Living off Scarlett

BY hoot| IN Media Practice | 16/03/2008

The Scarlett Keeling story has gone off the pages in some newspapers, but not all. The story is now moving on, as it should have done long ago, to focus on the drug trade and rising crime in Goa. But the focus comes from the victims’ mother’s fresh allegations, not from newspapers deciding that the reasons for the   decline in Goa’s law and order climate  needs probing. 

The feeding frenzy that has lasted almost an entire month is not surprising: the story about the hapless British teenager had it all. A dodgy-police angle, a drugs and sex angle, a negligent-mother angle, a hell-in-paradise angle. And if the anonymous media blog "Penpricks" is to be believed,  even a media cover up angle. All this and an attractive young face to slap onto every report. Enough to sell across continents for weeks.  It’s the sort of story where editors urge their reporters to keep turning up angles, to feed popular interest.  And when the young girl is British, in come the British tabloids, leading practitioners of voyeurism.

IANS filed a story titled, "Scarlette death under intense media scrutiny". It begins, "Droves of journalists have descended on Goa ever since the British media undertook a close investigation of the Scarlette Keeling case, which has seen the police and government doctors being accused of playing down or covering up details about the Feb 18 death of the 15-year-old girl." But that unfortunately, was  the only sentence there is in the story about media scrutiny. The rest was padding.

There was a very similar opening para  on a story on the BCC website too, (Scarlett mother ¿feels harassed¿) also followed by lots of padding. Both took the easy way out: if they did want to document the media frenzy there was plenty to pick on. The TV channels are freaking out, entire columns are being written about why Fiona MacKeown  was  an amazing mother for Scarlett to have, and the incident is enabling anyone in England who has ever been to Goa, to simply use the peg to take off on matters unrelated. Ian Jack, in the Guardian for instance, compared Fiona’s visit with six children in tow to that of Evelyn Waugh in 1952, simply on the strength of the fact that Scarlett’s mother was not the first  English parent of a large family to travel to Goa from rural Western England. Waugh had six kids, he says, to Fiona’s nine. Not that he took them with him.

The manner of coverage is questionable.  Sunday Pioneer which on March 16 has a magazine cover story and two columns referring to the media coverage, also points to many camera close ups of the scars on the body. Restraint has to come from regulation after all it seems, because it does not come from any inherent restraint or good taste in our TV channels.

Then Chandran Mitra devotes much of his weekly column to decrying the fact that the media is flogging the story so much and harming India’s tourism prospects. Your eyebrows begin to rise, because the section in which his column appears has a full page cover story on the ills which plague Goa. But by column two the editor is admitting that paper is guilty of the same. (He gets the section in which the story appeared wrong.)

Both Asian Age and The Hindustan Times simply report Fiona MacKeown’s allegations linking the Home Minister and the Director General of Goa Police with the drug trade, neither even asks the politician and officer concerned for their response. That may be fine for a first day story, but will we see follow up by these newspapers on this angle?

Meanwhile Penpricks, the Goan media watch blog, has been hammering away at the Navhind Times for attempting, so it says, a cover up of the role that  Dr Sapeco, who conducted the first forensic examination, played.  This blog’s declared self-appointed role is to watch the Goan media and expose what it calls its shaggy underbelly. But it rants too much and gets so personal that you wonder if its gunning for sections of the media rather than doing any objective watching.