The other day, a popular “national” television news channel went hammer and tongs at the one-day floods that brought life to a standstill in Bengaluru and Gurgaon. It was Suhel Seth, the agony uncle of many a magazine, who reminded the anchor that there were more calamitous floods occurring in North-east India that the anchor did not even mention.

Indeed Assam this time is utterly devastated by nature&’s fury. About 1.8 million people are affected and over 20 have died. The poor rhino and its animal fraternity are gasping for breath. But since floods occur every year in Assam, it is no longer news for a national media that thrives on shock and awe stories.

However. while blaming the national media, the regional press and television has not covered itself in glory either. The media has transmogrified into an unindentifiable monster even as celebrity television anchors get at each other&’s throats over non-issues.     

After having been likened to commercial sex workers by none less than a minister of the Modi government, I don’t think we need hunt for more demeaning metaphors. Lest we forget, he called us “presstitutes”, and I am not particularly hurt by that moniker since prostitutes work on demand. People solicit their services; they provide those services. But on a more serious note, the media is also a conglomerate of ideas and practices. We are told that there are three primary roles we ought to perform, which is to “inform, educate and entertain”. The three have to be balanced else we will fall off like the unstable Humpty Dumpty, who, because of his girth, was not meant to sit on a wall but did so nevertheless and had a bad fall. 

I daresay the media today has tended to do more of the entertainment bit bordering on voyeurism rather than the first two essential duties. 

The advent of 24×7 television has pushed us into the deep end. I don’t envy the reporters who have to “be” at the scene of an accident, a flood or a riot and shoot out their questions thrusting their microphones right into the subject&’s mouth to get a “byte”. Several jokes are circulating on how television reporters bungle. There is one where a person is drowning and a reporter asks him how it feels to be sucked into the water. The man yells and tells the reporter to wait till he gets out of the water. “I will hit you with my chappal,” he screams and ends up with a couple of swear words (unmentionable). 

The fault lies with media houses that employ cub reporters to ferret out information without even a modicum of training being invested on building their personality or orientating them with basic journalistic skills. The finesse that journalism demands is lacking in many of them.  

I often wonder at our media education programmes. Does media education and training include personality development? Do teachers/professors realise how important this is? Having been in this profession for so long, I can say that most subjects (and they include policy makers and other VIPs) discuss us behind our backs and mark us out as serious, non-serious, jokers, purchasable, etc. They shun reporters who they consider mischievous; are respectful of those who they know are made of better stuff and are not up for auction. They dismiss others as being of no consequence. 

The media training institutes, therefore, are to groom their students to meet the desired criteria. A mediaperson need not be aggressive to get replies to incisive questions. Most of us forget that we are not conducting an inquisition. And believe me, no one likes an inquisitor since Spain did away with them. Mediapersons are not the police; hence our mode of questioning subjects should be different. 

Let me now come to the purpose of this article. Recently, a widely read newspaper from Assam culled out some pictures from 2014 showing young Muslim women training in martial arts for self-defence and stated that they were being trained as jihadis somewhere in India. First, to cull out a picture from the Internet is bad journalistic practice. Second, to transpose a picture from somewhere in the globe and make it appear that the action is happening closer home is unethical because it is aimed at fomenting communal tension. One wonders if this piece of journalism has come to the notice of the Press Council of India.

Many of us have been hauled up by the PCI for putting out fact-based stories intended to help people who are victimised by the system. Yet the perpetrators of such injustices still approach the PCI as if they are guilty of nothing and the PCI takes cognisance of their complaints. I wonder if this Assam-based newspaper will be penalised for violating the basic ethics of the profession.         

This reminds us of the July 2012 incident after a communal conflict broke out in Assam following which a picture of Rohingiya Muslims being persecuted in Myanmar was posted on social media and labelled as that of Muslims in Assam being persecuted by the tribes there. The result of that post was toxic. It went viral and thousands of North-easterners living in Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, etc, had to pack their bags and return home fearing a backlash. The picture must have been posted by some crank on social media because he wanted to have his revenge. It was one of the most dangerous outcomes of social media use. 

That a similar thing could happen (the picture of some incident happening elsewhere in another context to be juxtaposed as happening in India in different circumstances) in the mainstream media shows that we have yet to learn our lessons. 

With the advent of web-portal/wired journalism in India, we are now in a greater frenzy to be the first to get the news out. All the web news portals are competing to “break the news”. This has pushed many in the mainstream media to have a wired portal along with the newspaper for this 24×7 newsbreak. This is journalism in a hurry where you dispense with the niceties of the profession without even a twinge of conscience. 

Lessons learnt in journalism school — media laws, media ethics, et al, are relegated to the background. Putting your news through such filters takes time and effort and you might just miss “breaking the news”. As a reader of such portals, one is unsure whether to take a piece of news as authentic or “planted”. India is populous and the average Indian has a view on every issue. Social media allows these views to be disseminated on cyber space instantly. In fact, the danger today is that there are too many people using the Internet to broadcast their political or religious ideologies and inciting trouble, than there are peace-builders. 

How do we sift fact from fiction? And how does mainstream media continue to retain its sanity and pursue its constitutionally driven mandate doggedly without being distracted by this constant blitzkrieg? It&’s a tall order and it&’s something we in the media seriously need to deliberate, but where is the time? And who is going to do it?         

 The need to keep up with social media&’s breathless, personalised, unedited “news by the minute” kind of journalism has pushed all of us to ignore the basic tenets of the profession, which is to balance our reports by getting views from all the subjects mentioned in the news, including those we allege of wrongdoing. Besides, journalists also have to contend with media owners and what they want from us. 

The media today has gone corporate and profit is an important purpose for running a media house. Television news is purely ranked on Television Rating Points, which essentially means grabbing eyeballs. The more sensational the news, the greater the viewership. This has become the current benchmark. Those reporting for television today are not all trained hands but they have accurately gauged the minds of the viewers. They know that the more voyeuristic the news and the more personalised, the better is their readership; hence they are better able to retain their jobs in a hire-and-fire environment.          

The media has also widened the gulf between different regions of the country. Where do we go from here? 

The writer is Editor, The Shillong Times, and member, National Security Advisory Board.