Three sides to every story
Blog by Shivani Sharma Dasmahapatra on April 15, 2009:
‘Is Media Jingoism fanning Indo-Pak Tensions” …that was a discussion organised by the Foundation of Media Professionals which I attended today. It is perhaps my first direct interaction with the media after quitting my job as staff photographer in a newsmagazine in 1997.
Since long now I have been on the “other side” so to speak. An audience, a viewer, a reader of news reports, analysis, a viewer of TV reports and as any other lay man…..a critique of all that I feel is wrong with reportage in our media. Do I have any authority to even comment? I would like to think so…humbly…for am I not the one who reads all the headlines and the gory details of murders, rapes, assaults, corruption and the other such alarming happenings? Taliban is inching closer…a fortnight back they were a mere 12 kms from India…of course I read it in the news papers and watched the same on the TV news channels. I worry for my child. I have even transformed my panic into active planning towards relocating to another continent altogether. Truth of the matter is every moment, I, like every other viewer gets an update on the impending dangers lurking only a few kilometres away, I get the depressing news of what’s wrong with everything in my country. And I believe every word of it.
These days it’s the election fever…where mud slinging matches, personal attacks have reached an all time low…where a candidate is strung up and hanged to death, my mind goes to horror stories my grandmother told us about pre independence days when freedom fighter would be found hanging from trees as a warning to all. And today we see a blurred out image of the same and yet we surely don’t think it is a horrific wrong and carry on with more sensational news about who said what about whom. The stark reality of indifference we have perhaps ingrained in ourselves hits me every few days. Does a click of the remote change the facts? Or have I become immune to just about everything?
At the discussion I hear many journalists speak about different experiences, different difficulties, the challenges and the impact of their reports. I sit soaking in all the information…I am the audience. At one point, during the discussion there is commotion…some men clap at a statement being read out from a news report about waging war against Pakistan and cutting off all links with the neighbouring country. There is some pushing and shoving and they are taken out , another one of their group sitting in the audience starts with loud protests…he too is taken out of the auditorium…..I watch the faces of the visiting guest journalists….there is hesitation, a disturbed unsurety reflects in their eyes. I make eye contact with one of them … I don’t know which one of us is more hesitant and unsure.
After it’s over, I come back to the safety of my home…switch on the television and watch the same drama unfold but in a twisted manner…I am informed that a group of Pakistani journalists has been “attacked” by members of a religious group. The clip shows one man being pulled and pushed and roughed up…my son asks…”why are they attacking him?” …..and it hits me once again… If I had not been in the media, if I hadn’t known the people in the clip, if I hadn’t sat in the audience…I would have understood the same. The minor difference in what my son saw and heard and what I saw and heard from that minute long report and visual was — the TRUTH. The man being roughed up and pulled out of the room was the miscreant. The men doing this were members of the journalist fraternity who were part of the Foundation. One of them a dear friend of mine.
In just a span of one hour, the internet reports over 16 items about this ‘attack” only a couple of them are factually correct stating that some men tried to “disrupt” the discussion. A Pakistan based newspaper reports on the internet “Hindu extremists attack Pak journalists in India”.
Ironically the discussion has come full circle………….’Is Media Jingoism fanning Indo-Pak Tensions”? The truth for the thousands who have and will watch the news reports like my son, or the ones who will read about this incident in tomorrows paper will be what is said and what is seen.
As for me. I believe there are always three sides to every story, the first is your side, the second is my side and the third – The Truth.
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Comment by :
Ayoobrahman
on November 6, 2009 @ 2:04 pm
The media with in india seldome do the ultimate functions of educating the society while they are waging unwanted hysteria and making peiole funny