Monday, December 05, 2005


What is wrong with the media?

A few nights back, I happened to catch the late night snippets that Aaj Tak (one of the news channels on television for those who've never watched it). This is not a channel I usually watch, and I caught even this bit purely by accident. But what I saw appalled me, and I thought I should write about it and share it with all my friends and family who read my blog.

To begin with, the way this channel chooses to present these news snippets is pretty awful. Sensationalising the traumatic events taking place in the lives of ordinary, often impoverished, sections of India's population, what Aaj Tak aims to do is not so much garner sympathy and support as appeal to the voyuer in people, and thus increase their TRP. Anyway, this story, which the commentator related with evident relish, was about this woman from an obviously lower-middle class (according to India's class system) background. She and her husband had divorced, but had fallen in love all over again and later remarried ('bilkul filmo ki tarah', 'just like in the movies'). Only, she didn't stop seeing the man/men she had been involved with in the interim period, and one day, after an altercation with her husband, she got her lovers to beat him up. Which they did, only so thoroughly that they killed him, and that too, before their son, who's barely 4 years old. The mother then dumped the child with her in-laws and decamped with the lovers, after telling people that her husband as away on work (or something to that effect).

And now I come to the horrifying part. This small, obviously traumatised child, who'd seen his father murdered in a particularly brutal way before his eyes, was the one who had informed his grandparents of the incident, who in turn had reported the matter to the police, thus setting in motion the whole chain of events that followed. Our media, in the form of Aaj Tak, did not just report the matter with great relish, they actually brought the child before the camera and made him recount the whole grisly incident in great detail, prompting him most helpfully and asking further questions whenever he faltered. A child of barely four was made to relive the horror of his father's murder for an uncaring, soulless news channel whose primary responsibility is to their ratings.

I know it's naive in these days to presume that the media has any social responsibility or even a heart. But surely this was carrying it too far? I know, too, that this is not an isolated incident. The grandparents of the little boy could obviously be browbeaten into submission - perhaps they were told that placing their vulnerable grandchild before the camera could help bring their son justice - but is there nothing anyone can or will do? In western nations the media would never have been allowed anywhere near the child. There are child support centres who would have immdiately come into play. Is there no one who could step in in our country to prevent the media - or individuals, for that matter - from pursuing their selfish agendas with such impunity?

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is horrible! But, like you, I am not surprised. Yes, the media in India seems to have forgotten its social responsibility. It's not even been a decade since I was studying journalism, and they drilled "social responsibility" into us like a mantra; but now I wonder if it was just a farce.

Or have things changed that much since the early 1990s? NDTV spends the night traipsing along in nightclubs; and I clearly remember one channel showing on TV how to unscrew a fishplate from a railway track after a rail accident had taken place to show how easy it is!

Leave alone any sort of humanity or sensitivity, even the law isn't sacrosanct. Isn't there some protection for children under the age of 16 for their identities not to be disclosed? I'm not sure if it applies to all kinds of media, but whatever... I wish we had some semblance of a system in place to drag the media house to court over it and teach them a lesson they will never forget!

A very cool cat said...

There are other countries where you could do just that - unfortunately, ours isn't one of them. And the state of the world (our country, more specifically) being what it is, if you were to start penalising people for insensitivity, immorality, inconsideration, etc., there never would be any end to it!

Anonymous said...

What a sickening thing to do to a kid! Wish there was something that we could do for him...

A very cool cat said...

Yes, I wish there was something, too. And I wish something could also be done for all the other kids who're being exploited in this way. But going by the state of the world, I seriously doubt it.

Anonymous said...

The media's been doing this for a very long time. I remember reading about the media's singleminded devilry for literally the first time in Edward Behr's 1981 standout book of professional reminiscences, 'Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English: A Foreign Correspondent's Life Behind the Lines'. The title came from Behr having witnessed firsthand at the first Congo civil war of 1962, a TV newsperson at a makeshift camp of "violated" Belgian nuns calling out: "Anyone here been raped and speaks English?" It's all soundbites, dear. And this was nearly a half-century ago. Nothing's changed. Nothing will. Not even your anger. In Volker Schlondorff's 'Circle of Deceit', which he shot in Beirut over six months, with his entire unit dodging shells and bullets, you couldn't make out which parts of the harrowing film were documentary and which fictionalised - and Schlondorff never made it easier on his viewers and his critics by clarifying where precisely he had appropriated creative licence in frames of buildings being stippled with bullets and old Lebanese women in black being shot and burnt alive. Fight the injustices you can, Pro - and accept that the human condition includes the liberty for many people to do as they please with other people's lives. The media's no different.

Anonymous said...

for the first time in many months, kajal and i actually agree on something. (k, we'll find something else to fight about, don't you worry.) that is basically what it boils down to, pro. and i would rather live with a media that is insensitive and irresponsible than live in a state that has the legal right to tell the media what it can and cannot do.

- ajitha

A very cool cat said...

Acuardo contigo, totalmente, mi amor. Huge relief to know that I've not suddenly begun missing the wavelength my husband's on!

And yes, the issue of censorship remains an important one, one that is best explored in a separate blog dedicated to it.