Category: BLOGS

By Ranjona Banerji

There is a little mystery surrounding the sisters from Rohtak, Haryana, who were filmed beating up some men who allegedly molested them on a bus. Another video has emerged of them doing the same thing elsewhere. Who knows, either they are women who have had enough and will not put up with male superiority or they are serial thrashers of men in public places. The mind boggles at the second. Does one applaud or condemn?

However, that’s the subject of another debate. First, let’s get past the media which brought them to our attention. The women were immediately dubbed “bravehearts” on TV. This term is now used for everything from a soldier killed in the line of duty or above and beyond the call of duty and any civilian who stands up to someone else in everyday life. One can only assume that some fan of Mel Gibson or perhaps William Wallace first used the term. Actually on second thoughts, strike the William Wallace reference. What are the odds anyone today has heard of him. The movie too came out in 1995 when most of today’s editors were in nappies being fed pap by their mummies and ayahs.

At any rate, the term “braveheart” has been rendered meaningless by overuse. Then we have the first video itself. It ran endlessly on TV, the women were interviewed, primetime debates were held but was any journalistic due diligence used at all? Did anyone find out about the provenance of the video, the background of the story, speak to witnesses or undertake any journalistic work of any kind? Or was the video taken at face value and presented to the world as is? Of course that’s what happened: Because it was in newspapers that a larger story emerged.

TV, as we have all had drummed into us by now, operates on a different spectrum. It is a hungry, demanding master which wants to be fed constantly and instantly. Time is a luxury TV does not have because, ironically, it is ruled by a 24-hour news cycle. But philosophical truisms apart, what does this make of the basics of journalism? As we can see, in plain Indian terminology, a fine chutney.

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If you missed this when it was aired, then you have denied yourself a barrel full of laughs. This edition of Left, Right and Centre on NDTV is a must-watch because of Trinamool Congress spokesperson and MP Derek O’Brien. He defends Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, attacks the media particularly the Ananda Bazaar Patrika Group and provides some real gems like: “Naveen Patnaik is Naveen Patnaik, Tarun Gogoi is Tarun Gogoi and Mamata Banerjee is Mamata Banerjee.”

Indeed.

At the end of it all, the other participants and the anchor Nidhi Razdan have no option but to laugh. This is not a spoof by the way.

http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/left-right-centre/mamata-vs-bjp-is-the-trinamool-chief-nervous/346936

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The idea of a “reader’s editor” or an ombudsman has not been taken too kindly or seriously by most Indian media houses. The only consistent exception has been The Hindu. In this excellent piece for The Hoot, Sumana Ramanan, who was reader’s editor with The Hindustan Times in Mumbai, discusses her experience:

http://thehoot.org/web/home/story.php?storyid=7928&mod=1&pg=&sectionId=19&valid=true

By Ranjona Banerji

If you listen to Trinamool Congress MP Derek O’Brien on TV, then almost the entire media and most certainly the Ananda Bazaar Patrika group is against Mamata Banerjee and the Trinamool Congress. But if you visit Calcutta and read the The Telegraph, it is clear that the media has no option in the matter. As a matter of course, the media should be anti-establishment and the TMC is the Establishment. The ABP group had earlier supported the TMC against the Left Front.

Of course, the media in Bengal is greatly assisted by the shenanigans of the TMC and not least by the chief minister herself. The Telegraph outdid itself with a couple of front page headlines last week. The first was on December 12, after TMC minister Madan Mitra was arrested by the CBI in connection with Sharada chit fund scam, when the front page punned on “Madan” and “Madam”.

The second was on December 14, when Mamata Banerjee made one more unsavoury reference to a bamboo being inserted into the human body while attacking the BJP for Mitra’s arrest. The headline simply said, “Ouch” and below that was a picture of bamboo with a sharpened point. When a CM stoops to such language, the media cannot be expected to stand back and applaud.

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However, the same does not necessarily hold true of the rest of the media when it comes to the government at the Centre. We are still in the laudatory stages where every word and action of the prime minister is treated like signs from the Almighty on High, especially on TV.

And yet, when it comes to our Delhi-based intelligentsia and the columnists who tell us what’s what because they know it all, there are a few tiny cracks emerging. Tavleen Singh for the second week in a row is not too happy with the Modi government, Madhu Kishwar has been fire and brimstone ever since Smriti Irani was made HRD minister, Surjit Bhalla’s columns on the economy now find not enough is being done and Ashok Malik has not been gung-ho about the new government’s foreign policy among other things.

All these columnists, among others, had earlier told us that the new Modi government was going to be a magical mystery tour where all our dreams would come true. Instead it’s turned into a bag of conjurer’s tricks with deft sleight of hand and smoke and mirrors being used to deflect attention from the lack of actual work. One supposes that no journalist can ignore the signs for too long. So far however, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is being spared and the blame for lack of action and bad decisions is being put on the shoulders of bureaucrats, the RSS, “fringe elements” and just about anyone else.

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But to see how the fan club continues, it is worth trying to watch an interview of BJP president Amit Shah on Headlines Today. The interviewer is Rahul Kanwal and although he asks tough questions, his dulcet tones can be a lesson to all people who want to learn how to woo and coo. And when Shah refused to answer a single tough question, the matter was taken no further.

Does that hoary old chestnut: “Let’s wait and see” have any traction here? I wonder.

By Ranjona Banerji

Election results day today and I’m assuming that every news channel in India is in a state of high excitement. Almost as excited perhaps as yahoo.in was when Salman Khan’s sister got married.

This has been the story of the year and the story of every year as far as 24 hour news television is concerned: A permanent state of end-of-the-world-ness, no matter what’s happening. It could be Narendra Modi fans dancing in New York, it could be women beating up men in a bus in Haryana, it could be a minister who smiled at someone he or she shouldn’t have. The details are immaterial. The positioning and the hype have to be the same.

Lack of discretion is one way of looking at it. Providing equal opportunities to all news events is another. And this is an ideal time to segue into what really was the story of 2014: the (so far) undying love (admiration, obsession, devotion) to India’s now not so new prime minister Narendra Modi. As ever Arnab Goswami of Times Now set off the trend with his fawning interview of the then PM aspirant. Since then, we have seen much of the media in thrall and awe of the former Gujarat chief minister and now leader of the free world. O, isn’t he? Well, he might well be soon, given his enormous popularity in all foreign lands. Or so the media would have us believe.

Some columnists in print though would rival TV’s fawning fandom. Having told us that Modi was the next best thing for India after the invention of the wheel (invented in ancient India, obviously), now they have found ways to blame the following for all the things Modi has not done yet: bureaucrats, Nehru, the Congress, the Opposition, RBI governor Raghuram Rajan, “fringe elements” in the Sangh Parivar, non-fringe elements like the RSS, Smriti Irani, the weather, the world economy and the Planet Uranus. Okay. I made up the last one but it’s only a matter of time. One day, they will have us believe, when Modi has conquered all these dragons, the world will change for the better.

Yeah.

Of course the evil Congi Marxist Macaulayist Missionary Muslim anti-Hindu Wicked sections of the media carried on with their anti-Modi propaganda. This is despite all the best efforts of some of India’s best TV anchors. Some people will never learn.

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The biggest news casualty of 2014 has been cricket. There was a time when every small doing on the cricket field and the BCCI’s backyard would overshadow everything else as far as the media is concerned. Instead politics and the media’s misunderstanding of what makes a rock star have hogged all the media space.

The Indian cricket team, N Srinivasan, the Supreme Court have tried their best to get back to earlier ascendancy positions but to no avail. There have been occasional successful incursions into media space short bursts of supremacy but not enough and not as much as the years before. Will 2015 be any better for Indian cricket? Or while the media has been distracted, have kabaddi, football, hockey and tennis made significant inroads?

Any ideas?

By Ranjona Banerji

This is the season of “yearenders” for the media and I must confess that even I have succumbed to a couple. Sometimes they can be fun and sometimes they are routine for the sake of tradition. Ah, well. Moving on.

The year for the media in India can be divided fairly into two categories: life before Narendra Modi and life after. And more shamefully for the media, those who decided to be part of the fan club and those who decided to stand apart. The first category is large in number and loud in voice. Which only means that the shameful lack of objectivity is on display in neon lights. Who knows who they think they’re fooling.

It will evidently take the media and the jaw-jaws some more time to figure out that the Congress Party is not in power at the Centre and in most of the states any more. Therefore, the constant sneering reference to “Congi journos” paid by the Vatican and the mafia to support Sonia Gandhi (no really, that’s how stupid rightwing hatred can make you) will soon find no traction. The Congress Party is hardly to be seen or heard these days after all. The media that is not pro-Modi is just being itself. And there were a few who were always critical of Modi and most of those are still standing too.

Until the media on the whole realises that its primary role is not to make excuses for the government in power, we will be treated to the cringing sights of famous news anchors calling the PM a “rock star” (you can work out if that’s a true compliment by googling the life story of Keith Richards if you know who Keith Richards is) or taking selfies with him and other Cabinet ministers.

Oddly, as the year ended and what the media rather embarrassingly and without self-consciousness refers to as the “honeymoon period” is over, it was former fan columnists who started showing their talons. There are only so many speeches, hats and NRI dances that anyone can take, apparently.

So what does the crystal ball I don’t have say? More of the same for a little while more until the next Budget…

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Since we’re looking back, the oddest trend this year was the attention paid to cricket. Usually, cricket takes centrestage over everything else in India, even and especially politics. But for the first time that I can remember, cricket took second place not only to politics but also to other sports. And these are shockers: athletics, badminton, kabaddi, hockey, football and tennis. I mean kabaddi? When was the last time who even heard the word until Star Sports decided (an excellent idea in my opinion) to promote it?

Of course, Sachin Tendulkar had retired and perhaps cricket writers felt the enormous gap left behind by a supernova. And much as they tried, no one else could fill that space although we do have a veritable galaxy of stars.

But for me the funniest phenomenon in media and sport this year was the International Premier Tennis League. India has done very well in tennis over the years and we have some big international names today, Grand Slam champions among them albeit in various doubles categories: Mahesh Bhupathi, Leander Paes, Sania Mirza, Rohan Bopanna, Somdev Devvarman.

But the arrival of the IPTL (conceptualised and organised by Bhupathi) in Delhi in December put the media into a tizzy. This is the non-tennis media because as they know, big stars including Rafael Nadal come to Chennai ever January for the Chennai Open, one of the first events on the ATP Tour. Also, Vijay Amritraj’s Champions Tennis League, with its own cache of international tennis stars, had just played in India to half-empty stands and perfunctory media coverage.

So what made the IPTL such a media sensation that every journalist who knows nothing about tennis jumped on to the bandwagon?

I’m guessing it was the glitz, the professionalism and it was, more than anything else, it was Roger Federer. I confess I have followed the tennis player since when he was a player and not a star and I can safely say I have never read so much breathless half-baked rubbish about Federer as I did when he reached Indian shores. I get Google alerts about Federer and even I confess that I did not read half of them because they were so much frothy nonsense.

The conclusion: Whether it’s Narendra Modi whom I don’t like or Roger Federer whom I adore, media fandom is deeply embarrassing!

See you in 2015.

By Ranjona Banerji

The Indian media is now involved in the battle of the boat. Some media outlets firmly believe the press release from the Ministry of Defence stating that the Coast Guard had intercepted and/or chased a boat full of terrorists from Pakistan heading to Porbander. Said boat then blew itself up.

Other media outlets have been asking questions, not least because various Indian intelligence agencies have questioned this MoD press release, which came a few days after the event. The Indian Express carried an excellent well-argued front page story by Praveen Swami, certainly the foremost journalist when it comes to Intelligence Bureau stories, poking holes in the MoD release. Some media journalists wanted to know why the Ministry of External Affairs had not sent an official complaint to Pakistan yet and it was only the Defence Ministry which had issued a press release.

Some journalists found indications that the boat could have been a smuggling vessel or a fishing vessel and may not have blown itself up as a suicide mission to heaven so much as it caught fire. Anyone who has been a journalist should know that all government agencies leak and that is where information comes from. Instead, we have fallen into the stupidest us versus them rut possible.

So now the division is clear. Anyone who has questions about the boat is a traitor and an agent of the Congress party and anyone who swallows every MoD press release hook line and sinker like the Gospel truth is an uber-patriot. India Uber Alles and bring on the storm troopers, brown shirts, nights of the long knives, young pioneers, Kristallnacht, what you will.

Is this what we’ve come to? A democracy where journalists cannot ask questions?

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Have started reading Vinod Mehta’s Editor Unplugged, his sequel to Lucknow Boy. As can be expected, the writing style is breezy, self-deprecating and enjoyable. As with Lucknow Boy, there’s a lot of pride in the journalistic achievements of Outlook magazine and even more about the many journalists he has mentored.

I cannot comment further without reading further, and this is not a book review. But this is a comment on the sort of mild hysteria that the book earned from fellow and former journalists soon after it was released. Most of these comments came from people either not born or still being fed pap by their mammas, pappas and ayahs when Mehta started working in journalism, in 1974.

The objections were to throwaway paragraphs in parenthesis about Tarun Tejpal, the now discredited former editor of Tehelka. Tejpal is out on bail having been charged with rape in a very public incident. I feel I have to make it clear that unlike many of those who had hissy fits on social media about what Mehta has written, I have made my own distaste and disgust for Tejpal’s actions very clear in commissioned articles for print and for websites. I have not hidden behind a veil of privacy on either Facebook or Twitter in my condemnation.

In spite of that, I found little offensive in Mehta’s observations. He writes about his firsthand knowledge of Tejpal and that is his prerogative.  Mehta admires Tejpal the journalist and that is also his prerogative. He sounds a little naive in this regard I must admit especially when it comes to Tejpal’s reputation with young women but that is hardly a hanging offence. The only problem seems to be a quote which he has attributed to writer William Dalrymple which Dalrymple denies.

But I remain amazed at the extent of the judgmental stupidity of some of my fellow journalists, including some I have worked with and some who have left the profession. They demonstrate on social media at least a complete ignorance about the way the system operates. It reflects, as I have said in these columns before, either bitter frustration for having left the profession and the perks it offers you or similar anger about not having a voice within their own newsrooms or the media outlet they work for. However, demonstrating their immense disingenuous sense of logic and patently bogus air of outraged innocence on social media cannot possibly help their respective causes, if what they want is fame and acknowledgment within the fraternity.

Did I just say that? After all, in this climate, extreme stupidity in journalists seems to be in high demand. Carry on guys in that case. Maybe someone will listen and give you that column or that TV appearance you so seem to crave. What posterity will say is another matter…

By Ranjona Banerji

The attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the deaths of 10 cartoonists, editors and employees and two policemen by Islamists yelling that they were doing this for the “Prophet” is so horrendous that no words are enough.

That this bloody rampage was an attack on free speech is self-evident. Charlie Hebdo was a magazine which pushed the boundaries and did it fearlessly. It took pride in being offensive and tried to be as offensive as possible to as many people as possible. Most publications will not and do not go so far for a number of reasons.

The mildest is that extreme satire is not to everyone’s taste. And sometimes being offensive for the sake of being offensive seems childish or even worse, adolescent. Anyone who has watched comedians battling in the “Yo Mamma” vein will know just how difficult being completely open to satire can be.

But just because satire can be difficult or painful does not mean that one must not embrace it. Everything in life is measured by degrees and so can your personal attitude to satire.  In absolute terms however, we need more satire, not less. Wherever there is pomposity, blind belief, bigotry, sanctimonious-ness, self-righteousness, grandiosity, power, hogwash, jargon… you need humour and sometimes only satire will do the trick.

Yes, in India, the media has not pushed too many buttons here. “Humour” is something we push to a corner and there are too many Indian citizens with thin skins and no sense of fun. Also, our idea of our society is based on paying lip service to the idea of “respect”. The result is that we end up “appeasing” all kinds of bigotry in the name of “respect”. If we exposed all humbuggery for what it is, we might in fact understand real respect better.

Having said all this, we have also accepted some limits. Racist attacks masquerading as humour are illegal and/or frowned upon. Across western Europe and the US, anti-Semitism is not permitted. In most democracies, making fun of those groups who have been historically subjugated is not acceptable. These are only some examples of where we usually do not go and where we consider we should not go.

But sometimes our self-censorship can be seen as pusillanimity.  And sometimes, in the media and The Government what some would call sensitivity, good sense or self-preservation, has led to the fringe elements of all communities setting the agenda. Many groups from the police to barbers to members of various religious communities have had massive tantrums when they have felt “offended” by sometimes innocuous mentions. Perhaps now, we should laugh at them a little more. We can always exercise good sense because not all attempts at humour are successful but we might now pussyfoot around controversial humour a bit less.

David Brooks in The New York Times provides a more nuanced view of the idea of the Charlie Hebdo sort of satire: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/opinion/david-brooks-i-am-not-charlie-hebdo.html?_r=0

This is an argument which should not end after the attack on Charlie Hebdo is forgotten.

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How far can a news channel go? Or, to put it another way, how did Times Now’sArnab Goswami accuse Congress MP Shashi Tharoor of murdering his wife Sunanda Pushkar and get away with it?

I must make it clear that I do not know who killed Sunanda Pushkar and I know no more about the case than what has appeared in the media. When Goswami blusters through his introductory monologue about injury number 12 and injury number 17 I have no idea what he’s talking about if indeed he is talking about anything.

When Goswami issues an open invitation Shashi Tharoor to his channel to discuss these numbered injuries and to come clean on what he knows, I realise that this is not journalism any longer. It is not trial by media. It is a news anchor trying to be Jerry Springer or any other such TV host who gets people to expose their innermost private lives for a few moments of fame and the delectation of those who live vicariously.

Earlier I felt, before Barkha Dutt was exposed by the Radia tapes, that Dutt had a good chance to be India’s Oprah Winfrey. Now I feel Goswami has trumped her and can become India’s Jerry Springer. No?

By Ranjona Banerji

While most journalists have stood firm with Charlie Hebdo and condemned the slaughter at the magazine, not all have agreed with the magazine’s position or even carried the cartoons that apparently set off this terrorist act. Across the world we have seen nuanced positions where journalists have explained why their own publications will not or cannot or would not ever imitate Charlie Hebdo.

It would be childish to call these positions cowardly. Rather, it reminds all of us of the restrictions we place on ourselves when we are responsible to a readership. It is easy to get sanctimonious about this but you only need to think about how pornography is not part of your daily newspaper to understand the restrictions already placed on us.

Some columnists like David Brooks in the New York Times defended Charlie Hebdo and then commented that a lot of its content was suitable for college magazines – if that. Some like Teju Cole in the New Yorker have discussed the various hypocrisies in the freedom of expression for all argument. Cartoonist Joe Sacco has used cartoons to explain his difference opinion with Charlie Hebdo in the Guardian – a newspaper which has given money to Charlie Hebdo to continue.

Cartoonists like Hemant Morparia have written about how he felt that Charlie Hebdo was too provocative. Morparia does not seem to mince his words or restrict his ideas but evidently even he places limitations on himself.

Commentaries on journalism – often by people who have little or no experience of journalism – sometimes comment in horrified terms about “self-censorship”. And yet, it is practised all the time because sometimes it is sensible and sometimes it is a question of good taste. What sort of a publication in India today would carry articles which said that it is time we returned to treating some castes as untouchables? The Constitution of India has promised us equality and no discrimination on the basis of caste. If you are a believer in the superiority of your own caste and the inferiority of others, do you have the right to freedom of expression and is a publication forced to give space to your point of view?

This may be an extreme example I know but I have made it only to point out that this is not a black and white issue. Politician Subramanian Swamy wrote an opinion piece which was deeply offensive to many since it argued that Muslims who do not acknowledge their Hindu ancestry should be denied their voting rights. DNA carried the piece after some argument within the newsroom one hears, but most mainstream journals would not have and with good reason.

The right answer here is that every journalist and publication has the right to decide how far it wants to go. We are circumscribed by laws and society whether we like it or not. France has its own laws and its own ideas and even it has had to answer for its long and unsavoury history of anti-Semitism with proscriptions on freedom of speech.

Europe has to deal with the difficulty of neo-Nazi movements and how far they are allowed to go. The US sees conservative religious groups makes the most outrageous and offensive comments about the LGBT communities and people whose sexual and lifestyle choices they do not agree with.

We cannot pretend that everywhere in the world freedom of expression is absolute and only Muslim extremists do not understand this.

But yes, as journalists, we must defend freedom of expression in absolute terms no matter how we practise it.