A day back, I tweeted about how Swami Agnivesh is incapable of handling spin masters from politics like Manish Tewari, etc. I take it all back. I just saw this clip from Barkha Dutt's opinion show - The Buck Stops Here. On a question from Barkha grilling him about whether the Bhushans should step down from the panel because of the allegations against them, Swami asked a question in return, indirectly asking if media people like Barkha should have stepped down after the Radia tapes controversy.
(posterous doesn't help me deep link. Please watch from 39m 40s in the clip above)
When the tables turned, Barkha tried to save her face saying that it would depend from case to case. How convenient for media to take a call on that while spending every waking minute judging everybody around them. I especially detest the path Indian electronic media is taking - every media house takes a stand, and all their shows blatantly pushes that agenda on it. It is one thing having such opinions being pushed on debates and talks, and it is a worse thing expression such opinions as headline news as what these channels are doing now.
What is under attack here is the constant contamination of the news by the views of those who disseminate it on television. As the cliché goes, comment may be free but facts are sacred. And when it comes to the news space, they need to be kept apart. The problem with TV is that there is a constant blurring of the lines so that one never quite knows where the news ends and the views begin.
God knows the print media has its own problems and it often gets things wrong. But where it scores is that the dividing line between opinion and fact is always very clear. Opinion belongs on the edit and op-ed page — and in the feature and style sections. The news appears on all the other pages, uncontaminated by the views of those reporting it.
The media and the blogosphere is filled with anger and vitriol. Perhaps, we Indians are too close to the scene of tragedy and are mostly incapable of seeing the large ramifications of what just happened in Mumbai. In this volatile time, perhaps some of the best analysis of the situation can be depicted by observers who are sufficiently detached from the incident and are therefore not as affected with the emotions running in this country.
BBC has this brilliant analysis by Paul Cornish, who theorises about whether this is a new chapter of terrorism - "the age of celebrity terrorism".
Quite apart from the scores murdered and the hundreds injured, what the Mumbai terrorists really wanted was an exaggerated - and preferably extreme - reaction on the part of governments, the media and public opinion.
In these terms, the attackers received as much attention as they could possibly have hoped for, and the Mumbai outrage can only be described as a very significant terrorist success.
Nothing too new there. The media frenzy about blame game, the war mongering by sections of the society. We all are reacting very predictably.
But wait, here is the part of the article which is interesting.
The character of modern terrorism is widely understood to have been shaped by a mid-19th-Century idea known as the "propaganda of the deed" - a strategy for political change in which the message or cause is contained within, and expressed by the violent act.
In a novel twist, the Mumbai terrorists might have embarked on propaganda of the deed
without the propaganda, in the confident expectation that the rationalisation for the
attack - the narrative - would be provided by politicians, the media and terrorism analysts.
If so, then Mumbai could represent something rather different in the history of
terrorism, and possibly something far more disturbing even than global jihad.
Perhaps we have come to the point where casually self-radicalised, sociopathic
individuals can form a loose organisation, acquire sufficient weapons and
equipment for a few thousand dollars, make a basic plan of action and indulge
in a violent expression of their generalised disaffection and anomie.
These individuals indulge in terrorism simply because they can, while
their audience concocts a rationale on their behalf.
Welcome to the age of celebrity terrorism.
Read the complete article for a more detailed explanation behind the theory.
We still don't have all the details of this attack to prove any of this. The only details that we have are premature and contantly revised and denied press revelations by the administration. But even if a bit of the theory of the article is true, we are in for really disturbing times. And it is even more unsettling to know about this possibility and watch the media and the government take the country inexorably to where the terrorists want it to be.
