Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Some of the most telling moments over the last 100 years come back to us as serried images which had, possibly, first made it to the public domain through the agency of a newspaper or TV screen. If these years were termed the age of mass media, they could just as well be seen as the age of mass anxiety. If mass media demonstrated an unprecedented power to bring disparate communities together, it also demonstrated a malign ability to divide them as never before. It is possibly this negative aspect of a awesome agency that had caused Adolph Ochs to come up with the words, ‘All the news that’s fit to print’, as a motto for the New York Times. Implied in them was the wisdom that there is a certain type of news that should not, must not, see the light of day because of its potential to create mass panic, revulsion, or hatred. Today, each newspaper, TV channel, radio station, magazine, is required every day to make that judgement call as to what constitutes news that’s fit to print. It is an important social function that has significant social consequences.
Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani was, therefore, quite right in raising the issue in the context of last week’s attack on the Akshardham Temple. As he pointed out, we — including the media — ‘must not contribute to what the terrorist wants to create’. Nothing helps the cause of the terrorist than panic among people and hatred between communities. Images of the mangled bodies of the innocent victims of terror do both. Therefore the media must necessarily act with restraint and responsibility when it comes to publishing, telecasting and describing such scenes. Unfortunately, several publications and media organisations — many of them, incidentally, considered extremely sympathetic to the BJP and the sangh parivar — did not exercise sufficient restraint this time. For instance, they thought nothing of publishing on their front pages photographs of dead children with their faces quite visible. Similarly, some TV channels ran extremely distressing footage along the same lines. To that extent they did fall prey to what the deputy prime minister characterised as ‘projecting terror among the people’.
There is a related aspect to be considered here. The manner an event of this magnitude is portrayed can either strengthen the national resolve to confront and defeat the spectre of terrorism or seriously undermine the popular will to fight it. Again, Advani drew the correct parallel. There were no mangled corpses in the plethora of images that emanated from the 9/11 terror strikes. An unstated convention ensured that such images — as indeed those of people hurling themselves out of the burning towers — was not granted media space. This restraint helped the nation immeasurably in recovering from the attacks and healing the wounds of its stricken people. There is something here for the Indian media to chew on.
