This moral policing must stop!
First, the assault by assailants. Then, the assault by the media
Iwork as a YouTube content creator for a popular national news channel. As a journalist entrusted with uploading news videos online, it is my job to watch every item that I put up, double-check its veracity, and write a headline that best captures it. And with every item, I have choices to make.
When a report of a man being murdered because he married a woman from another caste comes up, I can term it a hate crime. When reports of couples being harassed by bystanders come to light, I can write about it as a violation of the rights of the couple.
Or I can go another way and indulge in moral policing.
I can term the first case ‘honour killing’. In the second case, I can write up a headline that presents the couples as being at fault, as breaking social codes of conduct, and bystanders as good people correcting a social wrong.
But I don’t see murder — any murder — as ‘honour killing’. There is no honour in killing. And I definitely don’t see anything wrong with two young people expressing their affection towards one another in public. If octogenarians can be together in public, why can’t a teenage couple sit on a park bench together?
It is true that in both the aforementioned cases I am making a judgement call. But here is the difference: in the first, it is a professional judgement, based on the accepted norms of journalism and founded on its essential fourth estate function in a democracy.
In the second, however, it is based on moral values — or perceived moral values, I should say, seeping in to shape a professional judgement. I won’t enter into a debate on the morality of those values now other than to say that moral values, while good instructions on how to live life, cannot be forced down anybody’s throat. However, that is what sections of the Indian news media are increasingly trying to do now.
A case in point is the recent airing of the #TejpalTapes tapes by Times Now, which has been widely criticised for it (see this report in Quint, this in Scroll, and this letter from the Network of Women in Media, India). The channel aired two shows and a news break — including what it called ‘never seen before video tapes’ — about the in-camera rape case involving Tarun Tejpal, the former editor-in-chief of Tehelka magazine, thus brazenly violating court orders. Not only did the footage in the show include evidence of the trial, but the debates cast aspersions on the survivor, particularly at a time when she could not defend herself as she is still a witness in the case. If this is not a violation of her fundamental rights, if this is not moral policing at its worst, what is?
This is not an isolated incident. A cycle of sensationalist, judgemental reporting can be observed in the way sexual offence cases have been presented in many news outlets over the last few years. On June 17, 2016, for instance, a woman was gang-raped in New Delhi. Hindustan Times ran the headline, On her way home from movie, 23-year-old gangraped in Delhi’s Vasant Vihar. Other newspapers and news sites too carried the report with the same ‘explanation’ for the incident: that the victim was on her way home from a movie after midnight.
December 31, 2017 also saw a repeat of the New Year’s Eve mass molestation that had taken place the previous year in Bengaluru. Outlook magazine reported the story with this headline after Bengaluru police dismissed the mass molestation claims: Women Molested Again In Bengaluru During New Year Celebrations? Police Say No Complaints Received, the implication being that as the authorities had denied having received complaints, the molestation probably didn’t happen.
The late Suzette Jordan, who was raped in a moving car by five men in 2012, even made an appeal on an episode of Satyamev Jayate, the talk show hosted by actor Aamir Khan, to stop being referred to as the ‘Park Street rape victim’. Her point was that it reduced her identity to a victim of rape that occurred in a night club on Park Street — as if her going to the night club directly caused her rape.
The way a news story is reported can influence what people think about the incident and those involved in it. While there are no laws that would guarantee sensitive journalism, journalists need to be aware that the headlines they write, the words they use, the sources they quote (and not quote), their tone — all can affect the way readers think about and react to a case.
A change in the prevailing attitude of journalists towards the individual rights of the people they write about is perhaps a good place to start, to bring about better news reporting of sexual offences. The victims of such incidents, it would appear, have to deal with trauma from two sources — first, at the hands of their assaulters and then, at the hands of some in the media.
