Justice Markandey Katju blasts the media

Role of media in reshaping society
India is passing through a transitional period in our history -transition from feudal, agricultural society to modern industrial society. This is a very painful and agonising period in history. When Europe was going through this period the media played a great role, it was of great help in transforming the European society from feudalism to a modern society.

Media is anti-people, irresponsible

Indian media is, very often, playing an anti-people role. Let me give you that in three respects. Number one, it often diverts the attention of the people from the real problems which are basically economic. 80 per cent of the people are living in horrible poverty, unemployment, facing price rise, healthcare etc. You divert attention from those problems and instead you project filmstars and fashion parades and cricket as if they are the problems of the people.

The Roman emperors used to say 'if you cannot give the people bread, give them circuses'. In India, send them to cricket if you cannot give them bread. Many channels, day and night, are showing cricket as if that is the problem of the country.

Media divides the people

Very often the media divides the people. You see, this is a country of great diversity because it is a country broadly of immigrants. We must, therefore, respect each other and we must remain united. Take for example, whenever a bomb blast takes place, in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, within a few hours almost every channels starts showing that an e-mail has come or a SMS has come that Indian Mujahideen have claimed responsibility or Jaish-e-Mohammad or Harkat-ul-Jihad, some Muslim name. You see e-mail or SMS any mischievous person can send, but by showing it on the TV channels and next day in print, you are in a subtle way conveying the message that all Muslims are terrorists and bomb throwers and you are demonising the Muslims. And, 99 per cent people of all communities, whether Hindu, Muslim, are good people.

Media promotes superstition, casteism etc
India is passing in a transitional period from feudal society to modern society. So the media must promote scientific ideas to help the country move forward, like the European media did in the period of transition in Europe. Here the media promotes superstition, astrology and so on. You know, 80 to 90 per cent of the people in the country are mentally very backward, steep in casteism, communalism, superstition and so on. Should the media uplift them and bring them up to a higher mental level and make them part of enlightened India or should the media go down to that level and continue and perpetuate their backwardness? The media through many TV channels show astrology which is pure humbug. Astrology is total superstition that if you wear this colour shirt today it will be very good for you, what is all this?

I have a poor opinion of most media people. Frankly, I don't think they have much knowledge of economic theory or political science or literature or philosophy. I don't think they have studied all this.

See very often I find those debates totally frivolous. First of all there is no discipline. If there are four people on the panel, all speaking at the same time, is this the way disciplined people should behave? When you speak, I will never interrupt you. But why should you interrupt me when I am speaking?

The majority, I'm sorry to say, are of a very poor intellectual level, media people, I doubt whether they have any idea of economic theory or political science, philosophy, literature, I have grave doubts whether they are well read in all this, which they should be.

I don't see any effect of that move. The media has to be educated They must be told that you are living in a poor country where you have to address the problems of the poor people. What do you show? Lady gaga has come. Yesterday I saw it on TV, read it in papers. Is this the problem of the country? Kareena Kapoor has seen her Madam Tussauds statue and she says she loves it. This is what is on TV and in the headlines.

Justice Markenday Katju with Karan Thapar in IBN. Here

Terrorism, Muslims and Media bias

What is rarely visible in the Indian media, however, are the brutal, illegal methods used against suspected terrorists: torture cells, illegal detention, unlawful killings in “police encounters”; elimination of evidence against the illegal actions of the law-enforcing agencies; and rampant harassment of Muslims. In July 2009, The Week reported on the existence of at least 15 secret torture chambers meant to extract information from the detainees. The methods to extract information include attaching electrodes to a detainee’s genitals as well as the use of pethidine injections. To quote The Week, these chambers are “our own little Guantanamo Bays or Gitmos”, which a top policeman called “precious assets”.

In May 2008, a Muslim boy aged 14 was abducted by the Gujarat police. He was dragged to the police car at gunpoint and taken to a detention centre where he was tortured. He returned home ten days later when the court ordered his release following his mother’s petition. The police subsequently threatened the boy’s family with dire consequences if they pursued the case in court. The police harassment becomes even more acute in light of the fact that most lawyers often hesitate to take up the cases of “terrorists”. As a disempowered community - as the government-appointed Sachar Committee report (of 2006) minutely demonstrates - Muslims themselves don’t have adequate and qualified lawyers to pursue such cases. Muslims’ marginalisation thus renders their voice invisible in the media too.

It is believed that after SIMI was banned, soon after 9/11, its radical members formed IM. During my fieldwork (2001-2004) on Jamaat-e-Islami and SIMI I did not hear anything about IM. SIMI activists and other Muslims I met felt terrorised themselves. It is worth noting that since 2001 far more people have been arrested as “SIMI terrorists” than the actual number of SIMI members, which in 1996 was 413 (when founded in 1976, SIMI’s members numbered 132). Until today, the Indian government has still not legally proved its rationale for banning SIMI.
In the fight against terrorism, evidence and the rule of law are subservient to prejudice. As of this writing, the Indian government has not yet tracked the perpetrators of the July 13 attack. However, only two days after the attack, Subramanian Swamy, a prominent politician and former minister (with a doctorate from Harvard University) wrote an article called “How to Wipe Out Islamic Terror”. Without any evidence, he blamed Muslims for the attack, in the same way that The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Sun suspected Muslim involvement in the Norway shooting nine days later.

What Swamy did is standard practice in Indian media. In September 2006, a blast killed 35 people at a Muslim graveyard in Malegaon (in the state of Karnataka). The media blamed Muslims. Likewise, in 2007, after a blast killed 10 Muslims praying in Hyderabad’s Mecca mosque, Praveen Swami freely wrote about the Muslim terrorists he believed caused it and about what he perceived to be the “Islamist threat to India’s cities”. However, investigations later showed that Hindu nationalists carried out the Malegaon and Mecca mosque terror attacks.

Returning to Subramanian Swamy, Swamy wrote: “We need a collective mindset as Hindus to stand against the Islamic terrorist. The Muslims of India can join us if they genuinely feel for the Hindus. That they do I will not believe unless they acknowledge with pride that though they may be Muslims, their ancestors were Hindus”. Those refusing to acknowledge this, Swamy advocated, “should not have voting rights”. He proposed declaring India “a Hindu Rashtra [state]”.

Stories of Muslim terrorists abound in both the Indian and Western media. Since the July 13, 2011 Mumbai bombings, vitriolic pieces like Subramanian Swamy’s have appeared frequently in the media. These pieces subtly influence the analyses of many liberal intellectuals. By contrast, stories portraying Muslims as the terrorised remain fairly sparse. One wonders if, and how, such stories will be told

Irfan Ahmed in Al Jazeera. Here

Aam Aadmi and Media

Barkha Dutt flew to Cairo to air the views of Egyptian protesters.

• Why was she not interested in airing the viewers of the Delhi protesters? 
• Have you ever seen a worker, a coolie or a tiller on the panels in the air-conditioned studios of the channels?
• Why is Pronoy Roy not interested in knowing a poor Vidarbha farmer’s expectations about the next budget? After all he is also an Indian citizen with aspirations.

The poor constitute a majority of India’s population. Shame on the prisoners of corporate money for whom their livelihood issues are non-issues!

Roopesh P. Raj in Counter media. More Here.

Two rapes, two media yardsticks

Perhaps nothing exposes media’s double standards better than the two recent cases of reporting involving two females: one in Bihar and other in Uttar Pradesh.
While media, electronic as well as print, rightly pursued the gang-rape story of a Nishad, an extremely backward caste girl in Uttar Pradesh it virtually blacked out a similar incident in Bihar, where ironically a Brahmin lady principal of school, Rupam Pathak, in her 40s, was allegedly raped several times by a BJP MLA and his aide.
There is one thing common in both the stories: the involvement of ruling party MLAs and their aides. While in UP the chief minister, Mayawati, at last got her own party’s Brahmin MLA arrested and the victim-girl released from jail when the media pursued the story in Bihar the media blacked-out the story so much that the victim woman had to take up the knife herself. On January 4 she stabbed to death the BJP MLA, Raj Kishore Kesri.
What is strange is that in case of UP even after Mayawati got Bahujan Samaj Party MLA Purushottam Naresh Dwivedi arrested, the media, especially the electronic channels, continued to criticize her for taking action one month later.
In Bihar Rupam, an upper caste educated woman had been undergoing trauma for last over three years, yet nobody dared to listen to her. At last when on April 18, 2010 she lodged an FIR against the MLA the deputy chief minister of Bihar, Sushil Kumar Modi, who is the senior most leader of the BJP in the state, dubbed her blackmailer. A Local English weekly of Purnea, the town of Rupam and the MLA, carried a story based on the FIR. The state media grossly underplayed it and the national channels never deemed it fit to give any space to it.
However, the charges levelled by Rupam Pathak were serious. Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, while on his visit to Purnea during Vishwas Yatra after this development, refused to share dais with the said MLA, (now late) Raj Kishore Kesri. However, his deputy Sushil Modi, while delivering his speech from the same dais openly defended the MLA making it loud and clear for the administration not to listen to the victim’s complaints. She was forced to withdraw her statement before the court.

From Soroor Ahmed's blog in newzfirst.com More Here