Colombo General Cemetery: No discussion or debate...
This is a view of Colombo’s main cemetery, the final resting place for many residents of Sri Lanka’s capital and its suburbs. I took this photo less than a month ago, when I visited a grave on a quiet morning.
The late Bernard Soysa, a leading leftist politician and one time Minister of Science and Technology, once called it ‘the only place in Colombo where there is no discussion or debate’.
This afternoon, family, friends and many sorrowful admirers of Lasantha Wickramatunga, the courageous Sri Lankan newspaper editor who was brutally slain last week in broad daylight, took him there — and left him behind amidst the quiet company.
But not before making a solemn pledge. All thinking and freedom-loving people would continue to resist sinister attempts to turn the rest of Sri Lanka into a sterile zombieland where there is no discussion and debate. In other words, rolling out the cemetery to cover the rest of the island.
The last laugh?Silencing Lasantha was the clear aim of cowardly gunmen who intercepted him on his way to work and shot him at pointblank. Tarzie Vittachi, the first Lankan newspaper editor to be forced into exile 50 years ago for freely expressing his views on politically sensitive issues, once called such attacks ‘censorship by murder’. (Alas, since Tarzie uttered those words in 1990, shooting the messenger has become increasingly common in Sri Lanka.)
Rex de Silva, the first editor that Lasantha worked for (at the now defunct Sun newspaper) in the late 1970s, has just cautioned that Lasantha’s murder is the beginning of ‘the sound of silence’ for the press in Sri Lanka. Can this sound of silence be shattered by the silent, unarmed majority of liberal, peace-loving Lankans who were represented at the funeral service and the Colombo cemetery today?
And would they remember for all time Edmund Burke’s timeless words: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”?
How many would actually read, absorb and heed the deeply moving words of Lasantha’s one last editorial, copies of which were distributed at the cemetery and the religious service before that?
That editorial, which appeared in The Sunday Leader on 11 January 2009, embodies the best of Lasantha Wickrematunga’s liberal, secular and democratic views.
As I wrote in another tribute published today by Himal Southasian and Media Helping Media: “I have no idea which one – or several – of his team members actually penned this ‘Last Editorial’, but it reads authentic Lasantha all over: passionate and accommodating, liberal yet uncompromising on what he held dear. I can’t discern the slightest difference in style.”
“And there lies our hope: while Lasantha at 51 lies fallen by bullets, his spirit and passion are out there, continuing his life’s mission. That seems a good measure of the institutional legacy he leaves behind. If investigative journalism were a bug, the man has already infected at least a few of his team members…”
Much has been written and broadcast in the past 100 or so hours since Lasantha’s journey was brutally cut short by as-yet-unidentified goons who have no respect for the public interest or have no clue how democracies sustain public discussion and debate. I’m sure more will be written – some in outrage and others in reflection – in the coming days and weeks.
Siribiris (left): puncturing egos for 40 yearsAs we leave Lasantha to his rest, I remember Siribiris. For those unfamiliar with the name, Siribiris is an iconic cartoon character created by Camillus Perera, a veteran Sri Lankan political cartoonist who has been in the business as long as I have been alive.
Siribiris represents Everyman, who is repeatedly hoodwinked and taken for granted by assorted politicians and businessmen who prosper at the common man’s expense. The only way poor, unempowered Siribiris can get back at them is to puncture their egos and ridicule them at every turn. And boy, does he excel in that!
It’s no surprise that Lasantha – the bête noire of shady politicians and crooked tycoons – was very fond of Siribiris. Perhaps he saw his own life’s work as extending that of Siribiris in the complex world of the 21st century. That he did it with aplomb and gusto – and had great fun doing it, sometimes tongue stuck out at his adversaries – will be part of Lasantha’s enduring legacy. (As his last editorial reminded us, in 15 years of investigative journalism on a weekly basis, no one has successfully sued the newspaper for defamation or damages.)
So Goodbye, Lasantha. And Long live Siribiris!
Cartoon by Gihan de Chickera, Courtesy: Daily Mirror, Sri Lanka
Farewell & fare forward...Saluting the memory of courageous newspaper editor, fearless investigative journalist, jovial human being and my former colleague Lasantha Wickramatunga, Editor in Chief of The Sunday Leader, Sri Lanka, shot dead by four gunmen within sight of his newspaper office. Today, we lost the real Leader of the Opposition.
They picked Akanni up one morning
Beat him soft like clay
And stuffed him down the belly
Of a waiting jeep.
What business of mine is it
So long they don’t take the yam
From my savouring mouth?
They came one night
Booted the whole house awake
And dragged Danladi out,
Then off to a lengthy absence.
What business of mine is it
So long they don’t take the yam
From my savouring mouth?
Chinwe went to work one day
Only to find her job was gone:
No query, no warning, no probe –
Just one neat sack for a stainless record.
What business of mine is it
So long they don’t take the yam
From my savouring mouth?
And then one evening
As I sat down to eat my yam
A knock on the door froze my hungry hand.
The jeep was waiting on my bewildered lawn
Waiting, waiting in its usual silence.
I was run over by the truth one day.
Ever since the accident I’ve walked this way
So stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam…
With these lines opened the bitterly sarcastic reaction to the televised horrors of the Vietnam War by British poet, playwright and performer Adrian Mitchell.
He first read his best-known poem, called To Whom It May Concern (also known as Tell Me Lies), to thousands of anti-war protesters who flocked into London’s Trafalgar Square on the afternoon of Easter Monday 1964. As Mitchell delivered his lines from the pavement above in front of the National Gallery, angry demonstrators in the square below scuffled with police.
Adrian Mitchell (1932 - 2008)Mitchell, who died on 20 December 2008 aged 76, occasionally updated the poem to take into account the subsequent wars and resulting tragedies in places as far apart as Iraq, Burma, Afghanistan and Israel/Palestine.
“It is about Vietnam, But it is still relevant,” Mitchell said in 2001. “It’s about sitting faithfully in England while thousands of miles away terrible atrocities are being committed in our name.”
As Michael Kustow wrote in an obituary in The Guardian: “Mitchell’s original plays and stage adaptations, performed on mainstream national stages and fringe venues, on boats and in nature, add up to a musical, epic and comic form of theatre, a poet’s drama worthy of Aristophanes and Lorca. Across the spectrum of his prolific output, through wars, oppressions and deceptive victories, he remained a beacon of hope in darkening times. He was a natural pacifist, a playful, deeply serious peacemonger and an instinctive democrat.”
The one time journalist and television critic was fired by The Sunday Times (UK) for reviewing Peter Watkins’ 1965 anti-nuclear TV film The War Game. Its depiction of the impact of Soviet nuclear attack on Britain had caused such dismay within the BBC and British government that the public broadcaster cancelled its scheduled transmission on 6 August 1966 (the 21 anniversary of the Hiroshima attack). It was finally broadcast in 1985, with the corporation stating that “the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting”.
But Auntie Beeb and the rest of the Establishment couldn’t stop Mitchell, whose satirical poems continued to demolish myths emanating from the propaganda mills of the military-industrial complex and their allies in the mainstream media.
As Kustow recalled: “To Whom It May Concern, a riveting poem against bombs and cenotaphs and the Vietnam war, with which he stirred a capacity audience in Mike Horovitz’s pioneering Poetry Olympics at the Albert Hall in 1965, has lasted through the too many wars since: a durable counting-rhyme to a rhythm and blues beat.”
Watch Adrian Mitchell recite/sing his poem in 1965 (black and white film):
As Jan Woolf wrote in another tribute: “To watch Adrian Mitchell…prepare his body for a performance of To Whom It May Concern – chin cupped in hand, eyes focused, back tense, ‘I got run over by the truth one day…’ – was to see a great poet steadying himself with all the focus and tension of a warrior. When those blue suede shoes got moving, the poem came alive. He breathed it, lived it, became it. It was as if he were dancing with language to get at the truth.”
Woolf recalls that Mitchell’s reading of Tell Me Lies at a City Hall benefit just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq was electrifying. “Of course, he couldn’t stop that war, but he performed as if he could.”
The 21st century re-mix ends with these words:
“You put your bombers in, you put your conscience out
You take the human being, and you twist it all about
So scrub my skin with women
So chain my tongue with whisky
Stuff my nose with garlic
Coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about –
Iraq
Burma
Afghanistan
BAE Systems
Israel
Iran
Tell me lies Mr Bush
Tell me lies Mr Blairbrowncameron
Tell me lies about Vietnam”
For some strange reason that has nothing to do with Adrian Mitchell’s recent departure, these words and the whole poem keep turning in my mind over and over again.
Danny Schechter: Moving Images Person of the Year 2008
As 2008 – clearly an Annus horribilis for tens of millions around the world – draws to an end, we announce the Moving Images Person of the Year 2008: Danny Schechter.
Nicknamed “The News Dissector,” Danny is a television producer, independent filmmaker, blogger and media critic who writes and lectures frequently about the media in the United States and worldwide.
He has worked in print, radio, local news, cable news (CNN and CNBC), network news magazines (ABC) and as an independent filmmaker and TV producer with the award-winning independent company Globalvision. He is a blogger and editor of Mediachannel.org, a web and blog site that watches and critiques the print and broadcast media.
Another way to introduce Danny is to recall the scary headlines and TV news images that have dominated 2008 – of reputed banks going bust, leading stock markets crashing and these events triggering a global financial meltdown that, for now, has been slowed but not completely averted by unprecedented governmental intervention…by the very governments of the industrialised countries who should have kept a sharper eye on what was going on in their free market economies.
As the carnage on Wall Street and other global financial centres continued, some hard questions were asked: Did anyone see this coming? If so, why weren’t they listened to? What is the real cause of all this chaos? Where was the news media and why weren’t they doing their job of sounding the alarm?
Well, one man who saw it coming and tried very hard to raise the alarm was Danny Schechter. In 2006, as part of this effort, he made a documentary film called In Debt We Trust. In this, he was the first to expose Wall Street’s connection to subprime loans and predicted the global economic crisis.
This hard-hitting documentary investigated why so many Americans – college and high school students in particular – were being strangled by debt. Zeroing in on how the mall has replaced the factory as America’s dominant economic engine, Emmy Award-winning former ABC News and CNN producer Danny Schechter showed how college students were being forced to pay higher interest on loans while graduating, on average, with more than $20,000 in consumer debt.
An inconvenient truth that America ignored for too long...
The film empowers as it enrages, delivering an accessible and fascinating introduction to what former Reagan advisor Kevin Phillips has called “Financialization” — or the “powerful emergence of a debt-and-credit industrial complex.”
Danny and his film have done for global financial meltdown what Al Gore did for global warming with his own film: investigate rigorously, gather and present the evidence of a gathering storm, sound the alarm — and keep badgering until the warnings were heard. In both cases, the inconvenient truths they presented were ignored for too long — and we are paying the massive price for such indifference.
Watch the Trailer of In Debt We Trust:
Deborah Emin, writing in OpEdNews in October 2008, noted: “In Debt We Trust…brought Schechter a lot of grief. Rather than being seen as a prophet of doom, which in and of itself was not so terrible, he should have been lauded for sounding the alarm when it would have been in time. It is truly an amazing fact of American life that the powers that be can so disastrously determine what information we are able to see based on their subjective judgment of what is too negative or too harsh a view of a specific topic. From this perspective, we should judge all these gatekeepers as those on the Titanic who did not want to alarm the passengers that the ship was going down.”
Watch an extract from In Debt We Trust: How did we get into this mess?
So here’s the trillion-dollar question: if this film was made in 2006, and has since been running to packed houses scaring a lot of thinking and caring people, why was its message not heard in the corridors of power in Washington DC — and elsewhere in the G8 countries’ capitals?
The short answer could be that there have been no thinking and caring people running the American government for the past eight years.
Read all about it!The long answer is found in a book that Danny published in mid 2008. Titled Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal, it’s an outgrowth of – and update on – his 2006 film. It documents with shocking evidence how debt has restructured the American economy and put Americans under a burden that many will never overcome.
Plunder also offers an analysis based on current events, going behind the scenes, identifying the key players and culprits, challenging the financial industry, government deregulation — and the financial and most sections of the mainstream media who have been cheer-leading the financiers as the latter took ever larger risks. Danny also argues that this has been a criminal enterprise — a point only touched on in most media coverage — and of global significance, given the globalization of markets.
Read my Sep 2008 blog post: Financial Meltdown: Putting pieces together of a gigantic whodunnit
On a personal note, I have been a great admirer of Danny Schechter and his work since I first met him 13 years ago. In the Fall of 1995, he gave an inspiring and provocative talk to a group of journalists and producers from the developing world who were on a UN-organised media fellowship in New York. As part of our tour of media and development agencies in the US East Coast, we visited Danny’s GlobalVision productions.
Danny introduced himself as a ‘network refugee’ — one who had worked for the mainstream network television in the US and had left in disgust. From outside, he was trying to find alternative ways of speaking truth to power — the original mandate of the mass media which many corporatised media companies had abandoned, knowingly or otherwise.
In that pre-Internet era, Danny engaged in his media activism through independent filmmaking, through which he supported and often participated in struggles for social justice in his native United States as well as in places like apartheid-ridden South Africa and strife-torn Palestine.
http://www.newsdissector.comDanny was one of the early media activists to take advantage of the web. In 2000, he co-founded with Rory O’Connor MediaChannel.org, the first media and democracy supersite on web. Operating on shoe-string budgets, it has sustained critical spotlight on the mainstream media (MSM) for 8 years in which the MSM landscape has been completely transformed. While its scrutiny and chronicling of the political economy of the media is more crucial than ever, and veterans like Walter Cronkite whole-heartedly endorse the effort, the non-profit effort struggles for survival.
Now in his 60s, Danny is simply indefatigable. Besides running MediaChannel and GlobalVision, he blogs every few hours, writes a regular column on Huffington Post, lectures on media, writes books and still has time to make investigative films. He is extremely well informed, witty, funny and completely irreverent. He writes and speaks with justified outrage but no malice. That’s a tough balance to maintain.
Danny visits Wall Street on 20 September 2007 – typical of his funny, incisive reporting:
I was delighted to catch up with Danny in May 2008 when we both participated in Asia Media Summit in Kuala Lumpur. He and I were in a small minority of participants who were familiar with the inner works of the mainstream media and transformational potential of the new media. In characteristic style, Danny stirred things up, livening the usually staid proceedings, and I did my best to back him up from the audience. We both enjoyed asking irritating – if not outright annoying – questions from the 400+ media mandarins and press barons who’d come together for the Summit.
One evening, Danny and I had a drink with Malaysiakini’s CEO and leading new media activist Prem Chandran where we talked about the slow but inevitable decline of the mainstream media dinosaurs — or what Michael Crichton called Mediasaurus. The trouble with mediasaurus, we agreed, was that they are taking a long time going extinct and for now, they still command significant numbers of eyeballs and the dollars that follow.
After Prem left, Danny and I continued our chat into the evening. Over a spicy Indian meal, Danny gave me a crash course on subprime crisis (or sub-crime as he calls it) and how that was going to have a domino effect on markets everywhere. I listened with growing comprehension — and deep admiration for the man’s ability to communicate complexities without oversimplification.
Events in the weeks and months that followed have shown how remarkably prescient Danny Schechter was. And what a monumental, global scale mistake it was not to have heeded this man’s cautions in his blogs, films, columns and elsewhere.
We end 2008 with my cartoon of the year. As I said in a blog post in September 2008: “This cartoon by Pulitzer prize winning Tom Toles first appeared in the Washington Post in 2007 – it brilliantly anticipated the global financial meltdown that we’re now experiencing. Coming in the wake of confirmed global warming, it is a double whammy. Meltdown 2
Jantakarn Thep-Chuay, known as Beam
For many weeks, Jantakarn Thep-Chuay — nicknamed Beam -– did not understand why her father was not coming home. The eight-year-old girl, in Takuapa in Thailand’s southern district of Phang Nga, had last seen him go to work on the morning of 26 December 2004.
“On that Sunday, the day there was a wave, my dad wore his tennis shoes,” she recalls as she gets into his pair of sandals. “My dad didn’t have to do much work — he just walked around looking after workers.”
Beam’s father Sukaroak –- a construction supervisor at a new beach resort in Khao Lak –- was one of thousands of Thais and foreign tourists killed when the Asian Tsunami hit without warning. His body was never found.
For months, Beam would draw pictures of her family. These, and family photos of happier times, helped her to slowly come to terms with what happened.
The first year was long and hard for the family Sukaroak left behind: Beam, her two-year-old brother Boom, and mother Sumontha, 28. The determined young widow struggled to keep home fires burning -– and to keep her troublesome in-laws at bay.
As if that were not enough, she also had to engage assorted bureaucracies: even obtaining an official death certificate for her late husband entailed much effort.
Just a few weeks after the disaster, the local authorities approached Sumontha suggesting that she gives away one or both her children for adoption. Apparently a foreigner was interested. She said a firm ‘No’.
“Her dad wanted Beam to become an architect. He was hoping for a day when he could build something she draws,” says Sumontha. “If I am still alive, I want to raise my own children. I am their mother. For better or worse, I want to raise them myself.”
The Tsunami destroyed Beam’s school, but she continued to attend a temporary school set up with local and foreign help. Before the year ended, she moved to a brand new ‘Tsunami School’ that the King of Thailand built to guarantee education for all children affected by the disaster.
Sumontha, Beam and Boom are three ordinary Asians who have shown extraordinary courage, resilience and resourcefulness as they coped with multiple challenges of rebuilding their lives after the Tsunami. Theirs is one of eight families that we followed throughout 2005, under our empathetic communication initiative called Children of Tsunami: Rebuilding the Future.
It was a multi-country, multi-media project that tracked how ordinary Asians rebuilt their lives, livelihoods and futures after one of the biggest disasters in recent years. We at TVE Asia Pacific documented on TV, video and web the personal recovery stories of eight affected families in India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand for a year after the disaster. Our many media products — distributed on broadcast, narrowcast and online platforms -– inspired wide ranging public discussion on disaster relief, recovery and rehabilitation. In that process, we were also able to demonstrate that a more engaged, respectful kind of journalism was possible when covering post-disaster situations.
Four countries, eight locations: where Children of Tsunami stories were filmed for much of 2005
Meet the Children of Tsunami…
They have never met each other. Yet they were united first in grief, then in survival. Five girls and three boys, between 8 to 16 years of age, living in eight coastal locations in four countries. Their families were impacted by the Asian Tsunami in different ways. Some lost one or both parents -– or other family members. Some had their homes or schools destroyed. Others found their parents thrown out of a job. During the year, these families faced many hardships and challenges in rebuilding their futures.
Filming with Theeban in eastern Sri Lanka...now only a memory
As I recalled in early 2007, when we tragically lost one of eight survivor children – Theeban – to Sri Lanka’s civil war: “As journalists, we have been trained not to get too attached to the people or subjects we cover, lest they affect our judgment and dilute our objectivity. The four production teams involved in Children of Tsunami initially agreed to follow this norm when we met in Bangkok in early 2005 for our first (and only) planning meeting. We also resolved not to reward our participating families in cash or kind, as they were all participating voluntarily with informed consent.
“But the ground reality was different. 2005, Asia’s longest year, wore on. As survivors slowly patched their lives together again, our film teams found themselves becoming friends of families or playing Good Samaritan. Sometimes our teams would find a survivor family close to starvation and — acting purely as human beings, not journalists — they would buy dry rations or a cooked meal. At other times, finding the children restless or aimless, they would buy them a football, kite or some other inexpensive toy that would produce hours of joy and cheer.
“As commissioners and publishers of Children of Tsunami stories, we didn’t object to these acts of kindness. Journalism with empathy was far preferable to the cold detachment that textbooks recommend.”
Children of Tsunami: No More Tears (25 mins) was the shorter version of the end-of-year film that captured the highlights and ‘lowlights’ of our families’ first year following the disaster. We co-produced it with the Singapore-based regional broadcaster Channel News Asia.
Space prophet mobbed by anxious politicians: Cartoon by W R Wijesoma in The Observer (Sri Lanka)
This cartoon is nearly as old as myself! It was drawn by Sri Lanka’s leading political cartoonist W R Wijesoma and appeared in The Observer newspaper of Colombo sometime in the late 1960s (I haven’t been able to ascertain the exact date).
It shows science fiction writer (later Sir) Arthur C Clarke, already settled down in Ceylon (later Sri Lanka) and ‘Serendipitised’ enough to sport the native attire of sarong, being mobbed by the island’s leading politicians — all of them now departed — each wanting to know what he can foresee or foretell about their personal political futures.
Sir Arthur, whose 91st birth anniversary falls today, took pains to explain that science fiction writers like himself were not soothsayers with powers to predict the future. He was fond of quoting fellow SF writer Ray Bradbury’s famous saying: “People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it.”
But that kind of reason never deterred politicians of every colour and hue, who are always anxious to know just when they can get elected – or return – to high office and all the trappings of power that go with it.
To mark the birth anniversary – the first since his death in March 2008 – I have just published an op ed essay, titled Sir Arthur C Clarke: A life-long public intellectual, on Groundviews website. In this essay I explore, briefly, some of his life-long pursuits for more rational discussion and debate in public policy. I also wonder how and why he lost his struggle against Sri Lankans’ obsession with astrology.
Here’s an excerpt:
But even half a century of Arthur C Clarke could not shake Sri Lankans off their deep obsession with astrology — the unscientific belief that human destinies are somehow shaped and controlled by celestial bodies millions of kilometres away. A life-long astronomy enthusiast, he repeatedly invited astrologers to rationally explain the basis of their calculations and predictions. This challenge was craftily avoided by astrologers who continue to exercise much influence over politics, public policy, business and everyday life in Sri Lanka.
Despite his broad-mindedness, Clarke couldn’t understand how so many highly educated Sri Lankans practised astrology with a faith bordering on the religious (another topic on which he held strong views). Ironically, even the government-run technical institute named after him used astrologically chosen ‘auspicious times’ for commissioning its new buildings. In later years, Clarke would only say, jokingly: “I don’t believe in astrology; but then, I’m a Sagittarius — and we’re very sceptical.”
On a personal note, I’m truly privileged to have known and worked with both Sir Arthur Clarke and his cartoonist W R Wijesoma (who was my senior colleague at The Island newspaper which he joined at its inception in 1981). I know how much Sir Arthur liked this cartoon, the original of which he obtained from Wijesoma and preserved among dozens of other souvenirs and mementos.
Alas, Wijesoma left us in January 2006 — or he might just have drawn another brilliant cartoon to send off Sir Arthur on his final journey. In fact, a worthy follower of Wijesoma’s cartoon tradition did just that earlier this year – see this blog post of mine from March 2008: Arthur C Clarke autographing all the way to the Great Beyond….?
“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.
Kalpana SharmaI could see that the high adrenaline that every channel and reporter drew on during the 60 hours of drama has now changed into a mix of patriotism, jingoism and an incredible suspension of journalistic ethics and norms. This makes Kalpana’s reflections extremely timely and important.
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
Breaking News 24/7?
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
Chatrapathi Shivaji (Victoria) Terminus - the true icon of Mumbai
“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.
Gnani Sankaran“In all probability, the unidentified bodies could be those of workers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh migrating to Mumbai, arriving by train at CST without cell phones and PAN cards to identify them. Even after 60 hours after the CST massacre, no channel has bothered to cover in detail what transpired there.” Read his full blog post: Whose India, whose icon?
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.”
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.”
Beena Sarwar“Media might have brought the people closer but when nationalism rears its head, the beast of 24-hour television news also fuels conflict. This is where the commercial aspect comes in. When something big happens, the public seeks answers. The channels which cater to this need improve their ratings. Sensation sells. With viewers glued to the screens, channels keep them there with a continuous virtual reality show. They fill the time with speculative commentary, ‘expert’ guests and whatever footage is available. Sometimes such footage is repeated ad nauseum — like when the Twin Towers were destroyed on 9/11, when the Marriott hotel was attacked, when the FIA building in Lahore was struck.”
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.”
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.”
Doyen of Sri Lankan cartoonists, Wijesoma, saw it all coming (courtesy: The Island)
This cartoon is more than a quarter of a century old. It was drawn by W R Wijesoma, the doyen of Sri Lankan political cartoonists, in March 1982 — barely a month after Sri Lanka’s national television broadcaster Rupavahini commenced its transmissions.
I was a school boy in my mid teens when this happened, but I remember the story behind the cartoon. It was Sri Lanka’s first executive president J R Jayewardene who inaugurated the national TV station, which was donated to Sri Lanka by the Japanese government as part of its large package of aid to the island nation. At the inauguration, JR (as everyone called him) made this lofty speech, where he expressed his hope that Rupavahini would also be a satyavahini (meaning: the picture tube should also dispense the truth).
In practice, that presidential wish never had a chance. JR was in office from 1978 to 1989, and Rupavahini’s fledgling years coincided with his second term. Despite his ideals, his own government misused the new medium from almost day one for blatant, partisan propaganda. In the event, it was my old colleague Wijesoma’s vision of a ‘party-vahini’ (a propaganda vehicle for party in office) that became our sad, stark reality. Some have also called it pacha-vahini (dispenser of lies).
I recall all this on World Television Day, 21 November, because I’ve been reading a very interesting book by a remarkable man who was associated with Rupavahini’s inauguration. His name is Palitha Perera, and he is one of the most senior and respected radio and TV broadcasters in Sri Lanka today. Among other feats, Palitha holds the distinction of having been the inaugural announcer on two Sri Lankan TV channels – Rupavahini (15 February 1982) and TNL TV (21 July 1993).
Live with Palitha Perera Palitha has recently penned his first book, titled Palitha Perera Samaga Sajeeva Lesin (Live with Palitha Perera; Surasa Books, Colombo; 2008). It’s not written in the ‘been-there, done-that’ style of self importance. True, it has a rich sprinkling of autobiographical details expressed in Palitha’s lucid, entertaining writing style. But in recalling men and matters, and his own multiple roles in shaping events, he is both modest and moderate -– hallmarks of his professional career.
As I note in a book review published today on Groundviews.org: “His reminiscences provide some unique insights into our broadcasting history for nearly half a century. He chronicles little known facts and praises unsung heroes. In doing so, he offers a ringside account of the progress — and decline — of state broadcasting in Sri Lanka from the early 1960s to the present.”
Palitha is one of the few broadcasters who successfully moved from radio to television broadcasting. Many other announcers, interviewers and producers of the radio era failed to make that leap, for the two media are different.
In fact, Palitha has been in broadcasting longer than I’ve been alive. I grew up in the 1970s listening to Palitha’s deep, clear and friendly voice. He was Sri Lanka’s pioneering cricket commentator in Sinhala and that’s how he has had the greatest impact on our culture and society.
As I say in the review: “Here we have, straight from the original source, the story of how cricket became the de facto national past-time, if not our national addiction or religion! Like it or hate it, cricket is an integral part of our popular culture. Radio (and later TV) cricket commentaries take much of the credit (or blame, in some people’s view) for building up this uncommon fervour that occasionally unites our otherwise utterly and bitterly divided nation.”
Palitha has also made his name as the country’s foremost interviewer on both radio and television. In his time, Palitha has interviewed dozens of public figures from Presidents and prime ministers to social activists and trade unionists. He is always prepared and well informed. He remains calm and friendly at all times, yet is dogged in his questioning. This style has exposed many a hypocrite and charlatan.
It was said that boxer Mohammad Ali used to ‘float like a butterfly and sting like a bee’. I would say Palitha Perera floats like a butterfly and stings like a butterfly. It never hurts his interviewee personally, but he is piercing and penetrative all the same.
Unlike many other broadcasters who have cheer-led governments prostituting the airwaves, a public property, Palitha Perera never lost sight of who his real masters were: the audience.
Death has no sense of timing, but it sometimes leaves traces of irony. The day Americans were electing an energetic and articulate senator from Chicago as their next president, one of Chicago’s most celebrated citizens lost his battle with cancer.
Michael Crichton, who died on 4 November 2008, was trained as a medical doctor but played several roles in the creative arts world. He was a prolific author of science fiction and medical fiction, whose books have sold over 150 million copies worldwide. He also produced and directed techno-thriller movies, and was the creator of the highly successful medical drama series on television, ER (Emergency Room), now in its 15th season.
In the domain of popular culture, Crichton was best known for writing Jurassic Park (1990). This cautionary tale on unrestrained biological tinkering was turned into a blockbuster movie by Steven Spielberg in 1993. It became the highest earning film up until that time.
Before and since, Crichton used his technical training, vivid imagination and mastery of English to spin some of the most enjoyable – and scary – stories that often depicted scientific advancements going awry, resulting in the worst-case scenarios. A notable recurring theme in Crichton’s plots is the pathological failure of complex systems and their safeguards, whether biological (Jurassic Park), military/organizational (The Andromeda Strain), technical (Airframe) or cybernetic (Westworld).
Crichton was also a talented essayist who wrote perceptive pieces of non-fiction about science, society and culture – including the role of media. It is one such essay that I would like to recall in his memory.
The media world was very different when, in 1993, Crichton riled the news business with an essay titled “Mediasaurus“. In this essay, written for the newly launched Wired magazine, he prophesied the death of the mass media — specifically the New York Times and the American commercial TV networks.
“To my mind, it is likely that what we now understand as the mass media will be gone within ten years. Vanished, without a trace,” he wrote.
Building on his credentials as the author of a best-seller on dinosaurs, Crichton called this endangered beast ‘mediasaurus’.
Mediasaurus - courtesy Slate He added: “There has been evidence of impending extinction for a long time. We all know statistics about the decline in newspaper readers and network television viewers. The polls show increasingly negative public attitudes toward the press – and with good reason.”
He talked about technological advances — “artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page” — that would drive the mediasaurus to their inevitable doom.
Only those nimble, adaptable media products would survive, he said, noting that CNN and C-SPAN were steps in the right direction, giving viewers direct access to events as they happen.
But he had no sympathy for the media. “The media are an industry, and their product is information. And along with many other American industries, the American media produce a product of very poor quality. Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it’s sold without warranty. It’s flashy but it’s basically junk. So people have begun to stop buying it.”
Like most people who dabble in the imperfect art of foreseeing the future, Crichton got the trend right but the timing somewhat wrong. The mainstream media (MSM) were indeed on the decline but not at the dramatic rate that he envisaged.
In February 2002, Jack Shafer wrote a piece in the online magazine Slate titled “Who You Calling Mediasaurus?” Its subtitle was: “The New York Times dodges Michael Crichton’s death sentence”. It asked and tried an answer the question: Where did Crichton go wrong?
Shafer wrote: “Fables of the near future have a way of never materializing, whether they be fevered dreams of nuclear energy too cheap to meter or fossil fuels too expensive to burn. To be fair, Crichton wasn’t the only one to get puking drunk on the new media moonshine. Many of us spent a lost weekend—sometimes months—in a stupor after reading early issues of Wired. But instead of blotting out conventional media, the emerging Infotopia seems only to have made the conventional media more ubiquitous.”
Shafer asked: “Who would have predicted in 1993 that America’s great dailies (minus the Wall Street Journal) and the news networks would dodge both extinction and irrelevance by erecting Web sites overnight and giving their content away? That they would use their Web sites to keep us informed 24-hours-a-day in a way that we take for granted today but that would have astonished us nine years ago?”
In an email interview with Shafer at the time, Crichton acknowledged his own limitations: “I don’t have a lot invested in whether my predictions are right or wrong; I assume that nobody can predict the future well. But in this particular case, I doubt I’m wrong, it’s just too early.”
In that interview, Crichton said he wished he had foreseen “the effect of big media conglomerates combined with the universal decision to make news into entertainment. It’s all headlines and chat now. Factual content is way down, accuracy has vanished (it’s not even a goal any longer), and public confidence in media is at an astonishing low. Not surprisingly, audiences are shrinking.”
Crichton admitted at the time that the personalized ‘infotopia’ he envisioned in 1993 had yet to arrive. He scoffed at the Web for being too slow. “Its page metaphor, too limiting. Design, awful. Excessive hypertexting, too distracting. Noise-to-signal ratio, too high.”
Who succeeds mediasaurus?Now fast-forward to May 2008. The same Jack Shafer, once again writing in Slate, published a piece titled “Michael Crichton, Vindicated”. It was introduced as: “His 1993 prediction of mass-media extinction now looks on target”.
In this essay, Shafer wrote: “As we pass his prediction’s 15-year anniversary, I’ve got to declare advantage Crichton. Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It’s gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren’t going extinct tomorrow, Crichton’s original observations about the media future now ring more true than false. Ask any journalist.”
Read Jack Shafer’s full interview with Michael Crichton in Slate, May 2008
Revealed: the weapon that killed MediasaurusBy this time, Crichton was more positive about the web. He noted that the Web has “made it far easier for the inquisitive to find unmediated information, such as congressional hearings.” It’s much faster than it used to be, and more of its pages are professionally assembled.
Crichton suggested that readers and viewers could more objectively measure the quality of the news they consume by pulling themselves “out of the narcotizing flow of what passes for daily news.” Look at a newspaper from last month or a news broadcast.
“Look at how many stories are unsourced or have unnamed sources. Look at how many stories are about what ‘may’ or ‘might’ or ‘could’ happen,” he said. “Might and could means the story is speculation. Framing as I described means the story is opinion. And opinion is not factual content.”
He summed it up with something we already know: “The biggest change is that contemporary media has shifted from fact to opinion and speculation.”
It was interesting to note how mainstream media outlets paid tributes to Crichton this week. He was remembered for the entertaining story teller he truly was, and some even questioned his mixed legacy, for example being an ardent skeptic of global warming – thus batting for the fossil fuel cartels even if only inadvertently.
But I could find few references to his perceptive critique of the mass media.
Who says media likes to turn the spotlight on itself?
In the well known legend, the pied pier of Hamelin played his musical pipe to lure all the rats into the nearby Weser river. When the town reneged on the promised fee, he played a different tune to entice all its children away from the town.
Modern-day pied pipers use smooth talk and convincing images instead of hypnotic musical tunes to lead people astray. And they achieve much greater coverage today — thanks to the modern media.
When the media amplify pied piper tunes, how responsible are they for the resulting damage?
Then and now, we like to follow a tune...
This is the question I raise – and try to answer – in an op ed essay published this week by the Asian website Eye on Ethics.
‘When media amplify pied piper tunes…’ was inspired by a current experience in my native Sri Lanka. For the past few weeks, Sri Lankans have been shocked and dismayed to learn how thousands of middle-class adults have been hoodwinked by a confidence trickster who used paid advertisements in newspapers and on television to boost his image.
Sakvithi Ranasinghe, a populist tutor of English turned businessman, fled the country in mid-September 2008 after duping thousands of unsuspecting people to deposit money in an Ponzi-style investment scheme that offered abnormally high returns.
After the scandal broke, the media have been giving it a great deal of coverage. But most of it falls into follow-the-victim, blame-the-authorities style of journalism.
The main point of my essay: “Amidst the finger-pointing, arm-waving and name-calling, few have noticed the role of the media in promoting Ponzi schemes in the first place. Wittingly or otherwise, the media have helped amplify the mesmerizing tunes of pied pipers, and quietly collected substantial advertising revenue from such racketeers.”
I also comment in this essay the blurring of what used to be a sacred divide in the media – between editorial content and paid advertising. Here’s an excerpt:
“Many people experience media products as a whole, and lack the media literacy to separate news, commentary and paid commercials. Besides, the once clear demarcations have blurred in recent years.
“Television’s seamless blending of news, entertainment and commercials can leave even the most media-literate people somewhat perplexed. News bulletins are sponsored variously by sellers of insurance, milk food or detergents, while current affairs shows are branded by various commercial products or services.
Open Minds! 