Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
A couple of times a year, I walk into the neighbouring McDonald’s and make the young an offer. If they answer a few questions, the burger’s on me. They are suspicious at first but they are also hungry. At that age people answer with blunt honesty, especially when a bit of pocket money is saved. By the end, I have drunk more cold coffee than is sensible and learnt more than any opinion poll would tell me.
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Last time, I asked which channels count as Godi Media. Almost everyone named the same ones, as if they had rehearsed it. Then I asked when they had last watched any of them. Not one could remember. Half the group had never watched television news at all. They had watched clips on social media and nearly all came captioned. Their knowledge came from videos that called those channels names. They had never tasted the thing itself.
I didn’t argue. They were lovely kids, far more honest about what they consume than most people who appear on those channels. They had simply been told what the burger tastes like by people who had never eaten it either. Taste.
We develop a taste for something, anything, because of the environment we are in, and the company we keep. Taste is subjective and always leans on objective reality. I found the heckling of women reporters distasteful. But I will not join the senior editors in condemning the mob that bullied a reporter. The scene was ugly. No one needs to pretend otherwise.
But the chorus of statements by senior editors will never reach the people it claims to address. The mob doesn’t read editors’ statements. It barely reads. It is literate, mind you, and politically aware, with an awareness that arrived with salt and sugar, and a dash of lime. They don’t need no education. They are already angry. And the anger is real.
Anger is a feeling, and you can’t reason with a feeling. Plenty of clips show that most of them cannot say what exactly they have gathered to express, and the other side circulates those clips with glee. But that side wouldn’t show you the articulate protester who makes a rhetorical yet powerful argument. Failing to explain a grievance does not make the grievance unreal.
The anxiety of the young is real too. They stand at a crossroads where no road seems to go anywhere. It is a spectacularly confusing time to be young, and not just in India.
They are the disappointed, the disaffected and the disoriented. Young men and women who did everything they were told and still have nothing to show for it. They carry the habits, the language and the manners of their online life into the street, forgetting that the real world has real consequences and no undo button. Nobody here is a pure victim. Nobody a pure perpetrator either. We are all in this together. Silence.
I, of course, don’t condone the mob. But they cannot be expected to tell one journalist from another when the old adjectives have lost their meaning. With a phone in every pocket, almost anyone can claim the title. The difference between a good journalist and a bad journalist was always more rhetorical than real.
In a darker universe an equally absurd distinction exists: the good Taliban and the bad Taliban. And we know how well that worked for those who drew it. If that comparison offends you, stop reading and take your outrage to social media. It is open all hours. Those not so easily triggered may continue.
The outrage from senior editors is selective, and they select magnificently. They rise only when someone they count as their own is surrounded. They stayed quiet when another journalist faced the same treatment, again a young woman from the same channel. Same channel. Same city. Same crowd. Same abuse. Different response.
The line they draw is not about content or reporting rigour. It is about ideological kinship. Humein apne mein mat milayiye, as Sultan said in GoW, hum alag hain. Some have even applauded the public humiliation of the wrong kind of journalist, left or right depending on the crowd that day. I get it. When there’s a fight in the gali, you pull out your own brother first. But then don’t call it principle. Call it family. People like us. Kinship.
Wily politicians saw the divide, encouraged it, exploited it. And how. Politicians have always loved publicity and always feared the media for the light it shines on their doings. A degraded, ridiculed media is how they always wanted it. Both the ruling party and the opposition played the media, and the media, in its competitive quest for access, played along with equal enthusiasm. Opposition parties excelled at handing out rewards.
The big party had it easier. It would oblige only with photo-ops and pretend proximity. An interview here, a leak there, a seat on the plane, a cup of tea on a Lutyens’ lawn. Politicians of all hues could now dismiss any unflattering report as politically motivated, and their supporters would nod in chorus. Months of a reporter’s legwork, gone in two words. The mind game has left most of the country confused. Exactly as intended.
The young, many of whom don’t follow the news anyway, have kept away from a media that offers no conspiracy theory and speaks in starched, standard language. In this age of information overload and influencers galore, they are delighted to be influenced by people with zero checks and balances, who talk to them in their own tongue, no filter. Something the media as an institution could never quite manage.
Can you blame them for labelling the media? Journalists labelled each other first. Their rival’s lean was a sin, their own lean a virtue. Prime-time debates became the face of journalism, and debates, by design, divide. The news of the day drowned in the evening’s political boxing bout. That is what the young were told the media meant. With no time to check, they accepted the labels already pasted by their favourite influencer. Brilliant, really.
Labels are cheap. Black and white. Red label and blue label. Green, pink and pinko. One day you’re one thing, the next day the other, and the day after that, both. Those still standing in the formal media have had their colours distributed with great efficiency. Polarising politics loves to label institutions so that people can love or hate individuals. Journalists, politicians, industrialists, activists. Heroes and villains. Us and them. This is Modi. That is Lodhi. Here’s a Godi behind the Darbari. Chamcha.
Together they have spoon-fed these partisan potions to a vast army of obsessive over-consumers, courtesy the psychopathic algorithms designed by Big Tech’s greed. Nobody has time to discern who is what, so they judge you by who pays you. A young girl applauded in the morning for her fluency was a traitor by evening, because her organisation turned out to be a shady outfit with links to Pakistan. Fluent at breakfast, foreign agent by dinner. O fortune.
These labels were coined by journalists, stamped by journalists and distributed by journalists, especially those who rarely leave the studio, I say this with some sadness. I know a few of them. Some are good people who got carried away. Not necessarily because they were asked to, but because they wished to. Senior journalists have also spread the idea that no reporter thinks for herself, that conscience is simply traded for the pay cheque, that reporters have no agency and are slaves to their masters, owners, editors.
I have spent most of my life among reporters. I’ve seen them fight over a headline, wait outside a hospital all night for one quote, cry quietly in the loo after a bad edit. Puppets don’t cry. But that notion has drifted down to the street. A crowd has no independent brain of its own either. Mobile vulgus, the fickle crowd, which gave English the word mob. Now the vulgus is literally mobile. Most of those who surrounded the reporter in Delhi are innocent in their ignorance, drowning in more information than they have time to sort. Glut.
Their taste has been formed on processed stuff. The more they consume, the more they are fed the same. They fight over Taylor Swift, over Kohli’s supremacy, over Khan versus Khan, with a viciousness once reserved for ancestral property. Every opinion arrives pre-chewed from a thread or a reel. It’s reel, it’s done, bro. Poison.
The well is poisoned. No one should feel especially guilty. This is simply how a society moves when words travel faster than experience. Even the young journalists I regularly meet treat the labels as settled fact. They join the profession already knowing which colleagues to look down on. I can’t make them unlearn all that in a day. So how can I complain about the protester who doesn’t know whether Modi is prime minister or president, or whether Gyan Shashtra or Gyanesh Gupta runs the Election Commission or a coaching centre? You have seen those videos of gloriously clueless protesters, made viral by the other side to delegitimise the protest. Nobody ever made these kids curious. They were simply handed targets, the people responsible for whatever they feel. Names.
And the most popular slogan of all is repeated with complete sincerity: the media alone keeps Modi in power. The voters, of course, are pure and blameless, mere spectators at a magic show. The media is the sole magician. It saves everyone the bother of reading election results.
As children we would stare at a flower, lost in its pink gradients and delicate lines. Bewildered by the beauty, one of us would ask an uncle passing by, “What’s this?” “That’s a rose,” the ever helpful, ever knowledgeable uncle would say. The wonder would vanish. A single word had ended the enquiry. Red rose, black rose, white rose, yellow rose, pink rose, rose rose. Settled. Rose, it is. The uncle wasn’t being cruel or manipulative. The people in the crowd hold words whose meanings they would grasp if they looked them up. But they never look up. Their eyes are fixed on the screen. They chant what they are given, words. In the beginning was the Word.
If you have read till here and noticed the patronising tone and pedantic semantics, hold your horses, do not jump to outrage. The social media isn’t running away. Just a little more about tomorrow.
Tomorrow another crowd will surround another journalist of a kind. Editors of one stripe will condemn it. Editors of the other will join in solidarity. The Editors Guilt, sorry, Editors Guild, will weigh a statement if the journalist is of a pleasant shade. I will not, because I am no longer sure who we are talking to. I hope the reporter is fine and back at work. I hope the boys who shouted at her get jobs and some sleep. When they have time to look closely at what they feel, they will not sound clueless enough to go viral. For now they are repeating slogans. Echo.
For those cheering the mob-trolling of journalists. Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi. Look him up. Name.
A rose is a rose by any name. The uncle thought he was helping. Everyone else is simply following the feeling, with great enthusiasm and no further questions. I will go to McDonald’s this week again. To ask them about words. In the end there will be the word. Word.
– Ends
(Views expressed in the piece are those of the author)
SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
