MEDIA MATTERS
What’s yours?
BY SEVANTI NINAN
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The way one judges the media depends on the kind of blinkers one is wearing: saffron, red, green or just plain nationalist…
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It is worth asking: what defines media credibility for a media consumer with a made up mind?
Photo: PTI
Exposing the many faces of terror: The ATS Chief and the Mumbai Police Commissioner at a press conference.
Between a fast and furious Internet campaign and counter campaign on Obama transition team inductee Sonal Shah, and the unfolding “Hindu Terror” story in the mainstream media, one thing is clear: judging the media has plenty to do with su
bjectivity. Or, lets put it more plainly, to do with what your personal filter is: anti-communal, which translates as allergic to any shade of saffron, anti-communal and equally allergic to green and saffron (very rare), self-styled nationalist, harbouring suspicion of jihadis ( read Muslims), professed Right wing, or none of the above, but suspicious of media intentions.
The anti-saffron crowd saw, well, saffron, in Sonal Shah’s family background and her passing formal association with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. And nothing else mattered. So out went persuasive emails, as effective a campaign tool as any, calculated to give you opinions on a person whom until then you had not thought about. Behind the most widely circulated one was a Left wing academic in Massachusetts. Pretty soon, the burden of its song seeped into print and Sonal Shah became a raging media issue.
Counter-campaign
Then her friends and former associates decided to get into the act with a counter email which didn’t quite have the emotive appeal of the first one. It talked about her career, and her service as an economist in three Muslim countries, and cited a Pakistani Muslim colleague who would vouch for her being untinged by any form of communalism. The anti-communal, allergic-to-saffron brigade sniffed suspiciously and took little note. That’s all very well they said, but wasn’t there anyone else you could work with on relief after the Gujarat earthquake than the VHP? And what about her VHP family that had Bhairon Singh Shekhawat as a house guest? Or their association with Narendra Modi? The pro-Shah email sent out by a professor at the International School of Business in Hyderabad did not have the same traction as the one emanating from Massachusetts. The VHP is not an organisation that people-like-us have an open mind on. Ms. Shah remains firmly tainted by association for “secular” Indians.
Then came ATS Mumbai and its serialised revelations about the Malegaon blasts. The mainstream media was happy to chase this, just as it had chased the Jihadi terror story, leaping joyously upon each successive mastermind, swallowing the Batla House encounter story whole, and hyping up a policeman martyr. (Recall for a moment the ball they had: Indian TV reconstructing a scene in a flat with skull capped individuals tapping on laptops, a bearded Tauqeer gracing newspaper mastheads until he was displaced by another suspect.)
Elements within the media were also gratified that the anti-Muslim brigade were getting their comeuppance. And the rare few like Mail Today, which had done prominent stories on the Bajrang Dal bombs through the Muslim terror phase, said I told you so. It continued to do stories that others weren’t doing, including one on Narendra Modi stopping the ATS from questioning some people in his State. (Within the media we remarked on how the same media house could produce publications with different positions on the terror issue. Mail Today’s sibling India Today had done a cover story on Muslim terror which clearly served the purpose of the Delhi police.)
But here’s the difference: whereas only civil society voices were heard when Muslim terror was vilified and the ATS and Delhi police fed the media lead after lead, now the ATS and the media which reproduces its briefings, has a major political party, in election mode, gunning for them. BJP spokespersons on TV panel discussions protested volubly. Vasundhara Raje, resplendent in reddish saffron, blanketed the less expensive TV channels with an ad which took a swipe at the UPA’s Malegaon revelations. And television’s favourite Hindu right right wing voice, Swapan Dasgupta, vented bile in the Pioneer. He labelled the whole Hindu terror scenario a pre-election dirty tricks story, like St. Kitts of yore, which a gullible, happy-to-be-used media is falling for.
Welcome changes
Seen objectively, overall a few welcome changes are visible. Whereas there were no dearth of faces and names put out with reference to Muslim terror over many months in the media, at last, there are faces and names given to Hindu terror. Throughout those weeks of ugly violence in Orissa there was not one name or face from the ranks of perpetrators which hit the front pages and flashed on TV bulletins. But now we have a whole colourful range of women and men popping on and off the suspicion radar.
But the old question raises its head, with so much publicity to suspects, what are their chances of a fair trial? This time civil society secular stalwarts are not to be heard asking it. Only politicians in the BJP are. Subjectivity again?
I am not saying that the media is not guilty of vilifying suspects. But it is also worth asking: What defines media credibility for a media consumer with a made up mind?
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