Reprinted from the Nepal Times,
Bloody well right
You don`t make it to the News Bar with a story on how tourists are beginning
to return to
It is when your country starts making it regularly to the News Bar on CNN that
you know it has hit the big time. In the past year,
across the bottom of the screen with breaking news of some disaster or another.
Whether it is manmade or natural, none of the news is good news.
You don`t make it to the News Bar with a story on how tourists are beginning
to return to
make it to the news with the opening of a new hospital, it has to be on
the latest village to be wiped off the map by a landslide.
That is the way the business is: news is whatever is negative, out of the
ordinary, bizarre, or celebrity-driven. Tabloid television`s appetite
for news is voracious. But the news menu is shrinking as producers
try to cut costs by repeating the same news on the hour every hour.
Slabs of news therefore come off the assembly lines of the world`s
Perpetual News Machines, refined, sugar-coated, and packaged for
a lowest global denominator in audience surveys.
Live coverage of routine trivia distorts reality by exaggerating the
importance of an event just because it has gripping visuals.
It bends the truth by selecting the negative. The mere listing
of facts, therefore, does not necessarily bring us closer to
the truth. In fact, facts can distort reality. Facts, if they
are selective or incomplete, can lie.
But it is really not fair to blame the international press when we are
doing such a poor job right here. The media has a role in preventing
conflict, but rarely do we see it fulfilling it. Mostly, the reporting
begins only after the guns start blazing by which time the momentum
of war muzzles the media. And we have seen time and again that
even the saddest stories of human anguish and the suffering of
the innocent are not enough to stop war once it has begun.
Body-bag journalism, a daily death count that reads like
cricket scores, dehumanise the misery and numb the public
into accepting violence as a way of life. It spreads bad
blood and the thirst for revenge. Violence may be prolonged
even by the loaded words we choose to use: "terrorists"
when it is them, "martyrs" when it is us. We legitimise
slaughter by accepting propaganda, by selective coverage,
by sterile clinical listing of numbers, by sensationalism
and negativity, by the absence of context.
And when we in the insular world of media are confronted with
our own deficiencies, we blame the censors. Or we hide behind
journalism`s traditional rules of sterile objectivity and neutrality
to withdraw into our safe cocoons. What we need is a journalism of
outrage: outrage at the violence, outrage at the injustice that
perpetrates it, and building public outrage against conflict.
Let us explore the causes of escalation, and the impact of our own roles.
Are we doing enough to heal society`s wounds, or are we rubbbing salt in it?
Why do we repeatedly show the bodies of the dead on television screens strewn
about like water buffaloes at the Kot? How does that help in resolve conflict?
We have a choice: media can keep on being a part of the problem. Or we can start
becoming a part of the solution.
Kunda Dixit