The horrendous no longer shocks

Many years ago a television cameraman caught a man falling to his death. This incident happened during a fire at an the Ansals building in New Delhi and was captured by pure chance. That particular footage created a storm of protest. But times have changed. Viewers now appear to accept such visuals without squirming. The same shot today would probably be considered as a good one taken by an alert cameraman. The real question is where does one draw the line between what is acceptable and what is not? One answer is to avoid visuals that are repulsive and would hurt our sensibilities. This gives rise to a different question, do sensibilities change with time, age and gender? Only detailed research can answer such questions. But there is an easier way out — we only need to detach ourselves from the story and think about how one’s own family would react while seeing footage like that, especially if it was put out by a rival news channel. I can promise you, in 90 out of 100 times you would get the right answer.

Some newspapers do not print disgusting photographs on their front page. The argument for such a position is that a newspaper is read at the breakfast table and the reader would not want to see such stills while eating. Unfortunately, TV channels do not seem to follow such principles although the negative consequences of horrendous images on television can be even more grave.

The point is that news should and can be made interesting without being made sensational. Not a single dead body was shown during the coverage of the Russian air crashes recently. In contrast, Indian TV channels went to town with their gruesome coverage of charred bodies during the Chakri Dadri mid-air collision. At the same time the coverage of the Beslan hostage crisis was criticised widely for its explicit nature.

As a television journalist I have covered major disasters, including the earthquake that hit Latur a decade back. I know of journalists who kept asking the local people searing questions about the deaths of their relatives. They were made to relive the tragedy over and over again in their accounts filmed for TV. Although I, too, had to talk to them and try and get fresh details about their tragedy, I attempted an approach which, I believe, helped me to be less intrusive. I would roll my camera and wait for the victim to speak and then start my questioning from that point.

Many TV journalists defend their vocation by saying that they are showing “reality” and, ethically, there is nothing wrong. The difference, of course, is that this “reality” — being unspooled in the homes of viewers, who exist in a totally different context — is being consumed like any other product.

A few years ago I had attended a course on broadcast journalism in the UK. One of the modules was on journalistic ethics. As part of this module we were shown a BBC film with lots of unedited footage. Even within the training film there were warnings for the viewers about the kind of visuals they were about to see. I remember one sequence in the film very vividly: a mob was chasing and stabbing a person to death in South Africa. The cameraman actually ran with the mob and covered the entire sequence. The sequence would have proved very sensational if the sequence had been shown unedited, but the channel was very careful about how it handled it. It only showed the man being chased and then cut to the last shot and, that too, in a long shot. During the same course I showed one of my news stories on a train accident in India. What I had seen on location was horrible, to say the least. In the story however, I had confined myself only to long shots. Yet, despite this precaution, the participants in the programme felt that some of the pictures were very insensitive although I had never faced such a reaction to this story from Indian viewers.

Could it be that we have become so immured — through constant exposure — to such visuals that they do not bother us anymore? Perhaps it is time for television journalists and cable networks in this country to ask themselves a question: Do we want us, as a nation — including our children — to get hardened by grotesque and horrifying television images and therefore be rendered insensitive to the human experience they signify?

The writer is a senior television professional