Opinion Breaking down news: Cooking up a Coalition

TV stations try to rustle up khichdi fears, forgetting it’s comfort food. Elsewhere, Russia has touched a nerve with the Brits

Media, fourth estate, social media, Lootyens journalists, journalists abused, Modi government, Indian express column

Reporting from a conflict zone is perhaps the final frontier for many such story-tellers.

Pratik Kanjilal

April 7, 2018 12:34 AM IST First published on: Mar 17, 2018 at 12:48 AM IST

UP bypolls, TV studios, news channels, BBC, National Geographic, Indian express column

Journalists who prefer to listen instead of lecturing would have known, too, and the initial incredulity in channels like Times Now and Republic only indicates that if you listen too closely to IT cells, you will go deaf.

As the Uttar Pradesh bypoll results came in on Wednesday, the disbelief in TV studios over the setback to the BJP was itself beyond belief. Never mind Phulpur, “who would have thought Yogi Adityanath would lose Gorakhpur”, NewsX demanded to know. People who have been to Gorakhpur recently, or live there, that’s who. Signals that the BJP was losing ground were visible on social media before the election. Journalists who prefer to listen instead of lecturing would have known, too, and the initial incredulity in channels like Times Now and Republic only indicates that if you listen too closely to IT cells, you will go deaf.

Pleasant surpise from Republic this week, though: a series of interviews from the farmers’ march in Mumbai, without the histrionics the channel is known for. One hopes that heads have not rolled for this bold move, which showed people wearing badges with the hammer and sickle. But the channel made up with Arnab Goswami’s programme, in which he popped the rhetorical question: would India prefer a khichdi of a couple of dozen parties over a single man? Dangerous question. In large parts of this country, khichdi is a comfort food.

Disbelief has crystallised into high dudgeon in the UK, whose soil has again been used by Russians to launch Borgia-style attacks on other Russians. The attack on former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who are still critical, was met with disbelief. The day of the attack in Salisbury, before details were known, the BBC said bitterly: “Someone has used a chemical weapon in a shopping area.”

It turned out to be prescient, when Theresa May’s government claimed an attack on British sovereignty using a Novichok nerve agent. The claim is itself mysterious, though, since there is apparently no work on Novichok agents in the medical literature. The Russians are alleged to have developed them in the Seventies and Eighties, but have denied it.

The air of mystery about the case furthers the myth of Vladimir Putin, which has been built as much by Western media (they loved the martial arts and the bare-chested holidaying) as by Russian propaganda channels like RT. Coincidentally, Putin declared in an interview clip from a documentary, released shortly after the Salisbury attack, “Those who serve us with poison will eventually swallow it and poison themselves.” It was quoted out of context, and is growing his mystique some more biceps.

So is the diplomatic response — expulsions from the UK and sanctions by the US — which conveys the impression that this is some unfinished business from the Cold War. But social media has been providing a more credible narrative — if Britain welcomes funny money from Russian oligarchs, grim people will follow the cash make landfall on its shores, and funny business will follow. In the press, Iain Macwhirter, former Moscow correspondent of the Irish Times, who had brought Novichok to the attention of the Stockholm Internation Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in 1993, has argued that this case is unlike the poisoning with polonium of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006, and that Putin is unlikely to have mandated it.

Something interesting is cooking at the National Geographic magazine, which is looking back, if not in anger, at least in dissatisfaction. It now has its first woman editor in a history of 130 years, and Susan Goldberg has the organisation interested in how it has covered disadvantaged groups in the past. In the American context, colour gets first dibs, and an issue on race is due out in April. Historically, the magazine has provided armchair travellers with their first contact with worlds beyond their ken, and how race has been presented and negotiated matters.

The post-mortem of the archives was done by University of Virginia historian John Edwin Mason, who is interested in the history of photography and the history of Africa. He found that until the 1970s, the magazine had ignored people of colour in the US, except labourers or domestic workers, and exoticised them elsewhere.

Now, the National Geographic is an unusual case. It explored locations which were regarded as exotic until recent times, and this invited exoticisation. But its decision to step back and look back has opened up a line of enquiry for other publications elsewhere in the world to follow.

And finally, the finest headline of the week, which appeared on Twitter shortly after Rex Tillerson was sacked. It was released into the creative commons by David Neary, an assistant editor at Cineaste magazine in the US. He tweeted that he was no longer in the headline-writing business, so anyone was free to borrow his headline: ‘Tyrant Sore at Rex’. The next day, The Economist Espresso ran it with their Trump-Tillerson story.