BY SADANAND MENON
Monday, September 22 was an extraordinary day in the annals of
the Indian media. I would like to call it
a day of shame. For on that day our media collectively displayed its herdlike
mentality and its entirely uncritical attitude to the use – and misuse – of the
photographs it publishes.
At least eight mainstream English language newspapers (including
The Times of India, The Indian and The New Indian Express,
The Hindu, the Hindustan Times and the Deccan Chronicle),
and many more in the language press from north to south and east to west,
published uncritically almost identical photographs on their front pages. The
photographs were not generated by any single agency. They were neither taken by
‘citizen’ photographers nor were they official hand-outs. They were shots by
individual staff photographers as well as professional syndicated photographers.
What is amazing is what newsrooms across the country chose to do with the image.
The photographs were of three suspects allegedly involved in the
Delhi blasts, who were arrested from their residence in Delhi’s Jamia Nagar.
Reports also claimed they were students of the Jamia Millia Islamia. What was
fishy about the photographs was that they showed three totally unidentifiable
people with head and face completely swathed in a generous length of cloth,
flanked by gun toting policemen in mufti and other hangers-on. Yet it seemed
obvious that this was a photo op provided to the media – not to protect anyone’s
identity – but to precisely create a definite sense of identity.
For all three suspects, to mask their identity, were tricked up
by the local police in identical ‘Palestinian rumals’ or kaffiyehs or abayas as
this headdress is variously known. Though none of their faces were visible, to
any casual reader of the newspapers it would be abundantly clear that they were
of ‘Arab’, ‘West Asian’ or ‘Islamic’ origin. A clear case of racial profiling!
Some sceptical comments about this on the Internet, primarily
generated by documentary filmmaker Yousuf Saeed who lives in the same area, led
to a small critical piece in the Hindustan Times two days later, raising
critical questions. The sceptics wondered how it came about that the three
arrested suspects came to be in possession of identical brand-new rumals which
they could readily pull out of their pockets to cover their faces. As if, upon
realising they might be arrested soon, they went shopping and bought identical
scarves so that everyone would recognise them as ‘Islamic terrorists’. Critics
pointed out that usually suspects arrested on various charges mask their faces
with their own handkerchiefs or borrow towels or black cloth to hood their
faces; never before had it seemed like such a costume drama as the Delhi police
had managed to stage.
Then came the stunning revelation by the Delhi police
commissioner who confessed that it was his department which had dressed up the
suspects in such a suggestive manner and, even more alarmingly, that the Delhi
police had purchased these pieces of cloth "in bulk" for use by those arrested.
Obviously, every arrested person could now be given a suggestive ‘Islamic
terrorist’ look thereby setting up dangerous subliminal propaganda within the
media.
Repulsive as it is, most people will agree that the police and
its dirty tricks department are not beyond using such obnoxious methods. What is
beyond explanation is how the media collectively fell into this trap and carried
these images without a single question mark or doubt about what they so readily
display on their front pages.
For those not used to thinking about these things the question
can be framed a little differently. It has to do with conceptual issues related
to the use (or misuse) of the image in the media. On any given day hundreds of
thousands of photographs are clicked. Of these, by common consensus, and
governed by a largely abstract logic dealing with the received wisdom of ‘news
value’ or ‘newsworthiness’, about 500 to a 1,000 pictures might be considered
for use within the media. After that it is quite chancy or dependent on strong
editorial choices why a photograph makes it to the papers, in particular the
front page.
The front page photo, in the world of the print media, is
usually associated with an iconic status. It is supposed be a quick
encapsulation of what a paper or a region or a nation or a civilisation imagines
as its primary concern. It frames the news of the day with a kind of visual
evidence or backup which then illustrates how it wants to set up the
communication and how it wants readers to enter the narrative.
Very seldom, across 365 days in a year, do we find identical
images on the front page. That is supposed to be the greatness and the strength
of democratic media practice that editorial position and interpretation of
events can vary. It is also part of the notion of healthy competition in the
media that variety, diversity and contrariness are seen as virtues – that a news
item or image which is used sycophantically by one section of the press can as
easily be used critically by another section of the same press.
That is why when you come across a substantial section of the
national press using just one common image on their front pages, and this
without any critical remarks or interrogative comments, one begins to smell the
operation of ‘ideology’ which is nothing but a blind acceptance of certain
‘ruling’ ideas of a class or of a moment – ideas that indicate the power
structures within which ‘information’ and ‘meaning’ are manufactured.
To me it is shattering that on the evening of September 21,
across the newsrooms of the best of Indian newspapers, not one editorial
discussion chose to evaluate the photograph of the three arrested youngsters
draped in checked cloth and use their judgement to ‘read’ the picture in a
dispassionate manner worthy of a free press. Instead, the Indian media
collectively behaved as they had not even during the period of the emergency and
its draconian censorship. They all fell prey to their own sense of prejudice and
communal mind-set. The Nazi propaganda machine could not have expected to
produce better results.
Obviously, the Indian media needs to reinvestigate the ‘frame’
within which it is presenting, colouring and analysing news. Such evidence of a
collective cop-out is a serious failing which it needs to critically examine and
then carry out correctives. In fact, this is a case fit to be brought before the
Press Council.
Shame, a little shame is all that the media needs. For shame, as
Marx said, is a revolutionary sentiment.