The mortality of news

Arjun Bajpayee, a 16-year-old schoolboy from Noida exhibits the Indian flag at Mt Everest. Arjun become the youngest Indian to scale Mt. Everest
The mortality of news
By Pritish Nandy
Never has news been so short lived. The bigger it is, the quicker it dies. Something bigger or worse instantly replaces it. Saturday’s air crash is a perfect example. Screaming headlines on every news channel and round the clock coverage for an entire day ends up as an 8 column banner headline on the front page of newspapers and even before you know it, the event, the 158 deaths, the narrow escapes, everything becomes statistics. The terrible human tragedy is ready to be replaced by something else. The cycle of life, the cycle of news, the cycle of grief continues. Some call it fate. Others call it life. Perhaps it’s just business, the business of news.

This is not only true about tragedy. It’s also true about human endeavour. On the same Saturday as the air crash, a Delhi schoolboy, barely 16, scaled the world’s tallest peak, Mt Everest. It was an incredible event and made him the world’s youngest mountaineer to achieve this. When Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, his intrepid sherpa, climbed the same peak they were in the news for months on end. In fact Sir Edmund spent his whole life basking in the glory of this climb. So did Tenzing who’s still regarded as a legend.

Arjun Bajpayee was not so lucky. In less than an hour of his conquest, a 13 year old Californian reached Everest from the more dangerous North Eastern route in Tibet. Also the news of the air crash grabbed all attention. As a result, his story was reported on page 13 with tiny pictures of both Arjun and Jordan Romero, the Californian. Most people don’t even know that Arjun beat the record of another teenager, 18 year old Krushnaa Patil who had climbed Everest last year. In fact, 4 hours after Arjun, Mamta Sodha reached the peak as well. Earlier this month, two other Indians had also accomplished this feat. So, everyone got what Warhol once described as their 15 minutes of fame and then vanished into oblivion.

This is news as we know it today: Instant and ephemeral. Before you know it, it’s gone. Whether it’s human tragedy, a terrible crime or a spectacular achievement, it’s fleeting. You have to grab the moment or you’ll miss it. Those who are currently travelling out of India and will be back, say, a week from now will possibly even miss the news of the crash. Even if they hear of it, they will miss its impact. If, like me, they read old newspapers on their return, they will cluck their tongues, move on. This is not to say people have stopped feeling grief. Ofcourse they do. They also understand human tragedy and feel for it. There are more NGOs working to change the world today than ever before. But the nature of news has changed. So has the way we respond to it.

I read on Twitter people constantly complaining about the way news is covered and how journalists, particularly TV journalists, have become so insensitive to it. This could be true because this is a common complaint but can you blame a doctor for being less moved by death because he sees it every day in his workplace? In fact, it’s this very insensitivity that allows doctors to perform their duties with greater diligence and dispassion. You would find it tough dealing with a doctor who feels so strongly about your state of health that he scares the living daylights out of you. You need solutions in his job, not just compassion. Mother Teresa was so remarkable because she did not just feel for the poor and dying, as indeed we all do, but she kept that feeling aside and worked for them. That’s what a good doctor does. That’s what a good journalist must do. Sleeves are not meant to hang your emotions from. They are meant to be folded up while addressing the task that’s yours to perform.

As the nature of news changes, so does our response. We grieve too easily. We get angry too easily. We demand punishment too easily. And we move on too easily. The politics of news is thus easy to manipulate and Governments do it all the time. A crime happens or a terrorist strike and everyone’s instantly baying for blood. So what’s the simplest thing to do? Pick on anyone and hang the crime on him. Serious investigation’s going for a toss. Everyone’s running behind instant fixes. No one notices how cases eventually get thrown out of courts, how people are acquitted for lack of real evidence, how lives and careers are destroyed. When India loses the T20 World Cup, the first thing we demand is Dhoni be sacked. All his past is forgotten. When Yuvraj underperforms, we forget his amazing track record and want him hung and quartered for partying late at night.

If we persist like this, I fear not only will the ends of justice not be met but also we will have no heroes left. Apart from those who know how to play the media.

source: Times of India

Tweet