Media is a mixed blessing

Media is a mixed blessing

WHEN Hindus vandalise Muslim places of worship and plant small statues of Hanuman in each of these mosques, what does the media do - tell it like it is? In a State that is already burning? Star News and Aaj Tak decided not to show these Hulladia Hanumans as they were called, in Gujarat last month, even though neither news channel has much of a reputation for restraint. The Gujarat Samachar however saw no reason not to report this. On March 1, 2002 it carried a front-page box item, which said, "Reaction of Godhra in Ahmedabad. Several Mosques and Dargahs Ravaged - Hanuman Idol installed after destroying mosque at Paldi. The new idol is named Hulladia Hanuman."

Pictures of these Hanumans were not hard to come by in Ahmedabad. Vendors were hawking them in front of the District Magistrate and District Commissioner's offices. Yet how many of them did you see carried in the much-maligned metropolitan press? The Indian Express did carry one day a picture of one of these Hanumans planted on the razed remains of a mosque.

The more developed countries are much more evolved in the area of media ethics. Our media is still young, our regulations still in the pipeline. But while their ethical dilemmas are more conventional, ours defy imagination. Just pick a few examples from Gujarat. Should TV and print report that a foetus was ripped from its mother's womb and then burnt? Should they report that people were electrocuted in a room by avenging mobs? Should they carry pictures of bodies in wells?

So what do we do about media ethics when all hell is breaking loose?

Gujarat's leading newspapers did not tie themselves into knots asking the questions that the rest of the media has been torturing itself with since the violence broke out. They went right ahead and took the decisions that they thought would endear them to the popular mood. On February 28, Gujarat Samachar carried photographs of the dead on the Godhra platform and the burning bogies, above its masthead. Its banner headline below the masthead said (translated), "Most barbaric and shameful incident of the country at Godhra station". And below that, "60 roasted in the train". A box item enshrined Bal Thackeray's by-now famous quote about Hindus cowering like dogs with tails between their legs.

Its rival Sandesh, while matching the photographs and the banner, was more graphic. It said bodies of the burnt victims were glued to each other. The paper bristled with horror stories. Inside it said that two mutilated bodies of young girls had been found, something its rival, Samachar, denied the next day in a three-column story. Later the editor of Sandesh would tell the Editor's Guild team which went to Gujarat to look at the role of the media, that he had a paper to sell, and a rival to out-manoeuvre. His paper's circulation during the month of massacre was up by 150, 000, he is reported to have told them. The Guild team was shown a letter of congratulations sent by the Chief Minister to some Gujarati newspapers, for their coverage. And of course, none of those asked for his resignation as the press in the rest of the country did.

While on the subject of media and massacre, let's hark back not to the Gulf War, which is held to be the first milestone in live conflict reporting, but to Tiananmen Square in 1989 which was believed to be a watershed moment in defining different roles for television and print journalism. "Television became the raw `news' and print became the analysis and research-based reservoir of facts. While newspapers used to set the news agenda for both television and print, that was reversed by the live shots from Beijing." (Turmoil at Tiananmen. A study of U.S. press coverage of the Beijing Spring of 1989, The Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard University, 1992)

In retrospect, though some Pulitzers were won for the memorable coverage there, it was found to have suffered from biases, and endangered those whom it featured. It set a pro-student framework for the coverage: there was not enough objectivity about the students' movement, and the not-so-positive aspects of it. The technology outpaced the journalism, which created some serious problems. Lopsided access created lopsided coverage. The use of new technology allowed the inclusion of misleading or irrelevant materials, including unverified rumours that were hard to check and resist in the competitive pressure to provide something new. Some Chinese sources who appeared in news reports suddenly found themselves in danger. They were identified by authorities.