'When the public is 'anti-politician', the media too turns anti-politician'

The way the media swayed was really embarrassing considering politics and Bollywood is its bread and butter, says artist RIYAS KOMU

We were in Zenzi in Bandra when the attacks began. When the news came in at around 11pm, they shut the place. We had no clue about what was happening. We were told that there was an underworld shootout going on. There were a lot of rumours at that time. Half an hour after we passed the Marriott, we heard there was a shootout there too. After we got home, I kept surfing through five channels: CNN IBN, NDTV, Times NOW, CNN and BBC India. The attacks had been internationalised and the foreign channels were focussing mainly on the five-star hotels and the fact that foreigners were affected. I kept juxtaposing the different channels and seeing how the Indian channels were handling the news. There was huge competition between the Indian channels and the effect of live news which could run for 60 hours is very interesting. There was a tremendous amount of anticipation: the way they kept emphasising that 20 terrorists were inside the hotel had a huge impact. Nobody was able to get off their chairs.

Later, on Barkha Dutt’s We The People, everyone was chewing on the same stuff. They were criticising Ram Gopal Verma and ended with Prasoon Joshi’s Is baar nahi. I thought the level of debate was pathetic. The channels now go with the mood of the public. When the public is 'anti-politician', they too are anti-politician. It’s really embarrassing because the media nourishes its political gains. The two things that run the media are political gains and Bollywood. They will report an event of no relevance if two politicians are involved! I don’t trust the news channels at all. I was watching TV during the attacks only because of the live element. All those terrorists were carrying hi-tech equipment and had wireless networks. So they too were seeing everything and could channelise that information. That’s why the government stopped the live telecast towards the third day. Of course, that lasted only for one hour. I saw that only the Malayalam TV channels mentioned that the live telecast had been banned because of public demand. Today, I was watching the chief minister of Kerala, Achudanandan when he made that ‘dog’ statement about Major Unnikrishnan’s family. I also read about it in the Malayalam language Mathrubhoomi newspaper. You know, when he made that statement, his tone was so mellow and he was looking so sad. You could see he didn’t mean it in the way that other language channels and the media took it. He was using a Malayalam colloquialism. I keep telling people that you should listen to the tone… his true meaning was completely lost in translation! Channels like Aaj Tak have been hyping it up. A similar thing happened when MN Vijayan died while he was giving a speech. That was telecast on Aaj Tak and Headlines Today throughout the day. Of course, when somebody is speaking and then dies on the dais it’s a terrific scene but the way it’s handled, desensitises the viewer. After a while, people will not react even if the media plays things up a lot.

Now, the TV channels are overlapping things. After the attacks, it was Ram Gopal Verma, then they kept showing Naqvi and now it’s the political turmoil in Maharashtra. This sort of thing erases the earlier issues. They want live news happening to keep people interested.

About Ram Gopal Verma, why should he not be allowed to visit the sites? Some of his films like Satya exposed a lot of things to the common man. Is he not a citizen of India or is he a criminal? Abbas Tyrewala was wrong when he said Verma shouldn’t have gone to the hotel site because it isn’t his bread and butter. Even Ratna Pathak was upset. People have a notion that Verma is a commercial filmmaker. But so what? Really, those film people shouldn’t have turned against a person of their own community.
Talking about desensitisation, I recently went to for the Indian Express India Photo Journalists Award show, where the chief guest was Salman Khan. A German journalist who was with me questioned the morality of some of the photos that had been nominated for awards. One of them was of a woman sitting in a room with the body of her son, who’d killed himself, hanging from the ceiling. Pablo Bartholomew explained to the German journalist about how irresponsible the media is in India and how nobody questions whether that particular photo, which was clearly taken by a journalist who had accompanied the police during their investigations, should be considered as a journalistic work at all.

Talking about irresponsibility, why were the TV crews allowed to stand just outside the Taj? The whole area should have been cordoned off. The TV journalists were not sparing the survivors who were coming out. Barkha Dutt even asked Sabina Sanghvi’s husband horrible questions. She asked him how he felt now that his children had lost their mother. How will a person feel in such a situation? She made him cry. It was so shameful.

Right now, there is huge anger in Bombay. You do get a sense of that. The problem with Bombay is that you never feel like people are agitating because the pace of life here is so fast. All the FM channels have taken it up and 92.67b FM is organising a Halla bol meeting somewhere. Everyone is taking the discourse and making a tamasha of it. People will ultimately lose interest because there’s a lack of integrity on the part of those organising these things. One way or the other, everyone is pursuing the benefits arising out of all this.

Going back to that episode of We The People, they were supposed to end the programme with a two-minute prayer but that length of silence is terrible in TV terms so it ended in just 30 minutes. I suppose they had to end for an ad break!
The strange thing about Mumbai is that it doesn’t have politics. Many hate the Shiv Sena to an extent and there is no other political movement that people can identify with. Unlike, say, Kolkata, Mumbai is an orphan.

The issue of the attacks cannot invoke the religious issue. I don’t think people are thinking of it in those terms. They have become quite sensible. Besides, there is nobody to mobilise that feeling. This event has shut everyone up. The main concern has been security, unlike in earlier instances when people were concerned with revenge. It’s so evident that this has been perpetrated by outsiders. People don’t identify with this terrorism.

I got a mail from a friend that this was a test, that the attack was a sort of demonstration to show how mass terror is executed and for terrorists to study the fallout of this sort of operation. There are a lot of theories floating around.
But, no, I did not watch TV right through for 60 hours like many people did. I couldn’t take the way the media was behaving like a pack of dogs baying outside the Taj and the Oberoi. They were not showing what was really happening but were indulging in a lot of speculation.

As told to Manjula Narayan