Category: MxM JOURNALISM REVIEW

By Ranjona Banerji

The Prime Minister of India is apparently upset that the media targeted his minister VK Singh for his “presstitute” remark, while ignoring the good evacuation work that the former chief of army staff had done in Yemen.

In these media-obsessed times, where we are given more importance than we are worth, perhaps the PM’s comments are understandable. What I find intriguing is the number of working journalists who agree with Narendra Modi about the lack of attention paid to India’s exemplary role in evacuating people from the dangers in Yemen. If you work in a newspaper or a TV channel or a website, then you have a say in what goes into your paper or appears on your channel or on your website. To come on Twitter and start ranting about “the media” as one entity which ignored events in Yemen is childish and exposes your own irresponsibility. What were you doing? Does your job have no value or meaning? Can you not make your voice heard in your newsroom? In that case, what sort of a journalist are you? The best newsrooms after all are those in which there is healthy discussion and that is a euphemism for a fight!

And if your place of employment has taken a policy decision to ignore the sort of stories that you feel strongly about, take a stand. Protest or even better, quit: that way you will show the world the depth of your beliefs and your ideals.

But no, you have that loan, your child’s education, your weakness for shoes or whatever. So much easier to do a sloppy job at work and then come to social media to slam this entity called “the media”. Imagine how good a journalist you are when you pretend that there is such a thing as “the media” which thinks and acts as one. I use the word “sloppy” deliberately because if you are a job-worker then you have no business being a journalist. I find this category of journalist more repulsive than those who openly support a political party. At least they take a position openly in their professional life, whether you agree with them or not. But these say-nothing-at-work-and-rant-on-social-media journalists are nothing but snivelling cowards who pretend to have principles but only care about their pelf.

But given the state of media managements today and the general standard I see around me, I give thanks that I have been unemployed for five years now and counting. And thanks to this column, unemployable as well!

**

Since I wrote about how no one knows what Rahul Gandhi did when he was away from public life for two months or what he did, this joke on Twitter after his speech at a rally and in Parliament seemed appropriate: apparently, he’d been learning to speak Hindi!

**

Other political parties in India must be either tearing their metaphorical hair out or hugely relieved that the national media’s obsession with AAP means that this Delhi-based parties regularly wins newsprint space and airtime over even the prime minister of India. One of those bane and boon situations…

By Ranjona Banerji

The public suicide by a young farmer from Rajasthan at an AAP rally in Delhi this week exposed not just our political establishment but also members of the media. Watching events unfold on television it seemed inconceivable that this could happen with so many people present.

After the fact as well, TV attention shifted to a political blame game because no news is legitimate in India unless it has a political angle – barring Bollywood and cricket of course. So instead of the death of this one farmer, which capitulated the problems of all farmers to centre-stage, we were fed a constant loop of he-said-she-said finger-pointing by all India’s political parties.

Contrast this to the way the migrant crisis is being covered in Europe and you can an idea of how stories can be developed without competing quotes from political spokespersons.

Yes, I know. I’m talking to the wind.

**

I can understand members of the public being angry with newspapers and TV channels and websites for not being admirers of the current government. I for instance rarely read journalists who I feel are going to be needlessly critical of the tennis great Roger Federer. It is a choice I make as a fan, not as a thinking journalist.

But journalists who get upset when the current government at the Centre and the prime minister are criticised? What is one supposed to make of them? I’m not even talking about those who are open card holders and well-known admirers of the BJP or its attendant organisations. Or even the journalists who joined AAP. I am talking about working journalists in various news organisations.

Of course, it could be the dangers of too much blabbing on social media that I see before me. Many journalists, especially young ones, feel that they deserve a voice. The blog-as-diary is no longer as popular as it once was. So enter Facebook and Twitter. Perhaps their frustrations are better expressed on other fora as well that I am unaware of. Sufficeth to say, they sound off enough on the social media platforms I visit.

I’m even willing to forgive the young, the rookies, those at the bottom of the newsroom food chain. But not journalists who have had a good 10 years of work experience or more. They should at least know how a newsroom if not a news organisation functions. And they ought to know that the primary function of the media is to in opposition. So if they felt full of indignant self-righteousness when they called out fellow journalists and senior columnists for being pro-Congress or pro the Nehru-Gandhi family, then surely those same high principles apply to those who are pro-BJP or pro-Narendra Modi?

Incidentally, these are the same sort of people who happily point fingers at mistakes and transgressions by other news organisations but are silent when it comes to similar problems by their own. And no one is error-free – if I really even have to point that out. As I have mentioned in earlier columns, this sort of behaviour is cowardice and unprofessionalism.

There is also some irony in such journalists calling whoever disagrees with their political views “paid agents” of the other party. I mean, if that shoe fits…

By Ranjona Banerji

The terrible earthquake that ravaged Nepal on Saturday brought out the worst and the best of Indian news television. On Saturday, since it happened in the morning and most channels get into weekend programming, it took time for the enormity of the event to sink in. We will never, it now seems clear, escape from the tyranny of the breathless ingénue TV reporter who gets into “Wow Awesome” mode. Can there be a sentence more offensive than “The breaking news we are now covering is an earthquake in Nepal”?

As is the norm these days, the internet and Twitter got the news first, so if there has to be one-upmanship in human tragedy, the credit goes to the Net and not to television. And of the channels on offer in India, CNN won hands down on Saturday. The coverage was sober and informative. And the best of all is their met section which explained as much as was known about the earthquake and the weather in the area as the day unfolded.

Soon after the earthquake struck, CNN-IBN had the chance to broadcast the met update for Nepal but chose instead to switch to a press conference given by a minister. In India, when a politician speaks, all attention has to go to him or her, regardless. The minister made some anodyne remarks about a fast unfolding situation that added nothing substantial to the news. How I long for the days when the junior most or most incompetent reporters were sent to press conferences…

While on CNN-IBN, it was painful to watch an anchor pointing to a map of Northern India on Monday evening and saying, “This area has had many many earthquakes” many many times. We got it the first time. We would have been better informed if the many many had been replaced by numbers. We would have been even happier if the Indian plate pushing under the Asian plate had been discussed many many times with many many details.

However, it was not CNN-IBN alone which faltered. NewsX, Headlines Today and Times Now launched into their usual competition of nationalistic triumphalism. Oh India is the greatest, India set the most aid, India sent the best aid and so on. One should get used to this but it remains disgraceful and distasteful.

By Monday, most Indian channels had sent reporters to Nepal and coverage had improved. Sadly, though, whether it is CNN or the BBC or any Indian channel, the “how did you feel when the world ended” question just cannot be replaced or rephrased. They have to ask it, no matter how stupid and senseless they sound. One BBC anchor even asked an eyewitness to describe how people around him reacted after the earthquake. You really desperately want them to reply, “Oh, the people looked around at their broken homes and lives and injured and dead family and friends and went off and ate cucumber sandwiches.”

Surely, surely, there is a better way of doing it?

**

Incidentally, dear TV-wallahs, “PM chairs expert panel on aid for Nepal” qualifies as a news headline. It provides information. “PM tweets about Nepal earthquake” is not “breaking news”. It is not anything but your own desire to become a PR person being made public for the world to see.

By Ranjona Banerji

For the Indian media, the shame of Nepal tweeting: Go Home after our shamelessly insensitive and jingoistic coverage of April’s earthquake was quickly put behind us. Salman Khan’s seemingly shameless behaviour was far more appealing and come on, this is a big Bollywood star how can we not cover him?

And that is undoubtedly true. Everything about the Salman Khan case was important and we got everything there was: the judgment, the sentence, the star, the fans, the tweets, the victims, the affected people… The question that remained however was: did we have to get quite so much of it? It was as if, on television at least, everything else came to a standstill. The only news was Salman Khan and his sentencing and then bail in a 2002 hit-and-run case.

However, some good did come of it. We realised (at least those who had been kidding themselves) how stupid Bollywood can sound when it speaks in one voice. We realised (those who pretended they did not know it) how much poor people are hated by the privileged in India. We saw how miserably accident victims and people who do not have access to lawyers are treated by the system.

We also saw that it is not correct to talk about cases no one wants to talk about. Like that Aston Martin accident on Peddar Road one dark night in Mumbai. Even when it happened, only a handful of newspapers carried it. The car belonged to the Ambani family you see. Nuff said, eh?

**

We’re coming up to one year of the Narendra Modi government at the Centre and media organisations are gearing up with their surveys and report cards. Some pro-Modi columnists have hit the ground running and decided that Modi’s first year would have been perfect if it wasn’t for people like Jawaharlal Nehru (died 1964), bureaucrats, Arun Jaitley, farmers and so on. There will be others more critical. The Economic Times I hear from the grapevine has planned some 20-odd pages. Talk about overkill…

**

The coverage of results day of the UK general elections was a fascinating lesson in how we in India have developed our own unique Indian way of covering results. Of course, there is no question that an Indian general election is bigger in size and scale even if the number of seats to the Lok Sabha is less than those to the House of Commons.

But we have also managed to instil a wonderful dose of tamasha and gymnastic to our results coverage. There was something soothing I’ll admit about the BBC or CNN screens, with party seats scrolling at the bottom and informed discussions happening above. But what about our predilection for colourful graphics that burst all over the screen and our prancing anchors and our breathless reporters? Not to mention the countless studio guests all yelling at each other?

The closest to such drama one supposes comes during the US presidential elections when CNN has Princess Leia and R2D2 holograms all over the place.

**

Meanwhile, and this is nothing to do with the media, the media has decided that British politicians give the best resignation speeches. And the media is right.

By Ranjona Banerji

It is hard for anyone to deny that the Aam Aadmi Party and its earlier avatar, the India Against Corruption movement, got unprecedented support from the media, especially television. At the end of the day, the AAP is a party which has not managed to make much headway electorally at least, beyond Delhi. It has got far more national media space than any other state government in India, most of which are full-fledged state governments.

However, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal’s various tantrums and threats to the media notwithstanding, it now appears that the coverage of the AAP and its government has become vicious and even unfair. Undue and gleeful attention is now paid to every possible transgression by the party. Some TV channels seem to find it hard to accept that there are lawyers and constitutional experts who actually agree with AAP in the current imbroglio with between the state government and the lieutenant-governor over bureaucratic appointments.

There is a need here for the media to step back a bit and consider its obsession –whether for or against – with AAP which is now bordering on the absurd.

**

It is commendable when the media and especially TV take on the important and self-important on behalf of the ordinary person. However, as we saw when it came to the brick-throwing story, a little more diligence would have been better journalism. Equally, when it came to the very courageous young woman in Agra, who objected to a security guard winking at her, some considered focus would have made for a more accurate story. For those who came in late, a gun-toting policeman accompanying some political type winked at a woman on a two-wheeler. She objected and tried to take a picture of the man. He picked up her phone and smashed it. She jumped on top of the car he was in, sat on the bonnet and attacked the windshield with the party flag on the car.

She became an immediate heroine and with good reason. Women who have had enough street harassment empathised and people who are sick of political posturing wanted more. Evening discussions on TV however targeted the political party and the man in the car. As a rule, we in India feel that politicians are by nature venal and deserve to be dragged over the coals at every opportunity (except for those we admire or worship of course). The media also finds politicians the easiest target.

But however idiotic the Samajwadi Party member was in this instance and how dare he ride around in a Mercedes and why does his sister speak for him, surely the first port of questioning should have been the head of whichever force the winker belonged to? The transgression that started the fight was his after all…

**

The French Open, one of the four Grand Slams of tennis, begins this weekend. And for reasons we should be familiar with now, all tennis and sports lovers will not be able to watch it. All those who subscribe to Tata Sky that is. Because the French Open rights belong to Neo Sports.

My advice: start fighting for your viewing rights now.

By Ranjona Banerji

The latest count is over 2000 deaths in India because of the heat. Most are in Andhra Pradesh-Telangana but there are casualties across the nation. However, if you only relied on the Indian media to give you this information, you would have to concentrate on local media or mainstream South-based media. For the national media, 2000 deaths is a side story to all the usual political hoopla that we are obsessed with.

So the main headlines in print and on TV have been one year of Narendra Modi, one year of Narendra Modi, one year of Narendra Modi, Kejriwal v Jung, school board results, the President of India and Bofors, TRAI allegations against Manmohan Singh, Manmohan Singh meets Modi, Rahul Gandhi eats fish in Kerala and more along those lines.

Before all you defensive journalists get your knickers in a twist and mutter over stories that were carried on the heat wave please compare them to all the other headline news and you might get a chance to understand my point.

My case is simple: whatever you did was not enough. There has to be more to newsgathering than politics and minutiae reporting about our (I mean “your”) political heroes. And this north-south divide has surely run its course. We cannot possibly boast of how we have entered the 21st century as a nation and still determine that 1400 people dead in South India is of little concern to people living north of the Vindhyas.

The editors of the Dehradun edition of the Times of India for instance have decided that we who live here are not interested in these deaths at all. However, the local Garhwal Post is interested. So is the dak edition of the Hindu from Delhi, the Indian Express and of course the most news on the deaths comes from Asian Age because of its Deccan Chronicle connection. I have not noticed too many commentators and experts wasting their time on these deaths either. I may be wrong but the general feeling seems to be: if it’s hot, the poor will die and please crank up the air-conditioning. And yet, there are issues about global warming, environmental damage, increasing deforestation and development and water shortages which lead to these deaths. Are these not important?

Am I being unfair? In 2013, I was in England in the summer. It was blisteringly hot. Two people died from heat reactions, including one young soldier. The coverage was constant and comprehensive. I am being unfair here and making a comparison. Things have reached such a pass that you can get better news of the heat wave in India from foreign websites, news channels and newspapers.

**

In all the massive sycophancy shown to politicians of this hue or that by journalists, you have to commend India’s cartoonists who have become our most objective commentators on life and politics. A big thank you to Keshav, Ajit Ninan, Manjul, Satish Acharya, Hemant Morparia and anyone else I have left out. I salute you!

**

What was the Mumbai Mirror thinking? Its film reviewer gave the film Tanu Weds Manu Returns two-and-a-half stars. This is why you hire reviewers: so that they share their opinions, favourable or critical, with your readers. However, after seeing a kinder public reaction (or reading other critics?), the newspaper put out a notice saying that since people liked the film, they were increasing the number of stars to three-and-a-half! Okay, you and I can read between the lines. It had nothing to do with readers or critics. Long live marketing!

PS:  Just heard: the Mumbai Mirror reviewer Rahul Desai has quit on this issue.

By Ranjona Banerji

The way sports journalists look at scams, scandals and problems within the sport they cover is very intriguing. Many, and this is hardly surprising, choose sports because they have a passion or a fan interest. This makes them some of the best writers in the entire gamut of journalism. But does it make them good journalists? No one covers a civic beat for instance because they have had a childhood passion for municipal politics. But it can and is a treasure chest of great stories and an opportunity for excellent journalism.

So the “Sepp Blatter and FIFA versus the rest of the goodie-goodie world” story was impossible to decode for the casual observer. And everyone agreed that it would make no difference to football fans across the world. The western media, sports and otherwise, often looks at such scams in terms of how the third/non-white world operates. So the main objection to Qatar being awarded a football World Cup was the human issue labourers dying while making stadia. However. it could be postulated that workers might also die building other structures in Qatar. It seems a logical impossibility that they only die when connected to football.

If there is no outrage for those deaths then it would imply there is a bigger picture or the anti-Qatar feeling is tinged with racism and hypocrisy in the world of football. You see this very often with some parts of the British media and cricket where everything immoral about betting and match-fixing is sub-continental – the former Empire acting up and proving why the Brits shouldn’t have left. The “white” cricketers involved (and there are many) is because they were naive, innocent, trapped, really thought they were discussing the weather and so on.

Even when former South African cricket captain Hansie Cronje was caught by the Delhi police with incontrovertible evidence of involvement in match-fixing in 2000, several sympathetic articles appeared in the western press on how a believing Christian could never be involved in such stuff. Cue in evil Indian police authorities for daring to point fingers at a white man!

This is not meant to be a diatribe against racism in cricket journalism. It is just an example of how sports and general journalists cannot sometimes see the woods for the trees. They get caught up in other issues (why is the BCCI so powerful) or get affected by their fandom (how can someone who bats so well be a crook). I worked for a short while with a cricket magazine in 2000 when the match-fixing scam broke. Many of the sports journalists around me were genuinely shocked that such a thing had happened even though rumours had been swirling around for years and Tehelka had done a sting operation on dodgy dealings in cricket some years earlier.

While cricket fans were to some extent appalled as events unfolded in 2000, we have clearly been told that no football fan is bothered by what FIFA is accused of. Like the intrigues of the BCCI, many international sports associations are dominated by one man, full of money, politics, lifestyles and fun and games of various sorts. Blatter’s surviving skills outdo most reviled BCCI members so what does that tell us about sport and fairplay?

In tennis, which I watch very closely, I have noticed that issues of drug abuse and betting are barely reported before they are swept under the courts. French sports magazine L’Equipe went hammer and tongs at Lance Armstrong for drug abuse as he won Tour de France after Tour de France until they were proved right. But French tennis player Richard Gasquet gets a small ban and a tiny rap on the knuckles for kissing a girl at a party and getting cocaine all over his lips. Really. Marin Cilic comes back from a drug-related ban and wins the US Open. Hmm. Even if they are both innocent, and they may well be, where are the stories?

It is, intriguingly, the players who talk the most about drugs and betting but cursory attention is paid to what they say. A scandal of sorts has emerged in the ongoing French Open about defending men’s champion Rafael Nadal asking the Association of Tennis Players to remove a chair umpire from his matches, a request apparently not made to the French Open but still followed. Senior and well-respected umpire, Carlos Bernardes’s apparent crime was to enforce the ATP’s own rules against Nadal. In other words, he was doing his job. There has been some minor reporting on this and other top players have objected to the favour done to Nadal, but that is about it. Has anyone seen much on this in the Indian media, although the French Open is covered by all newspapers?

By Ranjona Banerji

Jagendra Singh used his Facebook account to post his articles: he was a “social media” journalist based in Shahjahanpur. Apparently several “mainstream” reporters in UP checked with his page regularly for updates. Singh had put out several stories about allegations of the gangrape of an Anganwadi worker against Samajwadi Party member and minister for dairy development Ram Murti Verma. He also posted stories about land grabbing and illegal mining by the minister, a Kurmi strongman for whom the SP is his sixth party. Incidentally, the gangrape story has also been covered in the mainstream media.

Singh was hounded and harassed by Verma and his men until on June 1 he was doused with kerosene and set alight, apparently by five policemen and Verma’s supporters. Singh remained alive long enough to record a dying declaration, accusing the minister and the police for his death and asking why indeed he was burnt when he could have been beaten up.

Singh’s son Rahul says that people from the party have since offered him money and a government job to hush up the case.

On one side, this incident represents total contempt for the law by the police and the political class. On the other, it shows the great difficulty of confronting those in power. Both sides tell a terrifying story. And yet one that is hardly new or unknown.

In any other world, the minister would be made to resign pending an enquiry. Here, it took a week of public outrage after Jagendra Singh’s death for the five policemen involved to be suspended. The minister remains not just on the run but in power and it seems will continue to have support from above.

To make matters worse, another journalist in Pilibhit, Haider Khan, was thrashed and then tied to a motorcycle and dragged along the road for 100 metres on Sunday. His “crime”? Stories on dubious land deals. He is in hospital in a critical condition and the police have started “an investigation against four people”.

This is when you realise the importance of a forum for and of journalists. We do not need special laws. But we do need someone who can take up the fight for the Jagendras and Haiders of the world. Because even if you assume that Jagendra was wrong in his allegations, his punishment cannot be being burnt to death by policemen loyal to a politician. We know what can be expected from the UP government when the state’s horticulture minister ParasnathYadav refers to Jagendra Singh’s death by saying, “There are some incidents that happen in the course of nature and destiny.”

I was going to write that we also need a society where accountability is taken seriously but it sounded like a clichéd joke when faced with such a legal and political system. The only hope is to keep covering such stories relentlessly.

**

A number of Twitter handles covering media gossip and news popped up last year using the word “Lutyens” to signify that they were focused in and Delhi politics. We all followed them and after titillating and entertaining their followers, most have petered out. @LutyensInsider remained strong however with its 40000+ followers.

However, when @LutyensInsider started attacking journalist Swati Chaturvedi with malicious, pernicious and slanderous tweets, you knew both gossip and anonymity had gone too far. Chaturvedi, rather than laugh it off or ignore the abuse as so many of us do, decided to do take the anonymous handle on. She filed an FIR against the handle, complained to Twitter India and did whatever was necessary. The brave anonymous handle deleted all tweets and closed the account, shifted to another and then closed that as well. All power to Chaturvedi and every support for her case which she assured her followers she will pursue to the end.

Does the employer of @LutyensInsider have any role to play here? He or she was presumably using information picked up in his or her line of work to share on Twitter. Was the anonymity of the handle licence enough for no one to be responsible?

There is caveat here for all of us who use Twitter for salacious gossip. Twitter is an open forum and this is where its benefit lies. Trolling is one of the disadvantages but there is a difference between a sad lonely person trying to annoy people and working journalists using anonymity to settle scores.

We also have the piquant situation where Chaturvedi is also accused of calling people names on Twitter. However, this “defence” of LutyensInsider has been put together by another anonymous Twitter handle which runs a website that attempts to critique the media. It is obviously not run by a journalist and it is nothing but a series of rambling rants on journalists the blogger does not like. It appears to be run by one of India’s millions of rightwing social media defenders of the current Central government. Irony? What’s that?

Expression is free and good luck to such websites. My beef here however is with journalists who pretend that such websites are credible and post links with self-righteous zeal as if blogs about your personal likes and dislikes are equal to proof. No one can be that innocent, surely? Or, er, foolish?

By Ranjona Banerji

For the past two weeks we have been consumed with the doings and sayings of Lalit Modi, ex- IPL commissioner, now on the run from the Enforcement Directorate for alleged financial improprieties during IPL season 2. Well, “on the run” is a slightly erroneous way of putting it since Modi has been safely ensconced in the UK since 2010 and travels all over Europe, thanks to his friends in high places.

His “friends in high places” range from British politician Keith Vaz to a few British royals, India’s external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj, Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje and many others.

The media has been all over the story and tales of impropriety which started with the UK’s Sunday Times have now taken over our TV channels and newspapers. However what, if anything, the Lalit Modi saga proves is the limited and largely delusionary “power” of the media. In spite of all the hysterics on our news channels and suitably outraged editorials, the Central government has not budged from its support of Swaraj and Raje and the prime minister has not said a word in public. Instead, he has been doing the relaxing makarasana on Rajpath.

Those inside the media insisted that the revelations against Swaraj came from within the BJP – the ruling faction— which wanted to embarrass her. But Lalit Modi being the loose cannon he is, Raje was dragged in as were others. That was not apparently the intended result. Then rumours surfaced that Raje would be sacrificed and Swaraj saved. Be that as it may, the picture emerging now is a government refusing to relent in the face of something as wishy-washy as “propriety” and a sycophantic media a bit confused as to which direction to take.

The neat segue to International Yoga Day and almost two days on non-stop coverage of people and politicians doing yoga underlines that confusion. The Modi (Lalit) imbroglio was almost forgotten as several contortions were made to prove anyone not doing yoga on Sunday June 21 was anti-India, anti-national and so on. Vice-President Hamid Ansari was also at the receiving end from the RSS’s Ram Madhav who then had to furiously backpedal to further incohesiveness.

On Monday, we were back to Lalit Modi. Interestingly, what was called “Modigate” (because of the Indian media’s obsession with Watergate although most would be hard-pressed to remember what Richard Nixon looked like) is now being called “Lalitgate”. The reasons are obvious: Lalit Modi and Narendra Modi. Enough said.

This story cannot go on forever and is already losing traction. There is additional confusion over whether to treat this as a cricket story or a political story. It is possible that to save our politicians and government, the focus will shift entirely to “cleaning up cricket” while everyone pretends that our politicians are squeaky-clean idols.

**

Soon after journalists in UP were killed and attacked, we have one more gruesome case from Madhya Pradesh. Sandeep Kothari, a journalist who worked in the Japalpur area and wrote for several local newspapers, was allegedly burnt to death for his series of stories on the sand mafia. Local journalists never get either the recognition or the rewards that mainstream and English language journalists do. Many are vilified as being fixers and operators. But it is also true that many do the groundwork that the media rests on. From all accounts, Kothari was relentless in his pursuit of the sand mafia in Jabalpur and paid the price in the worst possible way. Those of us who do not work against such odds must acknowledge, at least, how lucky we are if not the contribution made by the Kotharis, Singhs and Haiders of this cruel world.