Ranjona Banerji: Does media fuel horror stories?

By Ranjona Banerji

When I was a child, I hated carrots. I would do anything to avoid eating them. My parents and grandparents were great believers in the “no fuss” principles of life. If you went on and on about something trivial that was bothering you, they would either say “mind over matter” or “ignore it and it will go away”. So I apparently stared at the carrots on my plate, aged about 5, and plaintively asked my parents, “If I ignore them, will they go away?”

What do you think happened?

The reason for this little personal sidestep is that people often rant and rave that if the media ignored some unpleasant person or some unpleasant happenings, those people or things would go away. Is this true? Does the media feed into the horrors of society by publicising them and giving them more attention than they deserve?

Sadly, I cannot offer you an answer. My instinct as a journalist is that part of our job is to unveil those very horrors of society so that society can confront them, deal with them and acknowledge that they exist. As a collective, society usually tries to bury – or like my carrots, ignore – its unappealing side, hoping that if they ignore these issues, they will go away. Most discriminations and prejudices have got strength from this sort of thinking. The problems of women, of the underprivileged, of race, of sexual abuse, of assault, of hatred, of the differently-abled, of mental health are some of the many unpleasant aspects of society that people preferred not to mention. As a result, abuse, discrimination and cruelty went on unhindered and victims suffered without recourse.

A peruse of newspapers from the last century will make that clear: men’s issues, crime, war and politics dominated. What were the odds that you would read about the rights of transgenders in a newspaper even 50 years ago?

I am not crediting the media with exposing these problems. But the media has played its role in increasing awareness. And on that basis alone, the “ignore it and it will go away” principle can be deemed faulty.

This question of media exposure seems heightened by the times in which we live. Some people feel that this whole story about women marching on temples and mosques for free access is a non-story. Others feel that constantly airing the archaic and unpalatable for the 21st century views of some old Hindu priest, no matter how senior, serves no purpose. Others however acknowledge that just by pegging the cricket tournament IPL to drought as the media has done, the issue of water shortages and its attendant problems have been taken seriously.

This also brings up the issue of “good news”. Many argue that the media never focuses on the better part of humanity and only focuses on the dregs. For one, this is not wholly correct. The media does cover humanity’s progress and its achievers. And sadly, this can become dangerous. There are enough instances of the media making heroes and heroines out of people without adequate research. And often, these personalities grow like balloons as generation after generation of journalists picks them up and pumps them up further. They are lucky as long as their feet of clays and feats of horror remain hidden. Because when the balloon bursts and the media discovers those flaws, even god cannot help them!

On the whole though, every “good news” experiment by the media has failed mainly because we, as humans, prefer to know what’s wrong rather than what’s right despite any sanctimonious proclamations to the contrary. Take a look at fiction – whether movies or TV serials or books and see for yourself how many commercial and critical successes portray the “goodie-goodie” from start to finish without any conflict whatsoever.
I have personal knowledge of one instance where the newspaper I worked for decided not to give any more publicity to a particularly vicious person. And when we and others stopped doing that, his star diminished. It became clear that the more publicity he got, the more dangerous he became. He is still around, but circumstances have defanged him for the most part.

This one instance aside I would go for the bad news angle any day. You can put it down to my childhood. Those damn carrots did not go away!