To shoot, or to help?

Pub going girls attacked in Mangalore: cameramen from Media had the info about the time and place of attack...still they chose to "cover" the event, rather than protecting the modesty of the girls...

Hapless cow trader Hajabba got stripped naked by an angry mob....Press photographer from Udupi chose to click him naked, rather than cover him with clothes...while his associate was shining the headlight from the bike, for a "better" capture...

This time round, media has found a new breaking news in the orchestrated by media molestation of an innocent girl in Guwahati, Assam!

a good writeup by Karan Singh Tyagi, Courtesy: The Hindu

The Guwahati incident shows that journalists do not always adhere to the ethical standards of behaviour that they demand of others

I remember watching “The Death of Kevin Carter: Casualty of the Bang Bang Club,” an American documentary about the suicide of South African photojournalist Kevin Carter, at a film festival organised by my law school in 2010. The documentary that was nominated for the Academy Awards depicts the gut-wrenching tale of Carter’s enduring depression by the carnage he witnessed as a photographer in warzones.

In 1993, Carter took a trip to Sudan. There he saw a little girl, bent over with hunger and dehydration, eyed by a nearby vulture. Careful not to disturb the vulture, he waited for 20 minutes until the vulture was close enough, positioned himself for the best possible image, fixed his frame and shot.

The photo won him the 1994 Pulitzer Prize. At a conference, he was asked what happened to the girl. He didn’t know. Didn’t he do anything to help her? No. Carter came under heavy criticism for just photographing — and not helping — the little girl. Two years later, heavily disturbed by the incident, Carter committed suicide.

The documentary poses a moral dilemma. I was left asking myself — how many journalists would frighten away the vulture and help the child? How many would take the photograph? Witnessing the outrage against the journalist who shot the Guwahati molestation video, my mind wandered back to Kevin Carter. Should journalists put the camera down and help or should they remain objective observers?

Despite an increasing concern that many, including the Chief Minister of Assam, have expressed about the ethical obligation of the Guwahati journalist, there are others who remain extremely sceptical. Mr. Raghu Rai, India’s noted photojournalist, expressed solidarity for the journalist by commenting that a journalist’s only job is to report the story. He said that professionally speaking, journalists have to cover such things, no matter how distasteful.

LITTLE TIME FOR REFLECTION

Strong arguments can be made in support of Mr. Rai’s position. Journalism perhaps requires a certain clinical detachment from and disregard for some of the ethical niceties and sensitivities of everyday life. Moreover, journalism often requires rushed thinking and action, leaving little time for deep reflection. Further, by taking the video of the girl, that communicated an utter state of horror and despair, the journalist made a larger comment about the situation of women in India and helped promote the important debate on safety of women in our cities.

Interestingly, many years ago, Martin Luther King gave similar advice to a photographer from Life Magazine, who on seeing small children being shoved to the ground by policemen, stopped taking pictures and went to their aid. Ron F. Smith’s book on journalism and ethics mentions King’s statement to the photographer — “The world doesn’t know this happened, because you didn’t photograph it. I’m not being cold-blooded about it, but it is so much more important for you to take a picture of us getting beaten up than for you to be another person joining in the fray.”

So, what does the outrage against the Guwahati journalist tell us? Is it merely a case of people, far away from danger, from their living rooms, claiming the position of superiority? Or is it necessary for media persons to reflect upon this incident to enable them to clarify their intuitions, concepts and beliefs regarding journalistic and media practices?

On a basic level, the entire incident raises the bigger question of motivation behind telling a story. Here, I make the normative claim (and I am no journalist) that a journalist’s motivation should always be to tell the story at a deeper level than what has actually happened. The guiding force behind reporting facts should be to focus on the deeper reasons behind the issue.

Was the manner in which the girl’s private grief, impotence, and despair put on display for all viewers, without her consent and regardless of any sympathy in consonance with this deeper motivation? In the very act of deploring the tragedy, the underlying motivation behind the Guwahati video seems to be an appalling curiosity and morbid delight in the tragedies of others. And, therein lies the problem. In fact, such depiction is routine in the media. We have seen in the past journalists asking someone whose friends or parents have been killed in a plane crash “how they feel”!

ON RIGHTNESS

Although most journalists would consider it to be their professional duty to catch such events on tape and later put them up for display, journalistic professionalism need not come apart from ethical responsibility. As Oakley and Cocking claimed in regard to virtue ethics and professional roles, “goodness is prior to rightness” — (Oakley, J. & Cocking, D. (2001), Virtue ethics and professional roles). Rightness, properly understood, can only be derivative of goodness, insofar as what is right must be based on what is valuable in regard to certain notions of the good.

Similarly, journalistic rightness needs to be understood in the larger context of the role the media plays in our society. Given that the news media's function, at least in part, is to seek out and expose wrongdoing, it had better not be guilty of the very same sins it exposes in others if it is to avoid the charge of hypocrisy. That is, journalists and the news media must themselves consistently aim to respect the very same ethical standards of behaviour that they demand others should adhere to. A proportionate response in the Guwahati case would have been to focus only on the wrongdoer’s faces in the video, and try to protect the girl by either volunteering assistance or immediately informing the police.

I am not denying that probably many critics of media practices (including me) may possess only a superficial grasp of the realities of journalistic and media practices. Hence media criticism and ethical debate tends to contradict the complex cases and dilemmas that actually arise. But this is not to deny the point and purpose of critical reflection. Undoubtedly, it is the job of the journalists to depict and report facts as they happen. But, in doing so, they should not lose sight of the bigger question — what is their investment as human beings? Shouldn’t journalists be defined by who they are intrinsically, rather than what they do?

Kevin Carter ended his life grappling with the same questions.

TV channels ‘stay in the loop'

DEEPA KURUP/thehindu

The irony was unmistakable on news television across regional Kannada channels on Tuesday evening.

For, while news anchors pontificated on the “immoral” and “shameless” act of two ministers caught “enjoying” pornography on their small mobile screens, their channels aired, in a loop for at least five hours, close-up visuals of the video without so much as pixellating even sections of them.

The emphasis appeared to be more on the morality of watching porn, rather than the offense of watching these visuals in the Legislative Assembly where using mobile phones, even reading newspapers for that matter, is prohibited. Add to this tenor, the background score: at least two channels decided that images alone cannot titillate, and played music that appeared to be borrowed from a late-night soft porn movie segment.

So for hours on Tuesday evening, channels aired “fresh” — and of course, all “exclusive” — visuals, alternating between the two videos, one a soft porn video that appeared to be a strip tease, and the other, explicit pornographic images of a sexual act. Having made their point, some channels did blur the footage, but only after a good three hours. Notably, national television channels, which picked up the story from regional channels, blurred the footage right from the start.

Indeed, the channels did need to air these visuals to establish proof of content. But once the evidence had been established, did they go too far? For, the channels did not stop here. At least two leading channels, “traced the source” of the video (showing a woman in a ‘striptease’), downloaded it and played it in a loop. This footage — unlike the mobile screen shots from the assembly — occupied the entire TV screen, revealing the woman’s identity. This was a clear violation of her privacy.

The pretext was that the footage was being played to refute Minister Laxman Savadi's contention that he was trying to understand what a “rave party” was, or watching footage of exploitation in Iran or Egypt. This downloaded footage was aired for at least two hours, late into early hours of the morning.

Line crossed?

While channels can argue that it was in “public interest” and not with ‘intent to titilate’ -- making them not culpable -- did they cross a line by telecasting the downloaded video? In the second case, where close-up shots of the woman were aired, there is a violation of privacy, says Pranesh Prakash, legal expert. He points out that Courts have upheld an individual's right to privacy, barring only material in public domain or in public interest.

While there are several broadcasters; rules, most of which deal with self regulation, airing this footage indeed violates the Cable TV Act's programme code. The code prohibits content that “denigrates women through the depiction in any manner of the figure of a women, her form or body ... that is indecent, or derogatory to women”.

Media commentator, Sevanti Ninan, says, “That they showed footage without pixellating it, footage violated the Cable Act. Previously, too, for instance, in the telecast of the Swami Nityananda sex scandal video, the tape was not blurred and it is currently enshrined on YouTube, as this one doubtless will be.”