By Gauri Pande
COVID-19 Pandemic has taken over the globe and the entire world is at war with an unseen enemy who doesn’t discriminate between humans. A crisis that has brought the world to its knees has also proved that the only way to win this war is to sit and not do anything at all. India, like the rest of the world, is also battling SARS-CoV-2 with all the resources it has. The country is at a standstill and we are all hooked to our televisions and social media to keep ourselves informed and entertained. Recently, an article in a leading newspaper connoted how the Government’s dissimulation of the virulent virus in countries such as China, Iran, US and most parts of Europe, has created a feeling of distrust in the hearts of the citizens. In such circumstances, where the faith societies hold in their governing bodies is in shambles, we are all holding a torch for our only ‘bastion of truth- Media’, but is it?
Freedom of the Press is indirectly enshrined in Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution and like all liberties, this liberty is exploited too. Media, the honoured fourth estate has turned into a beguiling propagandist and the public keeps falling for its charade of herald. What we as a society are experiencing is called “Information Disorder”, where it is almost impossible to distinguish truth from lies. The educated section knows better than to trust blindly whatever they read but in a country like India, where almost 4 crore people are still illiterate and gullible, the responsibility of the Media to present nothing but the truth becomes fourfold. Still, we observe that our country’s Media believes in sensationalising every facet of a story, even if they have to fabricate it.
An article in ET dated 29th March 2020, discussed John Hopkins University’s dissociation from a study on India’s possible COVID-19 cases. The study claimed that as many as 12.5 to 24 crore Indians will be infected by the virus in the coming months. It was published on the CDDEP website and carried the logo of both, the university and CDDEP. The University tweeted that the use of its logo was not authorized and while it has been compiling the data on COVID-19 worldwide, it participated in no such study related to India.
On a similar front, an American Consultancy firm Boston Consulting Group (BCG), on 3rd April, came up front and clarified that the document which has been circulating all across media stating that India will not lift its lockdown till September, is in fact, a hoax which was without authorisation published under BCG’s name. The firm went ahead and cleared that it has not in any document purport how the infection will traverse across India.
Furthermore, in Uttar Pradesh, a local Hindi newspaper Dainik Jagran published a lurid piece claiming that a Doctor in Prayagraj hid his son’s foreign travel history thereby endangering the lives of all and that his son has tested COVID positive. The person in question was only a suspected case who was tested negative by KGMU Lab in Lucknow. The article spread like wildfire as Prayagraj has not had any cases of COVID positive and the health professionals in the city had to deal with contempt and suspicion by several residents.
Correspondingly, Lav Aggarwal, the Secretary of Health Ministry of India kept emphasising in all his interviews that the Media should not be using the term ‘Community Spread’ without receiving such information from an authorised medical source as it will only invoke fear and agitation in the country.
All the above instances exhibit the malice of the Media our nation is facing. Oscar Wilde’s, “The Soul of Man under Socialism” was a discerning canvass of journalism and said that, while at some point it was true that journalism served as the fourth estate, it is now the only estate as it has eaten up all the others. Tragically, a publication of 1891 is still proving to be as accurate as it may have all those years ago.
To discourage media houses from publicising falsified information various laws have been enforced in the country. From S. 505 of IPC which penalises making, publishing or circulating any statement which may generate fear in the public or any section of the public, to S. 54 of Disaster Management Act which criminally restricts the false spread of an alarm or warning of a disaster’s magnitude or severity causing panic in public, such laws have been concocted to save our naive population from believing the things they hear. Even so, a majority of the population in our country falls prey to such chicanery.
It is not insinuated that the entire Media is debauched, because had it not been the ingenuity of our country’s journalism, in cases such as R.K. Anand (a sting operation by NDTV which exposed the corrupt tie between Prosecution, the witness and the defense, in the famous BMW hit-and-run case), the Nitish Katara Case (where the same accused who allegedly murdered Jessica Lal, used his family’s influential contacts to get away with another case of rape and murder), Operation Duryodhan (in which Aaj Tak and Cobrapost.com were able to unveil 11 Parliament members who took cash in exchange for asking questions in parliamentary sessions, and were thus forced to resign) and several others, the perpetrators would have walked away. The power of the media in all those occasions proved to the masses that it indeed is the fourth estate keeping the other three estates in check. Nevertheless, with the plethora of competition and the underlying fact that India has more 24-hour news channels than any other country, the desperate need to keep the viewers engrossed purloined the morality behind reporting and turned most news channels into TRP mongers. What the media truly needs is to culminate its pursuit of turning news into sophistry, revive its ethics and reinstate its position as the patron of truth.
Gauri Pande has a Bachelors and Masters Degree in Philosophy from Delhi University and after working with a Think Tank- CPRG, is now enrolled in a Law Degree from Law Faculty, DU.
