By Ranjona Banerji
A friend in Bangladesh got understandably upset when, after the horrific terrorist attack in Dhaka on Friday, international news channels BBC World, CNN International and Al-Jazeera concentrated only on Italian and Japanese victims, as if no Bangladeshis had died in the attack.
This unsalutary practice is a form of what? – racism? tribalism? nationalism? nativism? – and is seen across all media organisations no matter how enlightened or how many times the word “behove†is used in edits. As a former edit writer myself, I posit that this tendency does not “behove†journalism. The Friday of the attacks, Indian news television for instance concentrated on the one Indian woman killed by the terrorists as if the others did not matter, as if 20 people had not been butchered.
For some years, the media has been told by those within it to “think global and act localâ€. However that is, as is evident, harder to practise than to preach. In an emergency, journalists tend to think of those closest to themselves or look for connections which they think will interest their readers.
Therefore, in the Indian subcontinent, the Dhaka attacks got front-page attention but the attacks in Baghdad where at least 90 were killed was on the world pages. We are perhaps inured to violence in Iraq since the beginning of this century. One more attack and you turn the page and check to see what happened at Wimbledon. That is our reality.
The excuse for international news channels however is harder to find. Both BBC World and CNN International supposedly cater to a larger audience than their home nations. And Al-Jazeera has positioned itself as local to the Gulf but in some sense larger in its understanding of our part of the world than its immediate competition. The logic therefore fails. Are the deaths of Italians and Japanese more important than those of Bangladeshis? How many Bangladeshis are equal to one white European? Does that sound needlessly harsh? Remember, this is not the first time this has happened. Whether by class or race, people are divided all the time.
As to my friend in Bangladesh, I can only apologise for this insensitive behaviour of fellow journalists.
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Twitter’s role as a platform for abuse requires some thought from its administrators. Bollywood singer Abhijeet Bhattacharya is known for his foul language and somewhat questionable views. He crassly tweeted about how people who slept on pavements deserved to die like dogs, in a bid to support Bollywood star Salman Khan, for instance. He has also taken strong positions about Pakistani singers performed in India. And sent some very disgusting tweets to a woman who accused him of sexual assault.
His latest is an attack on journalist Swati Chaturvedi. Bhattacharya tweeted that the man who killed a woman at a Chennai station last week was a Muslim and that this was part of some “love jihad†plot. Chaturvedi responded by saying that the man arrested for the murder was a Hindu called Ram Kumar, accused Bhattacharya of “fomenting communal tensionâ€. She also called him a mediocre singer.
Bhattacharya’s response was as usual filled with filthy language and sexual innuendo. Chaturvedi however is not easily cowed down and has reported his tweet to both the Mumbai police and to Twitter.
Not all journalists – especially women journalists who bear the brunt of such attacks – are as brave so more power to her.
The world of Twitter remains extremely misogynistic – many followers of Bhattacharya, most of whom proudly announce that they are “Hinduâ€, started a campaign to attack Chaturvedi even further, to either display their fragile masculinity or their even more fragile idea of spirituality.
This same glee at attacking women journalists was evident when the hashtag “Arnab Slaps Sagorika†– over some conversation between the two about Goswami’s interview with Narendra Modi – started trending, presumably to prove how manly TV anchor Arnab Goswami and his fans are when it comes to journalist Sagorika Ghose.
Is that one point for mankind’s glorious future, would you say?