The mob is in our TV news studio

The key tenets of ethical journalism have been grounded through decades of practice in accuracy, neutrality, fairness and accountability of information disbursed.  In a recent Indian television debate following up on an investigation on terror funding in Kashmir, fairness seemed to be the only aspect covered. Quite literally so.

In a Republic TV debate that has gone viral since its release on Facebook on June 3, retired Major Gaurav Arya of the Indian Army and moderator Arnab Goswami engaged in a cringe-worthy dialogue about drastic measures that they recommended to be adopted to bring the Kashmir situation under control.

Ignoring the fact that the objective of a debate is not to prove ideological supremacy and arrive at condemnations, but test ideas against an array of perspectives to arrive at best practices, the verdict of the debate was predetermined.

Ethics, quite obviously, are redundant to a channel that flashes its alignments even as the debate is under way with politically charged and TRP-oriented hashtags like #NationFirstNoCompromise.

Arnab Goswami, a popular national TV personality with shifting, conveniently timed, and transparent political affiliations, albeit with a massive viewership that can be attributed to the sheer frenzied theatrics of his programme, outdid himself as he ranted about the people of Kashmir (not all, the ones he considers anti-national, which could be anybody depending on the night you choose to hear him. Don’t make the mistake of one broad generalisation the way he does). Here’s what he said: “I would say ransack these people, take away the properties, seize the banks, take away the houses, leave them bankrupt, leave them on the streets, leave them with nowhere to go, let them scream and shout, let them say our human rights are being taken away, deny them anything, take away their passports, create an Indian version of Guantanamo Bay and put them there. That is the only treatment that these people now deserve.”

Gaurav Arya was quick with his support as he quipped, “This is all stolen goods that they are sitting on” as Goswami egged him on in the background with a petulant, “They have stolen a lot.”  Arya, in the meantime, had formulated an “important question” that he posed thus.  “Half of the time Kashmir is under lockdown, half of the time they are stone-pelting; even then there are no cases of malnutrition, even then there are no farmer suicides… all of them have such rosy cheeks there! I want to understand, where is this money coming from? If half of the time your business is shut down, your markets are closed, there is terrorist activity, why is everybody looking so healthy?”

How does a prime-time news hour debate compromise so coolly on coherence, sanity, humanity, and shame? Has the nation really come to the point where the extent of citizens’ innocence requires to be measured in terms of degree of starvation and the lack of will to continue with their lives?

While a segment of the public has responded to the debate by taking charge to educate the duo on the condition of agriculture in Jammu & Kashmir and correct their state of misinformation regarding lack of suicides in the state and placate their outrage at people not suffering enough, mostly the event has been the object of colossal ridicule.

It seems the channel concerned has performed its routine of doomsday prediction and warmongering one too many times. The audience has been made familiar with the structural organisation of the Indian Army, and hence knows better than to accept a major as a media-styled “defence expert/analyst” and place undue amounts of credibility on his opinion.

Arya is simply another road kill in the governing party’s way of pursuing hyper-nationalist ideologies. Goswami, it is safe to say, has lost the last shreds of credibility he had left.

But this article is not about Goswami, his channel, his colleagues, or his political agenda. It is about the larger issue that this incident leaves in its wake – the gap in ethical reporting in the country, particularly from the Valley and the increasing trend of media lynching.

The politicised media, the notion of democracy, and the current climate of neoliberalism has always had a complex relationship where the very idea of ‘democracy’ is corrupted. It is no longer understood as an informed decision made by an engaged public since the institutions of governance enabling people to participate in the process of decision-making are systematically weakened. Information is power but in a knowledge vacuum created by politicians through media lockdown and spreading false news routinely, authority is easily transferred to the media to concoct information, generate threats, as well as resolve them, as and when the political party backing them requires popular favour.

The recent raids conducted by CBI on the basis of a complaint by an individual on premises linked to NDTV founders go on to illustrate how seriously threatened the Indian media is by politics. NDTV, widely accepted to be one of the few remaining influential networks in the Indian media landscape that has not succumbed to the current nationalist government pressures has responded to the harassment with a statement that calls the raid a “witch-hunt against independent media”, “a blatant political attack on the freedom of the press” and an “attempt at silencing the media”.

Having slipped three places since the last year, India now ranks 136th on the World Press Freedom Index with a media environment ranked only “partly free” by media watchdog groups owing to the long history of misuse of defamation laws, sedition laws, physical threats and other forms of intimidation faced by journalists, especially those with dissenting voices.

Lack of diversity and conflict of interest are some other major concerns. Although India has 86,000 newspapers and over 900 television channels, only a handful dominate with coverage. Multiple channels are owned by same private holders, some of whom have running political careers. Even with media watchdogs crying themselves hoarse over this unchecked corporatisation, ground realities cannot change unless the government makes policy-level changes. The extent of damage that this can cause can be illustrated by a case study of the Murdoch media empire operations where unethical journalism has been repeatedly used to influence public opinion in critical elections.

Thus the media, once meant to exist in solidarity with society as a vanguard of democracy and protector of its interest, has changed its role as it is given the power instead to play judge.

In a deliberate opposition created between nationalism and intellectualism, the very term intellectual has become synonymous with anti-national, while compliance has become interchangeable with patriotism. Critical thinking is dead. A passive audience numbed by a style of journalism not reporting facts but opining upon them instead and telling viewers what to think, easily surrenders to unaccountable powers, in this case, unscrupulous media companies, convinced by their rhetoric of freedom.

In a recent interview titled Neoliberalism Is Destroying Our Democracy by Christopher Lydon, Noam Chomsky predicted, “when you impose socioeconomic policies that lead to stagnation or decline for the majority of the population, undermine democracy, remove decision-making out of popular hands, you’re going to get anger, discontent, fear take all kinds of forms.”

The media kangaroo courts that have taken it upon themselves to take over responsibilities reserved for the judiciary to resolve the unrest in Kashmir is a living example of exactly this prophecy. In the absence of legal intervention and moderation, even at the onset of the investigation, the media feels free to pronounce a man a terrorist and an entire community as a Pakistani agency. Ten peoples’ involvement with terror funding is sufficient to call for the conversion of Kashmir into a concentration camp.

Irresponsible journalism such as this not only instigates the mob mentality of greater India against Kashmir – a land many have never had any real interface with. This also sends waves of misunderstanding, discontent, mistrust and alienation that devalues the lives and rights of Kashmiris. This should be cause for concern to a government that otherwise deems Kashmir to be “an integral part of India”. As local disturbances threaten to destabilise the state, the government is quick to suspend newspapers, Internet and most recently, a total of 22 social media platforms including Facebook, WhatsApp, SnapChat, YouTube, Flikr, Tumblr, Google+, Skype, Viber, Pinterest, Reddit and Skype.

The government has stated that this act has been in the interest of maintenance of law and since social media was being used to spread hatred in the Valley. The government also stated that these platforms were being used to incite people into committing offences by anti-social elements, who were “misusing” social media platforms to spread hatred among the public against the state government and security forces.

The order issued by Principal Secretary of the Home Department RK Goyal said in 2016, “anti-national and subversive element, inter alia, extensively misused social media websites and instant messaging services for vitiating peace and instigating violence, which caused large-scale damage to life and property” creating the need to “regulate” social media platforms because “anti-national and anti-social elements” were transmitting unverified messages through these platforms without any accountability.

But who monitors the counterpart of this argument that is happening in India outside Kashmir? Who is checking the use of social media to generate hatred among masses towards select communities beyond the Valley? When journalists like Arnab Goswami and those mimicking him like Rahul Shivshankar and Navika Kumar overlook ethics and use their power to influence audiences to bring support to causes pushed by political alliances, are they not doing the same thing that we are so quick to ban in Kashmir? Does the journalist being given a free pass by the government to carry on with their propaganda make the process democratic and acceptable even as it solicits anarchy and state violence? In essence, is unethical media too, not separatism? This is not to say that there need be state control. It is to highlight that the same yardstick and logic is not applied in both cases.

The extent of social wreckage that media can cause has been illustrated well in the past by cases such as that of Judith Miller. In 2003, Miller’s article falsely claiming that the Iraqi government was illegally in possession of weapons of mass destruction justified and supported the Bush administration’s agenda to topple the Saddam Hussein regime. The credibility of the same article was later questioned. But it was never as trivial as “fake news”. It was an organised deception that led to the Iraq War, ending more than a million human lives, physically injuring tens of thousands of civilians, creating a refugee crisis situation and destabilising the entire Middle East inciting a reign of terrorism that continues till date.

It needs to be borne in mind that imbalance in regional and national representation in media, the absence of social media moderation in an era of viral transmissibility of false information and conflicts of interest in media companies are active ingredients for a struggling democracy as they transform informed public into misguided mobs.

This is the challenge of our times. How will it be tackled is what the nation wants to know. Or at least needs to.

[opiniontag]