I have wanted to write this article for a long time now, but could not sum it up. So, here I am. The issue is somewhat old now but has not lost its vigour because of the issue’s interference with our daily lifestyle. The issue is the media and how it covers the incidents that affect us. I will be referring to the recent apocalyptic earthquake in Nepal to address the issue.
The whole scene caught fire when our PM mentioned to the media, and proudly, that it was through his tweet that the Nepal PM came to know about the earthquake. What followed was something we could have imagined even sitting in our most comfortable sofa at home, the Indian media herded towards the tiny hilly country with every single equipment they had to showcase the catastrophic destruction there. The media houses were seen flushing our TV screens with snaps of people crying out of despair and children being relocated to places without their mothers, and mind you, those were hungry children, they and just been orphaned probably, they did not want the cameras, neither did they what the hype created around them. What they needed was a medical supply, which was almost immediately provided by smaller countries of the Middle East but that was the least prioritized thing on our government’s list.
Airspaces in Nepal, which could be used up meticulously for relief activities were occupied like houseflies by our media. The Indian journalists there reflected a lack of common sense as they kept on repeating the same questions to the residents there asking them if they were leaving the place and how their feelings were on being struck by the quake. Now, it is inhuman to jog a person with such questions when he or she has just been robbed off almost everything he had had. Moreover, the coverage of the media was also not unbiased; focussing on things related profitably to the ruling class was showcased shamelessly by the media houses.
The media focussed almost unnecessarily on the Hindu monuments of Nepal, landing the nation’s complete focus on the demolition of the Hindu relics there while shifting the much needed attention from problems faced by the common masses there. The BJP government’s Hindu fundamentalism played a big part there with media houses playing their advocates and focussing on things like Ramdev’s efforts there while they should have been covering the relief activities there, which were not at all sufficient. All these things almost forced the Nepal people to show “GO Home Indian Media” notion. They were left with no other option but to show the doors to the so called big brother of the country. Many people take Nepal to be a Hindu state but in reality it is not true at all, it has a large number of people following Buddhism too, while the coverage on Hindu relics was almost peaking up, the same attitude was not extended towards the Buddhist ones.
Debates were held whether the Nepal government was doing enough or not, but are we the persons to judge another government sitting in our A.C. chambers?
This is surely a sad part of the Indian story that while we are leaving no stone unturned to put the accelerator on the aped of growth but we have always shared a bitter-sweet relation with our neighbours. The basic cause for the problem is our country’s big brotherly attitude towards them, as in the case of Nepal, the ruling class needs to stop taking the country as a state of India. They need to understand that no matter the visa free border and the exchange rates for the countries being extremely favourable to us, the country is far better managed and ruled than ours.
That our media houses sell everything they can for a better TRP is nothing new to us, but they need to know it is an international scenario we are speaking of. Whatever they do at home can be restricted to us only but the moment they went abroad with the same attitude, the whole Indian media and its bad attitude towards sensationalising everything, it was exposed. Now the whole world knows what crap our media channels sell to us.
The Nepal earthquake’s coverage should have been an eye opener for our masses but the attitude of taking news to be just another form of entertainment rather made the masses enjoy the coverage. Cries of “Ahh, what has happened to Nepal?” could be heard in abundance but nothing was said about the method in which the while incident was shown on our television channels.
The time has come for us to stop this media intrusion in our lives otherwise the time is not very far when we will have no news channel showing true actual news but only Fox News channel type ones, which everyone knows does nothing but converts every important news debate into just another joke.
