How TV nearly led to war

BY R Jagannathan| IN Media Practice | 10/01/2009

When television whips up war hysteria, one feels compelled to leap without seeing.

R JAGANNATHAN says TV converted urban India¿s initial anger with our ineffective leaders into an Indo-Pak hate fest.

Reprinted from DNA.com

If the post-26/11 TV coverage hasn¿t converted you into a rabid warmonger or, alternatively, made you puke uncontrollably, you must be made of sterner stuff. I alternated between the two extremes while watching TV the whole of December and early January.

Indian TV plumbed new depths of one-sidedness and jingoism by showing an appalling lack of objectivity. In the process it made monkeys out of us all — viewers, participants in talk shows, and politicians. In fact, I would go further. If anyone brought India and Pakistan close to the brink of war in December, it was not our usually foot-in-the-mouth politicians, or hawkish security advisors. It was TV.

As a media representative myself, I am not trying to say that newspapers or bloggers were any less jingoist (for a while, anyway), but TV was quite something else. It just hijacked the agenda, and relentlessly shoved war hysteria down our — I must say willing — throats. So while nobody was particularly objective in his or her assessment of the situation in the initial days, TV was the pits.

Partly it is to do with the nature of the medium. When you declare a "War on Terror" in a newspaper, people have time to think. They can fold the paper, and reflect on what you have said. When you declare war on TV, and get five others to talk about it, egged on by a breathless anchorperson, you feel compelled to act. You start frothing at the mouth and figuratively reach for your gun. When raw human emotions reach your bedroom or living room 24x7, you cannot be unaffected by its immediate call to action. But the real curse of Indian TV is the verbose anchorperson, who can¿t stop pontificating as though he is the expert. In the process, the real expert looks like a blustering fool.

Consider how a typical Indian TV discussion proceeds. The anchor introduces the topic and raises loaded questions: Is Pakistan in denial? Will their government act to arrest the terrorists? Should we go to war over the terror attacks? The opening salvo, usually targeted at a Pakistani journalist or ex-general, will be a have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife kind of question. Questions like: "Has Pakistan become a rogue state? When will Pakistan close its terror shops? Why should we believe you are not lying, General?"

Now, these may be genuine questions for which we need answers, but at the human level, they are completely ill-mannered and insensitive. It is this kind of stupid question-mongering that drove an initially sympathetic Pakistani liberal media back into its shell, giving room for the Pak army to ratchet up the hysteria against us. It took pressure from the outside world to cool things down.

The other problem with Indian TV is it can make nuanced comments look dangerous. Take Pranab Mukherjee¿s oft-quoted statement that "all options are open" when

deciding India¿s response to the Mumbai terror strikes. Now all options merely mean all options; at best, they hint at something drastic, but they do not mean something specific like war. The statement was only meant to keep the Pakistanis guessing, not a direct threat to bomb them. But in the hands of TV anchors, that statement — repeated a hundred times daily — gets stretched to mean only war. When TV anchors keep talking about "other options" they essentially boil it down to one option — military options. So Pranab was made to look like a fool when he had to back off.

Experts were reduced to caricatures. Let¿s say you ask an Indian defence expert a loaded question like this: "Now that Pakistan has refused to do anything about terror, isn¿t it time to stop talking and take action? Tough action?" Now few experts will straightaway say no, we should not act. So they will begin by agreeing that we must act, but…The buts, unfortunately, get drowned when the other participants butt in or TV takes a break for ads. In short, the anchor can get an expert to agree on air when he has done nothing of the kind.

None of the questions I mentioned above are actual quotes from TV programmes, but they give you a general idea about what really happens when anchors wax eloquent. The handling of ex-Pakistani generals and journalists by many channels showed a complete lack of sensitivity. By asking insulting questions that could have driven any ordinary Pakistani to rage against India, the TV anchor acted like an inquisitor. And he managed it all without thumb-screw or rack. He could have been a star in Torquemada¿s Spain.

In show after show, anchors made it clear that we Indians are the noble guys, and the Pakistanis are the bad guys — never mind the fact that ordinary Pakistani journalists have been making disclosures to favour our position (Geo TV, for example).

Worse, they converted urban India¿s initial anger with our bumbling politicians and ineffective leaders into an Indo-Pak hate fest. It was probably TV-driven expectations about war that drove Manmohan Singh to make intemperate remarks about Pakistan being a terrorist state — however true that may be.

In short, TV brought us to the brink of war. Time they did a rethink.