“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.”
This is how my friend Kalpana Sharma, one of the most respected journalists in India, looks back at the momentous events that took place in her home city of Mumbai from 26 to 30 November 2008. In a thought-provoking analysis published on Tehelka.com, Kalpana assesses 60 hours of continuous media coverage of the Mumbai crisis and notes the significant gaps.
As Mumbai and India recover from the daring attack, the media continue to play the dramatic images over and over. I was in Hyderabad, in southern India (more than 700 km away from Mumbai) for a few days from November 30 and saw this first hand – especially on India’s several dozen 24/7 TV news channels in English and many local languages. Even before arriving in India, I was following the unfolding events on India’s leading English news channel NDTV 24/7 and their website.
She is not an armchair critic of the media, and understands the tough challenges that reporters and their gatekeepers face on a daily basis. “When such developments hit a city, it is understandable that there is a time lag before the media, particularly the electronic media, can react,” she acknowledges in her essay, and asks: “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.”
I have met some professors of mass communication who have never been inside a news room and well-meaning media activists whose naive idealism makes me laugh. Kalpana, in contrast, counts over three decades of mainstream media experience and retired last year as Deputy Editor of The Hindu newspaper.
Read Kalpana’s full essay here: Unpacking The Pixel
Others inside and outside India are also offering critical analysis of media’s role in the siege of Mumbai, or India’s 26/11 as it’s being called. One is by Anjali Deshpande and S K Pande of the Delhi Union of Journalists who have written an interesting commentary in the South Asian mediawatch website, The Hoot.
They acknowledge how “24×7 reporting of terror has indeed been has also been a traumatic experience for our colleagues” and go on to say that “Some of them really did a good job under the circumstances”. But their piece is are less charitable than Kalpana when they say: “If there is one thing the electronic media helped in particular to do in the last three days was to bolster the confidence of terrorists and to give them a sense of achievement far greater than their action may have provided them.”
They note: “The initial role of some of the media was to grab the eyeballs rather than ask questions and reflect all facets of life as they unfold without adding to the tension strife and trauma in such situations. In some cases the ethics evolved over the years was thrown into the dustbin. Add to it all the fact, that when some restraint began more than a touch of jingoism took over.”
They add: “The media behaved as if the country was so terrified it came to a standstill. As if Madhya Pradesh did not go to polls, as if Delhi did not vote, as if a former Prime Minister, V P Singh did not pass away, as if nothing else happened in the country.”
Read the full essay in The Hoot: Three Days of Mumbai terror reporting.
There are dozens of other debates underway in the passionately argumentative Indian society, some of which are being conducted in the newspapers, news magazines, on the air and online. One that especially interested me was the role elitism played in how the media covered the siege of Mumbai.
The attacks took place at multiple locations in the heart of Mumbai, which included two leading hotels, a synagogue and Jewish centre and the main train station. But not all attacks lasted as long, and certainly not all of them received equal coverage.
Gnani Sankaran, a writer based in Tamil Nadu, southern India, asks some pertinent questions in a blog post titled Hotel Taj: Icon of whose India? “Watching at least four English news channels surfing from one another during the last 60 hours of terror strike made me feel a terror of another kind. The terror of assaulting one’s mind and sensitivity with cameras, sound bites and non-stop blabbers. All these channels have been trying to manufacture my consent for a big lie called — Hotel Taj the icon of India.
He adds: “It is a matter of great shame that these channels simply did not bother about the other icon that faced the first attack from terrorists – the Chatrapathi Shivaji Terminus (CST) railway station. CST is the true icon of Mumbai. It is through this railway station hundreds of Indians from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, West Bengal and Tamilnadu have poured into Mumbai over the years, transforming themselves into Mumbaikars and built the Mumbai of today along with the Marathis and Kolis
“But the channels would not recognise this. Nor would they recognise the thirty odd dead bodies strewn all over the platform of CST. No Barkha Dutt went there to tell us who they were. But she was at Taj to show us the damaged furniture and reception lobby braving the guards. And the TV cameras did not go to the government-run JJ hospital to find out who those 26 unidentified bodies were. Instead they were again invading the battered Taj to try in vain for a scoop shot of the dead bodies of the Page 3 celebrities.
Read his full blog post: Whose India, whose icon?
Another interesting critique that touched on elitism in media coverage appeared in The Telegraph newspaper, published from Kolkata on 4 December 2008. Titled “WE, THE PEOPLE: The Mumbai tragedy and the English language news media”, it was penned by Indian writer Mukul Kesavan.
He echoes the same point as Gnani Sankaran about the Victoria Terminus being much more iconic than the Taj hotel, and comes to the same conclusion: “I can’t remember the last time that social class so clearly defined the coverage of a public event, or one in which people spoke so unselfconsciously from their class positions. The English news channels became mega-churches in which hotel-going Indians found catharsis and communion. Person after person claimed the Taj as home. Memories of courtship, marriage, celebration, friendship, the quick coffee, the saved-up-for snack, the sneaked lavatory visit, came together to frame the burning Taj in a halo of affection.”
In his closing para, Kesavan also touches on how the foreign media covered the Mumbai attacks: “English and American papers treated the terror attack as an assault on the West. The terrorists had, after all, specifically looked for American and British citizens to murder. Ironically, even as NDTV, CNN-IBN and Times Now put hotel guests at the heart of the horror and bumped train commuters to its periphery, older English-speaking peoples counted their dead and dimly regretted all Indian casualties as collateral damage. In that residual category, if nowhere else, the Indian dead remained one People.”
Read full commentary by Mukul Kesavan
Another dimension in the media coverage following the Mumbai attacks is how it is affecting the relations between India and Pakistan, both nuclear powers. As The Hindu reported on 1 December 2008: “The escalating tensions between India and Pakistan over the Mumbai attacks have led to the declaration of hostilities in unexpected quarters – Pakistani media has declared a virtual war on Indian media for its ‘knee-jerk’ finger-pointing across the border, and its unquestioning acceptance of the Indian government’s ‘Pakistan-link’ theory.”
Moderate journalists and media-watchers across South Asia are calling for more restraint, self-reflection and plain common sense. On 4 December 2008, Himal Southasian – the independent and outspoken voice of South Asia – ran a special editorial which opened with these words:
“There is an attempt on to generate mass hysteria in India as television channels compete for ratings. The channels are using the Bombay attacks of last week in a dangerous game of TRP-upmanship which can well derail the political process and set back the India-Pakistan peace train. Going far beyond what is required of them even in times of crisis, some media houses are leading campaigns to get citizens to take pledges of patriotism. They are pushing a brittle, monochromatic vision of the resilient country we know as India.”
Read the full Himal editorial: No to mass hysteria
My journalist friend Beena Sarwar, based in Karachi, voiced her concerns in an op ed published in the leading Pakistani newspaper Dawn on 3 December 2008:
She adds: “Some Indian channels are running the Pakistan factor like a movie trailer, complete with sound effects and watch-for-the-next-episode commentary. This obviously fuels Pakistani indignation. However, this indignation could be tempered by being less reactive and empathising with the Indians’ pain and grief that many Pakistanis share. Zealous commentators could also recall the times that their own media houses sensationalised an issue.
“Journalists may argue that they are just the messenger, reflecting official or public opinion. But the media must also question, and get people to think. The stakes are high in our nuclear-armed countries, in a post-9/11 world where the major players include armed and trained men around the world who subscribe to the ideology of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.”
Full op ed by Beena Sarwar: Media falls into old trap
Ordinary people outside the media industry have also started expressing their concern.
“Media on both sides of the border has stopped reporting and started indulging in senseless rants. The media, particularly in India seems to have thrown logic to the wind,” wrote Anand Bala from Bangalore, in a letter to the South Asian mediawatch website The Hoot. “The screaming for war on the Indian side has reached a din. The media is manufacturing consent for a war and manufacturing consent for the very people who they are blaming – the politicians.”
I would give the last word to Kalpana Sharma: “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.”
Open Minds! (formerly: Moving Images blog) 
Our perspective of this terrble event was brought home to Canada by actor Michael Rudder in his description from a tourist point of view. He was at the hotel in the dinning room when the sound of firecrackers went off in the distance. The hotel staff assured him and his other guests at the table, a man and his 13 year old daughter, that it was nothing…just some gangsters that were fighting with the police and that it would soon be over. They continued eating and the armed men came rushing in to the dinning room shooting everywhere. Not at one specific group…everywhere. Rudder saw his friend shot and his 13 year old daughter killed. He looked down at his white shirt and saw his own blood coming thru in several places. He remembered in an old Die Hard movie with Bruse Willis…to play dead…he did…and it saved his life…although he was shot 3 times. When the smoke became too heavy he escaped and was taken to hospital. He is alive to tell the tale. This is India’s 911….we know with the events around the world that no nation is safe…we must keep up our guard….and never given in.
Michael Rudder, of Montreal, was shot three times while in the restaurant area of Mumbai’s Oberoi Hotel amid the violence that left more than 100 people dead and hundreds more injured on Wednesday.
“He’s had surgery and he’s doing well,” Garvey said Thursday morning. “He’s stable — not enough to fly home yet — but he’s stable.”
David Damario
Canada
David: Thanks for sharing your perspective from the other side of the planet. To you and me, every human life is precious and the loss of even a single life is a tragedy. But where many news media channels are concerned, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
For some years now, I’ve been looking at the ethics of TV newsgathering. See, for example, my op ed commentary two years ago when Al Jazeera launched its global English channel: http://www.mediahelpingmedia.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=62&Itemid=2
It’s not just the global news channels, owned and operated largely by western media corporations, whose only operating guideline seems to be: get the story, no matter what — or who gets hurt in that process. After watching the coverage of Mumbai attacks by various Indian news channels, I must extend that concern to channels of our own countries.
There have been worse terror attacks and tragedies in India before Nov 26, but none elicited the kind of saturation coverage that followed the siege of Mumbai. Was it because Indian elites and foreigners were involved? Was it also because this time, it was not some backwoods of a peripheral state of India that suffered the attack but the heart of Mumbai, the centre of commerce and Bollywood?
These questions are worth asking. Also pertinent is to go back and read Jeremy Seabrook’s perceptive commentary written soon after the Indian Ocean Tsunami of December 2004, where he pointed out that for the western media, a tourist’s tragedy was more important than that of the ‘locals’.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/dec/31/tsunami2004.pressandpublishing
Is there a similar divide in the way our own media perceives the urban elite and separates them from the ‘masses’?
I agree with David, yes, the Michael Rudder story did a lot in shaping the Canadian perspective. I have been in various discussions with people here in Canda and it is interesting to note the reactions of many young people here in this part of the world. As you say, with all the publicity being given to the elite, people who don’t know much about South Asia were astonished that there were such places as the Taj in India – more interestingly someone told me “but I thought the Taj Mahal was some kind of monument” which was even more hilarious. I believe that most people in this part of the world associate India with slums and dirt and mosquitoes and terrible poverty anyway. The “elite” aspect of India was sort of new knowledge to the average person – although I do agree that it is despicable that the media concentrated only on the deaths of the rich and famous in posh places.
The elite print the press and press the flesh for the paperatzi to dance to the tune of the paid piper. No less tragic is the loss of a human being from any divide!
I have found what i was looking for !!! thx )