Journalists as citizens

SECOND TAKE

Kalpana Sharma

When the Sri Rama Sene in Mangalore proudly proclaimed that their purpose was served by the repeated telecast of the pub incident on January 24, when five women sitting in a pub were molested and assaulted even as the camera kept recording every blow, the Indian media should have paused to think.

When a six-year-old girl was tortured by two UP policemen for allegedly having stolen a small sum of money, in full view of television cameras recording every blow, the media should have paused again.

These two, and many similar incidents across time, raise an important question about the role of the media.  Should we as journalists just watch and record what is happening, even if what we are seeing is an assault on innocents and a flagrant violation of the law, or should we intervene and at least attempt to put to stop to it?

In the first case, although the Sri Rama Sene claim that the televised event helped them in their aim of keeping women in their homes, the reverse also happened.  People were revolted at what they saw and for the first time in India, there were pro-love demonstrations on Valentine¿s Day, another favourite target of the Sri Rama Sene variety of moral police.  There was also the highly innovative Pink Chaddi Campaign launched on the net and publicized widely through print and electronic media.  The aim of the campaigners, of ridiculing those who speak in the name of morality, was also achieved by the attention they received from the media.  So one can say, some good came out of the event after all.

In UP, too, the recording of the event on camera ensured that the two policemen were suspended and an inquiry ordered.

But there have been dozens of such events in recent times where the cameras are silent witnesses to attacks, molestation and torture.  The question that arises is whether the journalist should just watch and record such events, or intervene because he or she is also a citizen.  If you see someone breaking the law, is it not your duty to call the police, call for help or find some way to intervene?  If the television crew filming the little girl being tortured by the two policemen had protested while these men were going on hitting the poor child, she would have at least been spared the beating while the evidence of their attack would already have been recorded.  If the journalists who accompanied the Sri Rama Sene goons to the pub in Mangalore had intervened and tried to help the only man, who did try and fight back, some of the girls would have been spared the humiliation and the assault.  Yet, enough would have been recorded of what these men did.

A linked question is how journalists should respond when approached by the likes of the Sri Rama Sene, or Raj Thackeray¿s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, to accompany them for some "action".  Should they just go along without even finding out what the "action" is all about?  If the "action" involves breaking the law, should they not inform the police?  Or does their desire to get an exclusive override their duties as citizens?

Raj Thackeray, for instance, has cleverly used the media to make himself appear larger than life in Mumbai.  No one knows the extent of his following.  Only the elections will establish whether indeed he has thousands of loyal followers.  But till then, the media¿s projection of him through the actions of his cadres has made people fear him much as they did the Shiv Sena, his parent organisation.  As a result, he just has to hold out a threat of action, and people oblige.  A recent example was the way shopkeepers displaying the word "Karachi" on their boards were forced to paint them over after the November 26, 2008 terror attack. These are Hindu Sindhis who were forced to relocate during partition.  For them Sindh and Karachi are their Sindhi homeland.  Yet, Thackeray managed to make them feel guilty about their birthplace to the point of forcing them to remove the name Karachi from their signboards.  And they did so with alacrity because of the image of Thackeray that is possibly made more fearsome through media exposure.

The question of whether the media, in its desire for the sensational, actually abets the extremes of all kinds is one that does require some scrutiny.  The constant positing of opposites in TV talk shows and programmes, the resultant shouting matches that are a norm on every channel, and the din and noise that drowns out any voices of moderation is a deliberate media ploy.  As a result, readers and listeners are subjected all the time to extreme views resulting in the belief that there are no moderate voices.

During the 1992-93 communal riots in Mumbai, before the advent of television, print reporters were watching, recording and photographing Shiv Sena mobs on the rampage.  They also saw terrified communities, sometimes surrounded on all sides by hostile mobs.  As individuals it would have been physically difficult to actually stop these mobs.  But many journalists intervened by calling the army, someone in government, other media.  They gave their personal telephone numbers to people who lived in areas where they could be attacked in the future.  And they fielded calls through the night from individuals or groups trapped in different parts of the city.  They played the role of relaying the information to the army and anyone who could rescue these people – as the police were not entirely reliable – and also alerted media, even rival newspapers, to ensure that such events did not go unrecorded.

Some might say this is activism and not journalism.  But I would suggest that there is a thin line between journalists as recorders of events and journalists as citizens.  When your duty as a citizen calls upon you to act, you must set aside your supposed "impartiality", if indeed there is such a thing, and intervene. 

The story of the little girl being beaten would have been far more powerful if a member of civil society, a journalist covering the event, had intervened.