media seminar last fortnight. (These are becoming a veritable cottage industry.) 

But good journalism persists, while making its compromises. The Indian Express carries really hard-hitting investigations about continuing atrocities and the role of the State in Gujarat on its front page. And inside, it carries equally long stories on why the India International Centre is rationing its pastries or what Amar Singh's twins will wear for their first birthday. Civil society such as it is, seems to demand both. 

E-mail the writer at sevantininan@vsnl.com

Mediapersons under siege

By Shashi Tharoor 

Freedom of the press ... blood stained and a casualty during the war in Iraq. 

AS I write these words, on May 3, World Press Freedom Day, I am reminded that 12 journalists have been killed just this year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based independent non-profit organisation. All over the world, journalists are jailed, attacked and harassed every day.                                                                 

Throughout the world, World Press Freedom Day, observed on May 3, serves as an occasion to inform the public of violations of the right to freedom of expression and as a reminder that many journalists brave death or jail to bring people their daily news. Freedom of the press is the mortar that binds together the bricks of freedom — and it is also the open window embedded in those bricks, through which we can all see the world. 

The day marks the anniversary of the Declaration of Windhoek, a statement of principles drawn up by African journalists calling for a free, independent and pluralistic media in their continent and throughout the world. The declaration, adopted in 1991 at a seminar organised by the United Nations and UNESCO in Windhoek, Namibia, affirms that a free press is essential to the existence of democracy and a fundamental human goal. 

A free press is one of the most essential components of a democratic society. And there is no longer any serious debate about the proposition that democracy is essential for social and economic development. 

There can be little argument that information and freedom go together. The information revolution is inconceivable without political democracy — and vice-versa. Already, the spread of information has had a direct impact on the degree of accountability and transparency of governments around the world. 

There is widespread recognition that restraints on the flow of information directly undermine development. Global interdependence means that those who receive and disseminate information have an edge over those who curtail it. The consequences are apparent in all fields of human endeavour. 

The new hallmarks of development are the ability to receive, download and send information through electronic networks, and the capacity to share information — including not only newspapers and journals, but also on-line web sites — without censorship or restrictions. Thus developing countries need to open up to the outside world, liberalise the mass media, and resist government control and censorship of information. 

This year the United Nations is organising two major events that will stress the centrality of press freedom. The World Electronic Media Forum, convening in Geneva from December 9 to 11, will bring together media executives and practitioners from developed and developing countries, as well as policy makers, to discuss the role of the electronic media in the information society. 

The forum will contribute to the only global summit this year — the World Summit on the Information Society, which will be held in Geneva from December 10 to 12, 2003, with a second phase in Tunis in 2005. Freedom of the press will be a major focus of this first-ever global summit on the subject of the information society. 

The summit's draft Declaration of Principles stresses "the commitment to democracy and good governance as well as the existence, in accordance with the legal system of each country, of independent, pluralistic and free mass and other communication media". If the draft is adopted, world leaders will commit themselves to freedom of expression and guarantee the plurality of information. 

The information society of the 21st Century can thrive only if citizens are provided with full information to allow democratic participation at all levels. The summit will engage the media as indispensable key participants of the information society, and will, we hope stress the role of press freedom as vital to democracy and good governance. 

The summit should also help promote the creation of domestic content, in line with the local culture and in the local language. Cultural diversity and pluralism are essential to an inclusive information society. The "digital divide" is not only a technological one, but also a content divide that penalises developing countries. The two concepts — diversity of content and press freedom — can and need to go together. 

New digital technology offers great possibilities for enhancing traditional media and combining them with new media. Moreover, traditional media, and especially radio and television, remain the sole form of access to the information society for much of the world's population, including the very poor and the illiterate. 

Perhaps this is the newest challenge for the United Nations — to work to bring access to information, and the empowerment it offers, to all the world's people. Only then will equity and equality be truly brought to the information revolution. Only then will the world's poor and underprivileged have a real way out of the darkness that shrouds their voices, and their hopes. 

Shashi Tharoor is the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information and the author of seven books.

Changing work ethics

BY SEVANTI NINAN 




The tragedy in my old fashioned view is that someone who climbs too fast misses out on learning, travelling, getting to know beats, a process which also helped you discover what really interested you. 



On the one hand journalists today command prices they never did before, at ages unheard of before. On the other hand journalistic ignorance and incompetence has touched wondrous heights. The imagination boggles at what the two together mean for the p rofession. High flyers who, like the house hunter in the TV ad who does it all on the computer, never learnt to gather information from anywhere other than the Web? Reporters who cannot structure anything more complex than a 600-word story? Are we headed for a blossoming of media without enough of an underlay of able journalism? 

In the print circuit they will tell you that it is TV that is the culprit on the first count. The blossoming of channels has meant that even a complete novice can job hop with alacrity, upping her salary with each move. If you are bright (read from a college or school that makes it into a magazine rating), confident, can write rather than report, and can push rather than connect (remember the questions a TV reporter recently asked a child who had seen her mother being murdered) you are made, baby. You will have a market for some time to come.
Different values 


And who knows, maybe TV is guilty on the second count too. Shortly after this column began some 16 years ago, I remember writing about a fellow journalist who would breeze through complex subjects with great panache on television, that she was able to successfully substitute self confidence for extensive research. Today there is a virtual epidemic of that malaise. TV reporters sashay forth, gesturing expansively as they dish out quickie analyses. Good looks and self confidence are at a premium. Knowledge of subject? Who needs it when all you have to do is stick a mike in somebody’s face and toss off an opinionated sentence to round off a piece to camera? And when some one from the backend of the studio is feeding into your earpiece what questions to ask? 

The tragedy in my old fashioned view is that someone who climbs too fast misses out on learning, travelling, getting to know beats, a process which also helped you discover what really interested you. Not only do reporters not know where to place commas in their copy, many will rise two or three levels without having travelled through, rather than parachuted into, district India. But thanks to television which brings access, they will be on first name terms with the politicians and businessmen they are expected to cover. It has become a cliché in journalism education circles that every bright-eyed aspirant wants to be a Barkha Dutt. If there are any role models at all from print they are likely to be those editors who have a parallel track on TV. 
Rampant plagiarism 


With more media training establishments in existence than ever before, more allegedly trained people enter the profession today than they did in my time. Are they taught how to read government or parliamentary reports or budget papers for stories? Or about the difference between fact gathering, opinion, and analysis? And what does the growing epidemic of plagiarism say about whether they are taught anything at all about how to handle attribution? 

The Delhi edition of this paper has been paid the compliment of having its stories regularl lifted, more or less wholesale, by a tabloid. And the reporter who does it takes a byline! Bloggers increasingly amuse themselves by spotting plagiarism in the mainstream press. Nor is borrowing confined to our part of the subcontinent. I emailed a Pakistani journalist to say that it looked like he had lifted the introduction to an interview from an Indian website. He responded with alacrity to say that of course he had. He did not know much about the interviewee, so he searched the Web. Quotation marks? Whats that?

It only takes a couple of first-hand encounters with today’s newsgathering tribe to confirm that something has changed. When I wrote a media book 12 years ago, the Internet had just come to India that year and was nowhere near the kind of crutch it has become. The only people who wrote about my book were those who read it. Today things are rather different. The publisher’s marketing arm sends out a publicity mailer over the Internet and it is picked up wholesale and slapped onto a newspaper or TV website. I marvel at the creativity that goes into weaving parts of the mailer and the back page blurb, along with a para here and there from what someone else has written, to produce what looks like a three column review, no kidding. Do we need to bludgeon personal computer manufacturers to remove the cut and paste function from their machines to save the profession?

The time is now

By Shailaja Bajpai

Posted : Nov 04, 2008 (Indian Express)

Dr Manmohan Singh is in clear and present danger of being mistaken for his home minister. Saturday, Dr Singh, along with Sonia Gandhi, visited Guwahati 48 hours after the series of bomb blasts, looking like he would rather be anywhere but. And what did the prime minister say to the nation, after the sixth terrorist attack since July? — “there can be no compromise with terrorism”. Sounds familiar? Sounds like Shivraj Patil after every attack.

Meanwhile, NDA prime ministerial candidate, L.K.Advani, was in Assam 24 hours earlier blaming the Centre for the blasts — something he does each time there is an attack. But whenever there is a crisis, be it Assam or the arrest of Sadhvi Pragya S. Thakur, he is on the air before Dr Singh. Advani is seen to be communicating with the people whereas the prime minister seems to be in deep communion with himself.

When the financial crisis hit us harder than Shah Rukh Khan punched Saif Ali Khan in the stomach so hard it ‘hurts’, we saw the PM make a reassuring statement in Parliament; we heard him worry on board the flight to Japan and from China. But not once did he call a media meet or address the nation in a televised broadcast to explain the how, why, what and what now of the crash. George Bush did it, Sarkozy did it, Gordon Brown did it, why even the prime minister of Iceland must have done it but our prime minister, a most respected economist, allows others to do his talking for him. Yes, actions speak better than words but words explain actions and the public needs that to make sense of events. Yes, the PM has issued statements but TV edits those into a sound byte, making Dr Singh sound offhand, distant. These are, if not the worst of times, bad times and he needs to be seen and heard much more.

Last week’s coverage of the Assam bomb blasts had something new and something very old. Something very old: constant interruptus, the television disorder afflicting anchors who invite someone to speak but never allow them to. As in:

Vikram Chandra (The Big Fight): Jayanti Natarajan, why is the Centre, so slow to act in Maharashtra?

Natarajan: I don’t agree with the framing of your question, there were three different cases...

Chandra: Alright, let’s take an audience poll on how many of you think the Centre was slow? Everyone.

Natarajan: That’s because you did not let me finish my sentence...

On CNN-IBN with Rajdeep Sardesai, Montek S.Ahluwalia on the financial crisis: Although the (Sensex) investment is relatively small, we are concerned about...

Rajdeep Sardesai: Rajeev Chandrashekhar do you agree?

Rajeev Chandrashekhar: Yes, yes...

Ahluwalia: Can I finish my sentence?

Something new: While NDTV announced up to 18 blasts in Assam (officially there were 11), CNN-IBN was the only channel to stay with the official figures of blasts and deaths and refuse to speculate. Positive change. Also, Times Now hid the badly injured or the dead instead of giving them Page 3 type coverage. Good Times.

Something unchanged: speculation. Within an hour of the blasts, the channels had named Harkut, HUJI, Indian Mujahideen, Ulfa trained in Assam, Ulfa trained in Bangladesh by Bangladesh military intelligence and probably vice versa as the perpetrators without any evidence.

Onto more serious matters: are channels saving rupees by telecasting the same film, week in and out? Every weekend/week sees Malamaal Weekly on Sahara One and Guru on Max.

Ajay Devgan was On the Couch with Koel Purie (Headlines Today) and like Chunky Pandey on Zara Nach Ke Dikha, he insisted on wearing dark glasses. Why? Does he think she is an eyesore?

Lastly, placement advertising on Indian Idol — one contestant (pretends?) to have a cough and another helpfully says, ‘I know just what will cure you’. Cut to her reaching inside a desk drawer to pull out Vicks Ginger lozenges: ‘here this will cure your gale mein khich-khich.’ Note: the girl had a scratchy performance.

(shailaja.bajpai@expressindia.com)