Category: MEDIA

By Ranjona Banerji

 

The intimidation of journalists is not new and it is not unprecedented. And yet it is intriguing that this is reason that some of us come up with when there are new attacks on our community. The physical attacks on reporters by lawyers outside the Patiala House Court on two days this week cannot and must not be condoned.

 

The Mumbai Press Club held a protest meeting outside its gates on Wednesday and I was proud to be part of this. At a discussion afterwards, some of us tried to analyse what has been happening and how we should respond. Many senior journalists like Darryl D’Monte and Sidharth Bhatia were reminded of the run-up to the Emergency and the eventual clampdown on the media by the Indira Gandhi government in 1975. Nikhil Wagle reminded everybody that it is not just BJP or RSS governments which have attacked journalists – just about every political party has. Gurbir Singh spoke about the murder of Jagendra Singh for exposing the criminality of a Samajwadi Party politician. Ayaz Memon reiterated that we have to fight on, against all odds.

 

The battle that we are fighting now though is on two fronts. One is the affiliates, supporters and members of the BJP and its larger family. And the second is members of the media themselves. It is customary, or has been, for journalists to stand together when they are attacked. But watching some TV news channels like Times Now or reading the tweets of some journalists, you wonder where this profession is heading. Regardless of which political party you feel you support or like or prefer, what does it say when you choose that affiliation over your junior staff and fellow journalists being attacked for doing their job?
Does the newsroom of Times Now, for instance, hold together or how does it cope when its editor-in-chief is bombastically yelling for some bizarre notion of nationalism every night when this is how its reporters are treated by supporters of the government?
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Wheres-the-SC-now-lawyers-taunted-me/articleshow/51032085.cms

 

Meenakshi Bhanja of Times Now, in this piece carried in The Times of India and others from the stable, writes about how 40 lawyers surrounded her: “One lawyer asked, “Kaun ho tum?” I said I was a Times Now correspondent. I showed them my SC pass. Other lawyers in the crowd snatched my SC pass and tore it up and started taunting me, “Ab le aao SC ko apne saath. Kahaan gaya SC iss waqt?””

 

At the very least, one would have expected a bombastic anchor to lambast those lawyers after that?

 

But no, we were just murdering democracy with one more yelling match on who was more nationalistic and how students were the scourge of society.

 

Maybe George Bush was right: if you are not with us, you are against us?

 

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Meanwhile, there is evidence that the videos that have been doing the rounds of JNU students’ union leader Kanhaiya Kumar being seditious were in fact doctored. One would expect our patriotic news channels to issue some sort of apology but expectations, as Hindu philosophy tells us, are bound to bring us distress.

 

But here are a couple of tweets to make your life happy.

 

This is Swapan Dasgupta, who openly bats for the BJP who shows some grace at least, even if a “but…”:

“I checked with responsible people. There is a part of video clip I retweeted that may be dodgy. I erred & say so openly. Larger q’s remain.”

 

And this is former colleague Abhijit Majumder, editor of Mail Today, about whom I am speechless:

A fake video doesn’t change the fact that Kanhaiya organised event with break-India posters, slogans, intention. So, #IStandWithNation

 

The nation however is larger than petty patriotism and hopefully always will be.

 

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And to a miserable end, this is the sad story of Malini Subramaniam, hounded by the Chhatisgarh government and police for reporting for Scroll.in
http://scroll.in/article/803821/how-the-chhattisgarh-police-succeeded-in-hounding-out-those-who-questioned-it

 

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If you don’t understand that there’s a battle, perhaps you really should look at PR as a career option. At least that way you will be honest about what you do.

 

By Ranjona Banerji

 

Much as the nation has been rocked by the events of the past two weeks, so has the media. We have seen a breakdown of law and order in the national capital, a student arrested for sedition, a university under siege for expressing itself, a terrorist attack in Kashmir, a state held to ransom by rampaging citizens, journalists attacked, fake tweets being upheld by the government and videos allegedly being doctored and shown without any attempt at verification by a hysterical media.

 

Phew. Too much to take? It is not going to get any easier, judging by the way we are going.
Journalists in India took out marches at various cities to protest against the way their colleagues were abused and beaten up by lawyers at Patiala House Court even as the police watched. For this, they were mocked by very senior columnists like Tavleen Singh who said she had not seen journalists marching for some 30 years. In fact, that is untrue. In Mumbai at least, journalists have protested in many forms, including marches, when their colleagues have been attacked by political parties.

 

I was at the march in Mumbai, as I pointed out in my last column, and every senior journalist there was aghast at the way that some news channels were covering the “crisis” at Jawaharlal Nehru University. I would wager that most of them know more about journalism and the way it should be practised than all our TV anchors put together.

 

Times Now and Zee News were seen as the main culprits in this game of “my nationalism is better than yours” because both had shown videos of JNU student Kanhaiya Kumar shouting anti-national slogans without authenticating them. The videos have turned out to be doctored. Times Now’s editor in chief Arnab Goswami denied that he had shown the videos when called on it by Sidharth Varadarajan, one of the editors of thewire.in, and ran demands onscreen for an apology. However when confronted with evidence that he had shown the videos on air, Goswami capitulated. So much for him “saving the nation” every night. You might argue that journalism needs to be saved from him.

 

A journalist with Zee News, Vishwa Deepak, quit the channel because he claimed he could not live with the fact that his channel had shown the doctored video knowing it was fake and that he and the staff had been forced into further falsification. Zee Media has contested this.

 

But for calling Times Now and Zee News on this reprehensible form of journalism, many of my former colleagues have called me a hypocrite. So be it. I would rather be called that than applaud such practices.

 

But the biggest surprise of the week came from Ravish Kumar of NDTV India. In what seemed like a Howard Beale “Mad as hell” moment (from the 1976 film Network which should be mandatory viewing for every journalist), Kumar spoke to his viewers about the sickness that has infected television journalism today. For 41 minutes, he kept you riveted as he talked about how the practise of journalism has been pummelled by its own people. The screen blackened as he spoke and he played out just the sound of screaming news anchors and enraged politicians and students.

 

Yes, it was gimmicky in parts and yes it was over-emotional and dramatic at times but it was no less true for all that. Kumar exposed much of what is wrong with journalism today and did it without putting himself above it. I salute Ravish Kumar for having the courage to change the pattern, if only for one night. He has held up a horrible mirror for us to look into. You as a journalist may dismiss him but you would do so at your own peril.

 

Perhaps journalism in India has now reached one more crossroads. There are some of us who agree with Ravish Kumar but we have reached a terrible depth. We have to reclaim the higher space. There are others undoubtedly, who will always kowtow to those who hold the purse-strings and who will bend towards whichever political party is in power. These have always existed but they were once the minority. Now one fears, they are the rulers.

 

I feel the worst for the young journalist who comes into the profession full of hope. Speak to a few of them and their disillusionment is evident. But if they have to make a living, what are they to do? Those who should be their mentors are now the perpetrators of fraud.

 

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I come back once again to journalists who do not stand up for other journalists when they are under siege. What is one to make of them? If however there is any fellow feeling left in us, which can manage to overcome political differences, then I feel we should be brave when we are threatened, not capitulate. And if you do not think that journalists are under threat, do read this:
http://scroll.in/article/803975/insidious-intimidation-delhi-police-visit-homes-of-journalists-covering-the-jnu-row

 

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My friend and former colleague Neeta Kolhatkar put out a tweet last week about a protest march being held by the Mumbai Press Club. Just for this, she was threatened on Twitter with gangrape. She immediately complained to the police and to Twitter India. I can only hope that she gets the full support of all journalists to make sure that the obnoxious Twitter account is identified and caught. In this, at least, I hope our partisan differences can be put aside?