| Published on 04-09-2008 In General | | Viewed 1058 times | | Banning the Media Not a Solution in a Democracy |
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| Written by
N.R.Mohanty | 
The Jammu & Kashmir government banned two TV stations in Jammu in thefirst week of August, 2008 charging them with arousing inflammatory passions. In the last week of August, two TV stations in Srinagar were shut down on similar charges. The government was of the view that their partisan conduct was a slur on the freedom of the media and they did not deserve the privileges available in a democracy.
The J & K High Court intervened to lift the ban on the Jammu TV stations and the same may happen in the case of TV stations in Srinagar.
But the legality apart, is there a case for media ethics?
No doubt, J & K is witness to an explosive situation today, with the conflict between two regions and two religions enmeshed with each other. The ethical issue is, how should this conflict situation be portrayed in the media? Is it a free for all or should the media be governed by some ethical concerns?
The basic ethical standard for the media is the representation of truth. But then who defines what the 'truth' is? For the TV channels in Jammu, or for that matter, in Srinagar, the texts and visuals that they showed represented the truth. After all, the Jammu channels said, they reflected the grievances of the people of the area following the government's decision to withdraw the land transfer to the Amarnath Shrine Board and the subsequent police brutality on the agitationists. And the Srinagar-based channels claimed that they reflected the sufferings of the Kashmiris due to the blockade imposed by the Jammu region and also due to the crackdown by the armed forces on the hundreds of thousands of protesters.
They were representing the truth, they said. But the government argued that they were representing only the half-truths. The Jammu-based channel never showed the harrowing condition of the people of Kashmir and the channel operating from Srinagar never bothered about the sentiments and sufferings of the people of Jammu. Even in their region-specific presentation, they were selective in their telecast. They did not show any visuals that pinned down the rioters' act of vandalism. If they provoked the police by attacking them, it was not shown. But the police counter-attack became the lead news. Thus the channels on both sides of the divide did not conform to the basic norms of journalism. It was, therefore, necessary to prevent them from doing greater damage to the social fabric, the government averred.
The government advanced another logic which appeared rather convincing: the national channels also covered the developments in Jammu and Kashmir but they did not face any problem from the government because they were even handed in their approach. They reflected on the issues, concerns and tribulations of both the
regions, which is how it should be.
Who was right, then? The government or the regional channels? Perhaps both. The government was right in its contention that these channels indulged in partisan journalism. The channels were right because, being regional channels, they could only propitiate, not vilify, their audience which was confined to their respective regions.
It is a constraint imposed on the small media players -- because of the reasons of limited resources and limited audience – that they find it difficult to portray the larger reality. That does not mean that small players are invariably partisan. There are some media organizations which, though small, do not hesitate to put the complete truth on the table, in a conflict situation, even if it entailed huge risks. But then such media outfits are founded by people with a missionary spirit. Not many media institutions can measure up to that standard.
What should be the government approach vis-à-vis these media organizations? Banning them is no answer in a democracy. If the government gets the power to decide who conforms to the truth and who does not, then the freedom of the media is in real danger. What is to be done, then? It is a challenge for the bigger media, which are not tied down by the resource crunch or the territorial limitation or the ideological affinity, to present the larger truth before the public so that propaganda journalism does not succeed in vitiating the environment.
And the bigger media have, by and large, lived up to the expectations in this kind of conflict situation.
Let us consider another major conflict situation in the country: Naxalism. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described the Naxal menace as the biggest internal security threat in the country. This is because Naxal groups have taken on the government security forces as their biggest enemy. How have the media portrayed this conflict situation?
One way has been to report the depredations of the Naxalites as and when they take place. They most often focus on the ruthless, blood-thirsty ways of the Naxal groups. These are accepted as 'objective' representation of reality. But the trouble arises when a journalist argues, on the basis of field visits, that Naxals have popular support base. That journalist is perceived to be sympathetic to the Naxal cause and is made out to be a case of ideological deviation from mainstream journalism.
When a reporter goes into a Naxalite territory with the knowledge and the approval of the area commanders and comes back and reports about what he saw or heard, does that portray the reality of the given situation? Many would argue that it is an 'imposed' reality, a reality constructed by the Naxalites. Since the reporter did not have access to an unstructured reality, which is a basic pre-condition for the search of truth, his reports could not be treated as 'objective', they would say.
But the reporter can legitimately argue that the reality is often contextual. What one sees and hears in a given situation is the reality in that context; and the reality may change if new developments appear in the reporter's horizon. So the contextual reality cannot be brushed aside as half-truth.
This was the position taken by Peter Arnett, Pulitzer-prize winning war correspondent of CNN, whose broadcast during the Gulf War (1991) made headlines all over the world. He was unlike most other Western journalists who were only critical of the Iraqi regime and saw nothing wrong with the actions of the American forces. But he made his point forcefully: "I speak what I see and hear. I do not argue with people who is right and who is wrong'.
If a Red-cross hospital was bombed and hundreds of patients died, it was advisable to skip the story, the Pentagon pleaded with him. But if Peter was insistent on reporting it, he ought to tell the audience that Saddam Hussein had resorted to biological and chemical wars to kill his enemies, the White House advised him.
Peter Arnett was asked to present the immediate developments in the larger, historical perspective. But he held forth that it was not his job, as a journalist, to balance his reports on the sly. He was lucky that he worked for a proprietor, Ted Turner, who stood by him to present the other 'truth' of the war.
But then there are not many Ted Turners in the world who would not mind showing the mirror to their own country engaged in a war with another. After all, there is only one standard that has historically been accepted as a restraint on media coverage during war: information that jeopardizes the operation of the troops. Ted Turner broke this legacy, not because he wanted to uphold the greater principle of truth, but because, as he himself admitted, he saw in it the possibility to make big money by attracting a larger audience.
There are thus myriad considerations in reporting conflicts, be it between regions, sects or nations. It is not for the governments to decide who is truthfully representing the reality and who is not. It must be left to the consumers of the media messages to make their own decision. But that would presuppose that we have more active, not passive, consumers. To make this presupposition a reality, we need to make media literacy an integral part of our education programme. |
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