Does your duty as a citizen sometimes conflict with your duty as a journalist? That is the question asked of the media in some form or the other after every major terror attack in the world. So it came as no surprise to be asked this at a conference on Megacity Security held in Mumbai this week, timed with the anniversary of the 26/11 attacks. Those dark days of November 2008 were also seen as a blot for the Indian media and how they covered the attacks. Speaking at the conference were security officials from the U.K., the U.S., Kenya, Sri Lanka, India and other countries which have been most affected by terror attacks that specifically target citizens in an indiscriminate manner, with coordinated strikes at restaurants, malls, theatres, and so on. A >common complaint about media coverage is the ‘revelations’ of details live, over airwaves and social media, even as the attacks are underway, that endanger and compromise security forces. Another is about the inordinate focus on gruesome aspects of the attacks that only play into the narrative that terrorists with a nihilist agenda benefit from. Finally, there is the reportage after the attacks that seeks to blame the state and security forces for intelligence failures, operational inefficiencies, the lack of adequate equipment and trained forces, and the systemic failures in a government’s outreach that result in youths being indoctrinated into terror groups. “Much of the media focusses on what the state is doing wrong,” said one senior official. “It is in society’s interest that the media instead shows that even if it doesn’t succeed, the government is doing its job the best it can.”
Suhasini Haidar Different prism of thought By the same token, it is important that the state understands that the media is also doing its job the best it can. Let’s be clear: the media and the state are not on the same side. The government’s role in this case is to hunt criminals, prosecute them if they are found guilty, and try to prevent terror attacks. The media’s is to report on what happens and how the state responds to the same. The state’s focus is national security; the media’s priority is how society is affected, including the impact on personal freedom. Increasingly, the policeman with a gun raised to shoot terrorists is finding himself shoulder to shoulder with the cameraman raising his camera to record the attack in real time. Both face the same threat in the same place, but this doesn’t mean they share the same prism of thought. And much of the coverage depends on what is accessible.
During the Mumbai attacks, for example, the media was savaged for covering commando operations and giving away coordinates of ‘Marcos’ forces that were airdropped onto the roof of the Chabad House. But the commandos were visible to the naked eye for miles around, as the operations were conducted in broad daylight. A day after the attack on the Westgate mall in Kenya, Kenyan newspapers faced a severe backlash from the public and the government for publishing photographs of the victims lying in pools of blood. But the media had access to them, and thought they truly showed the horror of what those who faced the bullets had endured.
During the Paris attacks, there was an upsurge against the media on Twitter, for not covering bomb blasts in Beirut with the same vigour. Yet, the Paris horror was unfolding before the world’s eyes over a period of hours, and journalists covering it were themselves worried about their own families, which reflected in the coverage.
The truth is, the new breed of terrorists of the Islamic State, the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Al-Shabaab, and other Islamist groups have changed the nature of journalism with their attacks across the world. While the media was seen as an observer in the past, it is now a possible victim, and the possibility of journalists or their loved ones being killed is as much as of any other citizen. As a result of the indiscriminate nature of the strikes, the metro reporter is more likely to be covering the attack than a seasoned conflict reporter. At times, journalists are specifically attacked, as they are a valuable target for the groups that desire publicity above all else, and the reports they put out are a force multiplier for the groups’ diabolical message. In the past year alone, journalists have been kidnapped and beheaded by the IS, slaughtered in the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris, pulled off the road and shot in Karachi, and butchered by extremists in Bangladesh. In 2000, when this columnist was amongst several journalists injured in a bomb blast in Srinagar, the terror group responsible issued an apology to the media. That is unlikely now. For all of this, media outfits across the country are ill-prepared: very few of them have reporters trained to deal with a terror strike, even fewer have a standard operating procedure or fire drills, and close to none keep protective gear like bullet-proof vests in-house.
Similarly, the government has to revise its public diplomacy manual, designating specific officers as spokespersons rather than giving out multiple, sometimes conflicting, accounts of operations. Even as recently as during the Gurdaspur terror attack, or the ambush of a Central Reserve Police Force bus outside Jammu, there was no standard operating procedure for the press — to the extent that journalists were handed telephone numbers of an alleged terrorist’s family in Pakistan whom they spoke to even as the interrogation was underway, and presumably before security agencies had a chance to. The answer is not to point fingers but to work on a more cohesive method for the state and the media to do their jobs while respecting the other’s role. While a hyper-nationalistic narrative helps a government stave off criticism of its actions, dubbing the press as ‘anti-national’ for coverage of a story is hardly productive. The simple answer to the question about the conflict between the duty of a journalist and the duty of the citizen is ‘no’: journalists’ jobs are a part of their role as citizens.
suhasini.h@thehindu.co.in
