The ‘real’ Breaking News

Terror attacks take lives. They also leave lots of tell-tale signs. It is for us to recognise these signs. And forget to learn from them. As usual.
I refer to the latest blasts in India’s financial capital, Mumbai. In the evening of July 13, 2011. It wasn’t a Friday. But then.
It is not the deaths that I write about. Nor about the reasons. Certainly not about the ensuing pathos. Cynical? No. I am a journalist. I do report. But mostly observe than report. An acquired skill. A necessary evil tool of the academic I am turning into.
I was switching between the three Indian news channels I get in Leicester. NDTV. Star News. Aajtak.
Breaking News everywhere. In leaking red. NDTV: Terror Returns To Mumbai. Star News: “Mumbai Par Phir Hamla (Mumbai Attacked Again). Aajtak: “Mumbai Par Hamla” (Attack On Mumbai).
You cannot beat Indian journalists in using technology. The three competitors had their OB Vans at all the three blast spots. Visuals were aplenty. So, no loop of the same stuff. The reporters looked harassed, drained. Their voices were hoarse: One of the professional hazards of Indian broadcast journalism is the reporters don’t talk to their audiences, but shout ‘to’ them. Whether in a crowded street or at an opera.
The first half hour was devoted to live reporting. Uncut, live feed from the spot with the reporters’ commentary over the phone.
Then started the coverage of the blasts.
The subsequent three hours were a treat to students of journalism focusing on “Coalition Journalism”. The nexus of journalism and officialdom.
The dead in Mumbai were still being sifted from the debris and shifted to the morgues. The wounded were still being rushed to the hospitals. The police and forensic teams were trying to find clues. Eyewitnesses were desperately recalling the bloody scenes.
But the channels were already looking at the “larger picture”. The Breaking News tablets erupted on all the channels. “Prime Minister condemns the blasts”; “Home Minister flying to Mumbai”; “Home Minister briefs the Prime Minister”; “Government: We will get to the bottom of it”; Maharashtra Chief Minister shocked; “Police block all escape routes”; “Centre: All help to Maharashtra government”; “Centre: It is a terrorist attack”; Home Minister: It is a coordinated attack”; “Chief Minister visits hospital to see injured”; “Obama condemns blasts”; “Hilary Clinton promises all help to India”; “Pakistan condemns attacks”; “Our correspondent was first to reach spot”; “We are first in bringing you the blast visuals”; “Our reliable sources say Molotov cocktails were used”.
NDTV beats all other channels with the first big exclusive of the evening. Its senior correspondent, Srinivasan Jain, is on camera, live, with the Maharashtra chief minister next to him. Tells Jain to the camera something to this effect: “The blasts are a test case for the chief minister who took oath of office only recently.” Then come the erudite questions: “Sir, can you now give us the big picture, that is, how many blasts occurred, how many died, who is responsible, etc?”; “Where have the bodies of the dead been taken?”; “We are told some IEDs (Improvised Exclusive Device) are used, do you agree?”; “Sir, I know you don’t want to speculate on who was behind the blasts, but a certain terrorist group normally uses IEDs. Do you want to speculate?”; “Sir, there have been a series of attacks on Mumbai, there is a sense of frustration, why are these happening?” “Sir, last question. In the last eight years I have been in Mumbai I have seen several blasts and what I have noticed is that on all these occasions that people of Mumbai have always remained calm and not got provoked into violence disturbing communal harmony. Do you have a message to the people of Mumbai?”; “One final question, Sir, are there are any terrorist sleeper cells who might have been behind the blasts?” Finally: “Thank you, Sir, for your time. Best of luck in your attempts to bring peace to the people. (Now looking at the camera) That was the Maharashtra chief minister exclusively talking to NDTV”. Luckily, the chief minister’s responses were more informative and pertinent.
The group editor of NDTV then came on air, rather her voice, with an exclusive, something to this effect: “The Prime Minister is being briefed about the blasts. The Home Minister has met him and given him the updates. The government has just now issued a statement saying the people of Mumbai should remain calm.
Would a viewer be more informed by these breaking news snippets? Anyone who says yes has to have his or her head examined.
The next couple of hours were a treat to students of journalism focusing on “Package Journalism”. The nexus of journalism and narcissism. The winner was Star News. It had two packages ready. The first one, with loud, eerie music drowning the voiceover, was a series of five pictures. Each picture with its own sting: “Pehla Tasveer” (first picture” and so on. The sting was followed by the selected picture. Not a picture but a frozen video shot.And so on. The second package was similar to the first, but instead of picture, it was a “voice”. That is, a quote from the ordinary citizen from the spot. Either severally or jointly they did not inform the viewer on what actually happening at the spot.
By this time it was midnight in India. The graveyard shift was in. No more fresh information forthcoming. The focus was on “Tearjerk Journalism”. Stories of people saying how they have saved people, dragged bodies out of the debris, noticed the blasts, etc. The emphasis was on how “brave” Mumbaikars (people living in Mumbai) were.
With live television the only medium at such times, there was no other option for the Indian viewers to get information. Given the information rolling out as described above, I cannot say how informed the Indian public was in the first few hours after the blasts.
I checked the social networking sites, which were ultra busy, and the wires and the posts on online newspapers, from India and abroad. See the link below for what I think was an informed piece written for a western audience, and with some perspective, in the early hours after the blasts, that appeared in the India site of the Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304911104576443753384835910.html
I leave you to your opinion.
This, after the national broadcast media conducted several introspections in the last two years on how to report breaking news on terrorist blasts, especially in Mumbai. When the first major string of blasts occurred in Mumbai in 1993 – shortly after rightwing Hindu extremists demolished the Babri Masjid in the east Indian town of Ayodhya, Indian broadcast journalism was in the final stages of its birth. By the time the second, major attacks (there were some minor ones in between) happened in 2008 – dubbed the “Mumbai Terror Attacks”, the broadcast media had come of age. Yet, the confusing, contradictory, wrongful, even inflammatory reportage on televison led to a major debate. The journalists and editors, facing public outrage, promised to learn the lesson. The reportage particularly by a senior journalist of NDTV, Barkha Dutt, had come in for special criticism. She stuck to Delhi this time. But if the lessons were learnt, it did not show tonight.
Journalists will be journalists. And some of them never learn. But an interesting thing I noticed in this round of Mumbai attacks relates to “Citizen Journalism”, forcing me to ask the question: Has Citizen Journalism come of age?
My PhD supervisor, Prof. Stuart Allan, was one of the earliest academics to focus on Citizen journalism and his book, News Culture (2004, OUP) recalls the heady, initial attempts at “citizen produced coverage” immediately after the 9/11 blasts in the US. Allan refers to Sam Pax, the well-known blogger from inside Iraq whose internet dispatches became popular world wide because, as the author writes, “Salam’s posts offered readers a stronger sense of immediacy, an emotional feel for life on the ground, than more traditional sites”. Pax himself is quoted as saying why he felt the need to post information: “...(because) it is just somebody should be telling this because journalists weren’t”.
Like elsewhere in the world, it did not take much time in Citizen Journalists becoming the source, sometimes primary, of news and visuals in India. The trend picked up in the middle of the last decade. I remember, when I was working for an Indian channel, how we used to get calls from people saying they had a MMS of a crime or whatever and whether we would use it. Those days, it was new to us journalists and our bosses used to confer with the senior management and the legal executives on the use of such information, eventually using it anyway.
As a result – certainly not because of editorial decisions – more, distant, inaccessible, even rural, areas of India came to be covered by the national news channels. The journalists saw this as yet another source of “exclusive breaking news” and began encouraging people to report. Subsequently the channels began to run lop-strips at the bottom of their screens, giving their internet addresses for the citizens to mail their information to. Later on, it became common norm for the channel anchors to invite contributions from the pubic whenever major events took place. Eventually, reports by Citizen Journalists became a regular diet of these channels.
But the begging question is: What impact did this wooing have on Citizen Journalists? That brings me to the crucial point I noticed in the coverage of today’s Mumbia blasts. I could clearly see in the visuals shown on the channels scores of flashes erupting from among the onlookers at the blast spots. I thought nothing of them initially. But when I looked closely, I realised they were flashes of mobile phone cameras. People were busy shooting the scenes with their mobile phones and trying to send them to social networks or the news channels. Look at the Citizen photos on the NDTV website, for instance.
As I sat through the night watching the visuals on the three channels, I noticed something that gave me a start. There was a brief shot where two or three people were trying to clear a damaged two-wheeler near a body and the debris. A large crowd had encircled the spot. Only a few were watching the action. And many of the rest were clicking away. Perhaps they thought capturing the scene was more important than helping out. In some other scenes on one channel where the reporter was interviewing eyewitnesses, I heard a voice off-camera of some one amid the din saying, “You can see the pictures on my phone which I clicked right after the blast”. There was a scene of an ordinary going close to a body for a better focussed shot, oblivious of other people trying to clear the body. There were other scenes of the police trying to shoo away mobile phone-using people who certainly were not journalists.
Have we raised a Frankenstein, I asked myself, in the name of Citizen Journalism? Were such events of human tragedy nothing more than opportunities for ordinary people to celebrate a moment of fame by capturing the tragedy on their mobile phones? Is communal mentality, the help-the-needy instinct, of ordinary people subsumed by the hunger for citizen reporting? What will happen next? Will kids film their parents fighting at home and mail the video to the police? Would we have some pathological killer capturing the killing of a person on a cell phone and send it to a seedy channel? What will happen if each and every person became a Citizen Journalist – what if everyone stops thinking like a human being and starts thinking like a journalist? Should we take a re-look at our stated distancing from Activist Journalism because we simply, no longer can wind the clock back on Citizen Journalism?
As journalist and academic I think these are questions we will be forced to contend with. If not now, then at the time of the next blast. This is the real Breaking News.