Recently Shweta Tripathi, a reporter of Republic Bharat, was seen holding an umbrella posing to be reporting from Dwaraka, a city in Gujarat, which was hit by Cyclone Biparjoy. She was seen holding herself strongly against the strong winds while making an effort to show the live pictures of the affected areas. It was a sheer act of misleading viewers as Shwetha was actually reporting from the channel’s studio in Mumbai with a clip of a cyclone playing on the backdrop. Even the visuals were not from Dwaraka but scenes of the destruction caused by the cyclone Ian, that hit Florida last September. It was distressing that a media house made its reporter enact falsely and run fake visuals to fool the viewers. This is new age journalism! The menace of fake news is so rampant that it is indeed difficult to differentiate between false, half – truth and fact these days.
The Reporting Bias
It’s a well known fact that not everything makes it onto the news. Only what is ‘newsworthy’ makes its way to the media. It is the media and the news agencies that decide what to convey to the masses, how to convey and when. All over the world, there are networks that decide what is ‘newsworthy’ and they dictate the news selection criteria. Besides the advancement in technology and the overwhelming content sharing through social media, heavily biased news reporting takes the front seat till today.
One such biased reporting was regarding the incident that occurred on June 1st in the occupied territory of Palestine. A toddler, Muhammad Tamimi, was traveling in a car with his father while the occupying Israeli forces opened fire on their car, wounding them seriously. The Israeli bullets struck the two year old Muhammad Tamimi’s head and his father in the shoulder. Tamimi was hospitalised and declared dead after 4 days on June 5th. This should have been a very important news item making headlines internationally. But it did not!. Meanwhile something else surfaced the media as a very important piece of news. That was of the destruction of a huge dam in the Russian – controlled area of Southern Ukraine.
Ukraine’s military and NATO have accused Russia of blowing up the dam. While Muhammad Tamimi’s injury and eventual death did not find place in the international newspapers, news about the dam occupied the first page of all major media houses’ publications. The news even found place in several inside pages thereafter describing the length, breadth and depth of the dam. It was denounced as an extreme act by the occupiers and was deemed as tantamount to war crimes. The atrocities carried out by the occupiers in Palestine by opening fire at random vehicles and unarmed civilians, which is a war crime and an extreme act of human rights violation was not reported in the international media. Leave alone the first page, this gruesome incident of brutality did not find a place on any pages of newspapers around the world. This clear display of bigotry by the media is appalling.
After 6 months into this new year 158 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli forces out of which 28 are children. This cruelty is a daily occurrence but (un)surprisingly, does not knock the conscience of the media. While the one year old occupation of Ukraine is enormously condemned by the western media, the decades old occupation of Palestine deliberately goes unmentioned everywhere. If only a month-long analysis of the Israeli forces’ actions is carried out, shocking revelations of their atrocities and illegal demolitions will be definitely unleashed. But who bothers do to that?
In a recent development, Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter openly claimed that the government of India had pressured Twitter to block accounts related to farmers’ protest and criticism of the Government. In an interview with a US based YouTube Channel he said that the Government even threatened to shut down the platform and raid the homes of its employees.
What should be in the news? Which one makes national news? Which one should be international news? Which one makes the ‘breaking news’? Which event generates more coverage? All these are decided and dictated by some vested interests. FAIR, a media watch group that has been presenting well documented criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986 says that the American media plays politics on every piece of news. They have established through facts and statistics and shown the world how these media edit pictures and manipulate them before presenting the news to the world.
The pathetic conditions of Indian television channels.
The pathetic conditions of Indian television channels. The advancement of modern technology is a boon to television channels. They benefited a lot through technologies like virtual reality, augmented reality etc and now are availing the bliss of artificial intelligence. Even so, the question is, are they getting more efficient in their work because of the advancement of technology or have they turned more into some fake news generators?
Recently Shweta Tripathi, a reporter of Republic Bharat, was seen holding an umbrella posing to be reporting from Dwaraka, a city in Gujarat, which was hit by Cyclone Biparjoy. She was seen holding herself strongly against the strong winds while making an effort to show the live pictures of the affected areas. It was a sheer act of misleading viewers as Shwetha was actually reporting from the channel’s studio in Mumbai with a clip of a cyclone playing on the backdrop. Even the visuals were not from Dwaraka but scenes of the destruction caused by the cyclone Ian, that hit Florida last September.
It was distressing that a media house made its reporter enact falsely and run fake visuals to fool the viewers. This is new age journalism! The menace of fake news is so rampant that it is indeed difficult to differentiate between false, half – truth and fact these days. Gone are the days of the likeness of Niel Hallsworth, the CNN photojournalist who covered and filmed the Syrian fire of 2012 putting his life into risk. The world witnessed the scenes of his running with camera while the fire almost engulfed the area near him.
The newsroom debates have turned to be a stage to discuss communal issues only these days. Any news can turn into communal discussions in our television channels. The recent Odisha train tragedy also was given this angle. A debate on the Odisha train mishap in the channel News 18 was so pathetic that it not only turned into a heated communal discussion but also saw verbal abuse thrown at each other by the panelists. Everything went live on the television screens. The panelists were almost on the verge of getting into a fist fight with each other.
This is the miserable condition of our journalism. Fakeness in reports, communal in debates and irresponsible journalism – the news channels today have stooped to such a low that the chances of their redemption looks very feeble. A combination of strict laws, ethical revival and cleansing of the system is a need of the hour for the re-establishment of responsible journalism.
Well written article.
100% true that any news can turn into communal discussion in TV channels.