The medium is the message

Lessons the Indian media can learn from the TV coverage of the Wisconsin gurudwara shooting

All acts of senseless violence are reprehensible, but there is something particularly disturbing about an attack that takes place at a place of worship and targets people at prayer. As the news broke late on Sunday night of a shooting at a gurudwara in Wisconsin, I watched the nightmare unfold live on American TV news channels and via Twitter updates by people who were on site.

What has stayed with me since then was the incredible bravery of the president of the gurudwara, Satwant Kaleka, who lost his life in a bid to tackle the gunman; the tragic death of the priest Prakash Singh, who had just moved his wife and son to America; the helpless grief of those who stood outside wondering what had become of their loved ones inside the building; the courage of the policeman who engaged the shooter in an encounter and killed him before he could do any further damage; and the astonishing news that the Sikhs gathered outside had offered food and water to the journalists reporting on the incident as part of their ‘langar sewa’.

But as I think back on the whole episode, I am also beginning to appreciate the restraint and tact of the media coverage of the incident. And try as I may, I can’t help but contrast it unfavourably with the way we in the India media cover such acts of terrorism.

In Wisconsin, there was never any danger of the terrorists getting any tactical advantage from watching the TV news. All the news channels abided by the diktat that they should not show any footage that gave away the position of the SWAT teams that were deploying to storm the temple. The cameras also obediently pulled away from aerial shots of the gurudwara once they were asked by the authorities to do so. And despite all these precautions, they still erred on the side of caution by putting out a delayed feed so that the terrorists didn’t have any real-time information of events unfolding outside.

Contrast this with the way in which the Indian news channels covered the events of 26/11 in Mumbai. There were a cluster of TV crews outside the Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels giving minute-by-minute coverage of what the security agencies were planning so that the terrorists only had to turn on a television set to find out what they were up against. Some reporters even gave away the location of where some of the hostages were hiding, thus enabling the terrorists to hunt them down and kill them.

Live pictures of every development were beamed all across the world – including Pakistan, giving the terrorists’ handlers a front-row seat to the carnage. For instance, when the NSG commandoes rappelled down on Chabad House to rescue the hostages, their operation was show in real time by most TV channels (only a couple had the wisdom to put in a time lag) thus taking away the surprise element that is crucial to any such attack.

And then there was the insensitive, even callous treatment of relatives and friends who were waiting outside hoping for news of their loved ones. It can’t have been easy having microphones thrust into their faces and asked variations of that old chestnut, “And how are you feeling?” (“Aap ko kaisa lag raha hai.”). In Winsconsin, on the other hand, the loved ones of those inside the gurudwara were corralled away from the site at a safe distance, and the media questioning – when it happened – was both sensitive and sensible.

But the pictures that still haunt me from the TV coverage of 26/11 are the ones of the hostages finally emerging from the Oberoi hotel, having been rescued after a hellish night. The moment they came out, the TV cameras were on them, the microphones thrust into their catatonic faces. “Tell us what happened”, “How many people are dead inside?”, “Did you see the terrorists?”

Can you even imagine what that feels like? To spend the night wondering whether you are going to survive to see another day, to see your friends and family mowed down in front of you, to finally emerge from that nightmare – and then have to negotiate a bunch of loud, raucous reporters walking all over one another to ask you a bunch of asinine questions. That’s exactly what all those who had been rescued had to encounter the moment they walked free.

Contrast this with Wisconsin, where we didn’t even see a glimpse of the hostages. The authorities evacuated them once they had sanitised the gurudwara interiors, but safely out of sight of the cameras. Their traumatised faces were kept out of the press; their privacy was respected by the authorities who did not give out any names; and they did not have to run the gauntlet of a media grilling the moment they walked out.

Leave alone the hostages, we didn’t even see close-ups of dead bodies, or screen shots of injured people. And the hospitals refused to release the names of those who were being treated out of respect for their families. In India, the camera crews would have been right outside the emergency room, trying to get in as many gruesome shots as they could for the benefit of their viewers.

Yes, there is a lot that is wrong with America – its gun laws, for instance, which allow such lunatics access to serious weaponry. But there are some things that it does get right – and its media coverage of such terror attacks, for one, is worth emulating.

The medium is the messanger

A look back at how we covered the last Mumbai attacks...

As the media brouhaha about the television coverage of the Mumbai attacks rages, it’s time to stop being defensive and to try and understand just why people are so upset.

The words used – in social discourse, on the Internet and in the print media – to describe the coverage are telling. Over the top, sensationalist, exploitative and melodramatic – these are just some of the adjectives being thrown about.

But the fury of the response and the venom of the attacks suggest that this is not a one-off thing. This resentment over the way television channels cover events has been building for a while. The 26/11 attacks were just a catalyst for people to express grievances of long-standing.

At the root of this anger lurks the resentment of the viewing public about the assumption of journalists that their opinions are the only ones that matter. As offensive is their presumption in inserting their own views into the narrative of whatever story they happen to be covering.

What is under attack here is the constant contamination of the news by the views of those who disseminate it on television.

As the cliché goes, comment may be free but facts are sacred. And when it comes to the news space, they need to be kept apart.

The problem with television is that there is a constant blurring of the lines so that one never quite knows where the news ends and the views begin.

God knows the print media has its own problems and it often gets things wrong. But where it scores is that the dividing line between opinion and fact is always very clear. Opinion belongs on the edit and op-ed page – and in the feature and style sections. The news appears on all the other pages, uncontaminated by the views of those reporting it.

Yes, newspaper columnists can be as self-indulgent and self-obsessed as television reporters (and I’m guilty as charged for my weekly column in Brunch) but on the whole they restrict themselves to the spaces reserved for the venting of opinion.

In television that is hardly ever the case. Newscasters start editorializing in the middle of a news broadcast, anchors of panel discussions are more interested in holding forth than eliciting the opinions of their guests, and interviewers routinely interrupt their subjects in mid-sentence only to insert their own agendas.

And that’s what viewers resent the most: being told how to feel or how to think. We are not imbeciles sitting at home that you have to tell us over and over again that an event is a national tragedy. We can work it out for ourselves.

Is it really surprising then that the viewing public has finally snapped and said: Don’t tell us how to feel about things. Don’t even tell us how you feel about things. Just give us the facts and let us make up our own minds.

But while it is easy to knock television journalists, let’s not forget that some of these problems are inherent in the medium itself. In the print media, when you sit down at a computer terminal to write your story, you are already one step removed from the event. And that in itself lends some distance and hence, some perspective to your report.

Television journalists don’t have that luxury. The nature of their job demands that they report from the thick of things in real time. And when there are flames billowing behind you, grenades exploding, bullets being fired, feelings running high, it is difficult to step back from the event so that you can report it dispassionately.

But it is easy to start to think that you are part of the story. It is easy to con yourself into believing that it’s all happening to you rather than around you. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that your emotions, your reactions matter – that your pain, your anger, your anguish are part of the narrative.

Only they’re not. Your job is to tell the story, not become the story. More important, your job is to tell the story as an objective observer in a manner devoid of hyperbole. The event is big enough; you don’t need to magnify it through needless hysteria.

As the post-mortems on the TV coverage of 26/11 get underway, one thing is clear. What people resent most is getting the news through the prism of someone else’s emotions.

A reporter is supposed to be the filter not the funnel between the news and the viewer. A filter helps keep all the extraneous clutter out so that you can concentrate on the essential details of the story. A funnel on the other hand just pushes everything through without bothering about the contents too much.

All of us in the media – both print and television – need to treat the news as a sacred space inviolable by opinion. And just as we exhort the government to keep church and state apart, we need to draw a line between news and views – and make sure that we never violate it.

The message from the public is loud and clear. And we journalists ignore it at our own peril.