Freedom of Media is Not Liberty to Bitch

Use of embedded TV reporters and Camera-crew by CNN in the coverage of 1990-91 Gulf war changed the consumption of TV content for all times to come. Bringing real war and often live war to people’s drawing rooms numbed the audience reactions to horrors of war, blurred the lines which would be differentiating reality and fiction, news and entertainment, reporting and commenting, observation and opinion, and even between war and peace. The change was nearly global limited only by the limits of TV penetration.

The visual feeds of broad daylight attack on New York twin-towers in September 2001 and on gunmen attack on Indian Parliament of December 2001 affected the Indian audience and Indian Public in similar ways.  Reporting of Gujarat riots in 2002 was a true mixing of reporting and commenting and the audience could no longer separate facts on the ground from the opinions of the reporters and editors. News was no longer news. Emotions, rationale, opinions, perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, creative camera work, glib scripting, all blended up with selective facts were doled out to the audience as a heady mixture. Working on the strength of “seeing is believing” TV media became the propaganda maker and advocate of a “right” opinion for the audience. 

3-days of round the clock live telecast by multiple cameras and from multiple locations and on multiple news channels of Mumbai attacks of November 2008 brought to the fore some very bizarre characteristics of the Indian people. Public outburst can be fuelled by the voyeuristic politico-journalism and video melodrama bordering between News and entertainment, something which started with the reporting of the Gulf war, was a new lesson which was going to be used soon by the likes of Anna and Ramdev.

The Baba Ramdev hunger strike against corruption and black money event of June 2011 and the Anna Hazare's anti-corruption movement in August 2011 was as much a TV driven event if not less as it was driven by the faith of citizens in the principle behind the agitations.

Notwithstanding the heinous and macabre gravity of the Nirbhaya Rape Incident in December 2012, the resulting surge in the public outburst was unprecedented. While the incident triggered an outburst of welled up emotions and frustrations against failing governance of the day, the decibel levels of public voice were kept amplified by the relentless reporting and commenting by TV channels. TV News channels had by then mastered the craft of using social media and armchair activists as force multipliers by trending new ‘hash tags’ and setting up new slugging matches and orchestrated discussions on their broadcasts every day.

While no single rape is condonable or passable, India has one of the lowest per-capita incidence of rapes in the world (lower than Canada, France, Germany and the UK) and one of the highest conviction rates for a rape-case in the world (better than the likes of Sweden, France and the UK). With over 90 percent of the rapes in India being perpetrated by such accused who are known and familiar to the victim, rapes are more of a social issue than a policing issue. Factually therefore, while India like any other country also has rapes as a crime, a woman is quite unlikely to get raped in India by an unknown aggressor as compared to most other countries in the world. 

The selective and differential weight allocated to the recent heinous rape incidents of Kathua, Unnao and Ghaziabad by the TV media and the resulting differences in people’s outburst is the evidence how TV succeeds in shaping and mobilising people’s opinion and action. They are directing the public discourse around the Code of Hammurabi (Babylonian code of law of ancient Mesopotamia, dated back to about 1754 BC) “Eye for an Eye and a tooth for a tooth” in the name of justice for the victim but no-one is traversing the tougher path of taking the crime by its horns and simultaneously being fair to the accused. As they say, “power corrupts” the reporters and editors of TV news channels have gone overboard either in ignorance or have been pursuing some covert agenda of harming the nation by painting India as the ‘rape country’ and the ‘women-unfriendly country’ of the world.

There is nothing like “Freedom” in some absolute sense. Absolute freedom may mean a social order with no order. Freedom is always contextual and signifies the sense of “Free From.” Freedom therefore usually connotes “free from” the persecution of the government or that the government does not have the liberty to persecute or restrict the rights. Freedom differs from liberty as control differs from discipline.

Press is free to report what it chooses to; but it does not have the liberty to indulge in false reporting, partisan reporting, coloured reporting or unsubstantiated reporting. Freedom of Press or freedom of speech is not a licence to malign the nation or to propagate any anti-national tirade. The content and tone of communication needs to pass the filter of our conscience which in many cases has been dimmed already to such an extent due to the constant bombardment of fake news, disinformation and the general public discourse that we hardly hear our conscience any longer and have forgotten how to listen. Rogue reporting in the name of freedom overwhelms the listeners and takes away their freedom of carrying free opinion.

India is not a perfect country - no country is - and no country is above criticism when that criticism is just and based on fact. The United States is not perfect and is the subject of daily criticism, especially from within. The UK and Europe are not perfect either. All of that is normal if we bear in mind that democracies are, by their very nature, subject to changes and shifts. Freedom of thought and freedom of speech is a central value in all genuine democracies, and that is being dangerously eroded in the India but by irresponsible conduct of the press and media.

Running a 24-hour News Channel is a very expensive proposition. Gathering on site information is difficult and needs large investments in setting up news gathering machinery. It is for this reason that most countries have only 2-3 news channels. India is an exception with over 400 news and current affairs channels out of a total of nearly 900 TV channels approved by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. Reruns of programs and analysis or opinion programming are played throughout the day, with the exception of some news obtained from free syndicated sources. Surely, they depend on other sources of programming content and revenue streams then just the news business.

Unfortunately for Indian democracy, media is turning out to be a propaganda machine of suspicious and coloured motives rather than a pillar of strength. Serving the National interest through placing the right media weight and remaining objective without succumbing to pressures and prejudices is a price that Media should willingly pay for its Freedom.

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