Unpacking The Pixel

KALPANA SHARMA assesses 60 hours of continuous media coverage of the Mumbai crisis and notes the significant gaps

The attack on Mumbai by ten highly trained gunmen on the night of Wednesday, November 26, and the drama that followed over the next 60 hours, was physically confined to one corner of a very big city. But it extended its ambit to the rest of the city, the country and the world because of the non-stop media coverage.

For two days and three nights, television channels gave blanket coverage to the drama around the siege of two hotels, the Taj Mahal Palace and Towers, and the Oberoi and Trident Hotels, as well as Nariman House in Colaba, a synagogue and centre for a Jewish sect. And the entire country watched in horror and fascination.

The audacious attack caught everyone off guard, the police, the government and the media. When the first reports came of firing at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, no one knew what this was about. But within less than an hour, almost 40 people had been gunned down at CST, the Cama Hospital just down the road had been attacked, three top police officials, including the head of the Anti Terrorism Squad Hemant Karkare had been killed. The gunmen had seized the very vehicle in which these top officials were travelling and had continued on their journey southwards while spraying bullets from their automatic rifles on people on the way at the junction where Metro cinema stands.

Even as these two continued on their killing spree from one end, two had entered the Trident at Nariman Point and begun killing people in one of its restaurants and four had made their way to the Taj Mahal Hotel, on the eastern sea front opposite the Gateway of India, and launched into a murderous journey. On the way to the Taj, these men had casually walked into the popular Leopold Café on Colaba Causeway, thrown a hand grenade and opened fire on customers. Eight people died including two waiters.

When such developments hit a city, it is understandable that there is a time lag before the media, particularly the electronic media, can react. As a result, in those first hours, there was a lot of confused reporting about the number of gunmen, the locations of the attacks, etc. For example, some channels repeated flashed that nine terrorists had been arrested. Yet, later it turned out this was untrue. The numbers of gunmen varied from eight to 25. This led to the resultant fear in the city that there were gunmen, with automatic weapons, roaming around the city.

The siege of Nariman House went almost unnoticed initially. Few knew that it was a Jewish centre. Its location was unclear. The fact of hostages taken there only registered with the Indian media once news about this appeared in some foreign papers, notably The New York Times. Even on Thursday, it was unclear how many gunmen were in the building and whether they had hostages. Many of these details emerged as the foreign media followed the story through relatives and friends of the occupants of Nariman House.

But when we assess 60 hours and more of continuous media coverage of this unprecedented and chilling incident, there are several issues that have to be considered even as we acknowledge the constraints within which the media operates.

The electronic media, in particular, has to ask whether at a time when they were the only source of information for most of the city, and indeed the country, there should have been some restraint placed on information given out.

For example, on the morning on November 27, when the media concentrated on the Trident-Oberoi hotels, some channels spoke about “hostages” and hinted at possible negotiations with them. The information was attributed to “sources”. NDTV went as far as to compare the situation to the IC 814 hijacking and kept quoting a “diplomatic” source that had spoken of this possibility.

We know now that the “hostages” that the gunmen had seized from the Kandahar restaurant at the Oberoi on Wednesday night were taken to the roof and shot dead that very night. So was it right to give out information about 30-40 hostages without ensuring that there was some basis for suggesting that these people were alive? At such a time, is it right to broadcast unsubstantiated information, particularly when anxious people were waiting for news of their relatives? In attempting to score points and claim exclusives, the electronic media tripped up badly here.

Another major goof up was the story of a fresh shootout at CST on Friday, November 28. Several channels ran this as a running strip. There was fresh panic in the city. The train services were suspended and the government compounded the problem by asking cable operators to blank out news channels.

CNN/IBN had a reporter stating that she had seen three men with their hands over their heads emerging from GT hospital, which is close to CST. A print reporter would never have run with such a story without checking with the police what this was all about. Why did the TV channel air this kind of half-baked report that would have added to the panic?

There were widely differing estimates given through the two days and three nights about the number of gunmen. For this, the media cannot be entirely faulted. This attack has exposed the total absence of an information management system in the government. Surely, by Thursday morning, when the seriousness of the situation had registered with everyone, including the Union Government, somebody should have been appointed as the information spokesperson who could coordinate between all the different elements involved – the police, the Army, the Rapid Action Force, the Navy and the National Security Guard.

Instead, viewers were subjected to different “authorities” giving out varying figures about the number of gunmen and also figures of whether there were hostages, how many people in each of the hotels and the casualty figures.

Even if such a centralised information system did not exist, it is inexplicable that until a day after the drama ended, none of the Mumbai newspapers had lists of the wounded and the dead. After every major terror attack in the city in the past, this is a routine that every newspaper has followed. In fact, during the 1992-93 communal riots, some newspapers sent reporters to morgues and hospitals to put together a body count and published this alongside government figures to expose the discrepancies. This time none of this was done.

Interestingly, the one area in which the electronic and print media showed some restraint was in showing visuals of those who died. In the past incidents, newspapers were full of gory pictures of the dead. This time, we only saw dead gunmen. The exception was DNA that inexcusably carried a photograph of bloated bodies of people who had been gunned down in one of the restaurants at the Trident. Was this restraint exercised because the people who died at these luxury hotels were a part of the elite? When poor people die in bomb blasts or other attacks, few journalists bother to consider what their families feel when these photographs are used.

Also, with the focus on the unfolding drama at the two hotels – and also on Nariman House after the commandos made a dramatic helicopter landing – stories about the first people who were killed were almost forgotten. When the gunmen opened fire at CST, they killed people who were waiting for their trains. These were ordinary people. Till today, little is known about them.

There are many more points that can be raised about the hits and misses of the coverage. But more relevant, if we consider the role media plays in opinion formation, is the way the story played out once the last of the gunmen had been killed at the Taj Mahal Hotel.

“Enough is Enough: India’s 9/11” was NDTV’s slug for the programmes that followed.

“War on Mumbai – The Longest Running Horror Show” was CNN/IBN.

And “India Stands United: Ops still on” against a saffron, white and saffron strip was Times TV.

The programmes analysing the attack were tinged with more than a little hyper-nationalism. The comparison to 9/11 was particularly questionable given the imagery of retaliation by the American government that it inevitably raises. This was also accompanied by interviews with celebrities and others who lambasted politicians, spoke about citizens taking control, and basically vented their frustration without any questions being asked about what actually could be done.

Most of the voices heard were those of the elite, familiar faces who now appear across the TV channels. And much of what they said has been heard in the past. It’s as if Mumbai was peopled by only by this class. What about the rest of the city? How come their opinion about what had happened, whether they really felt secure or not, did not count this time?

Much was made, and rightly so, about the police and NSG officers who died. But we heard little about the ordinary policemen who were also killed – 11 of them – and the staff of the two hotels who played a heroic role in rescuing many of the hotel residents. The real “unsung heroes” – a favourite phrase used by many channels – were these unknown men and women.

And finally there is the question of terminology. The BBC and CNN used terms like “attackers” or “gunmen” while all the Indian channels immediately used the term “terrorist”, even before the nature of the attack was determined. English channels, however, were careful about not adding an epithet like “Jehadi” or “Islamic” to the term even as unsubstantiated news began to be telecast about the link to Laskhar-e-Toiba.

Media rarely pauses to analyse itself as it hurtles from one breaking story to another. But the Mumbai terror attack shows us that it is essential that reporters be trained to handle such extraordinary situations, that they learn the importance of restraint and cross-checking as at such times the media is the main source of information. Professionalism and accuracy will ensure that we don’t contribute to prejudice and panic.

Kalpana Sharma is an independent journalist based in Mumbai who was, until last year, Deputy Editor and Chief of Bureau of The Hindu in Mumbai.