Backstory: Why Journalists Should Never Forget that Early Morning Knock A fortnightly column from : The Wire's ombudsperson.

Pamela Philipose, The Wire, 14 OCT 2023 : This is not fake news. We have the exact count of the number of times the police stormed the houses of journalists and others associated with NewsClick on October 3, thanks to the FIR filed by ACP Lalit Mohan Negi, of the Special Cell, Delhi Police, in a Patiala Court: Raids were conducted in 88 locations, 81 in Delhi and others elsewhere in the country.

The almost military-like proportions of Operation NewsClick signals the exceptional institutional energy that the Modi government has expended on it.  There is also no mistaking its intent. It is a declaration that journalism can only exist on the terms set by the state, otherwise it will be crushed and the capacity of professionals to carry on with their journalistic work will be taken away from them, just like their devices were on October 3.

No question of warrants.

No question of receipts and hash values.

Just a systematic dismantling of their capacity to think, question, reason, document, report, write, speak.

We often resort to lazy terms to define times we are barreling through. We term it a second emergency, an undeclared emergency, a silent emergency. Perhaps it is time to search for other terminology to define the era. In fact, the author of Emergency Chronicles, Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point (‘Prof Gyan Prakash: Wrong to Compare 1975 Emergency to Today. This is Way More Dangerous’, October 5) believes there is something completely sui generis about the present situation.

Two things, for him, stand out:

One, the relentless effort to clear the public sphere of any dissent. Any thought that deviates from what is officially prescribed is already suspect; potentially any human being who thinks is a suspect.

Two, the attempt is to achieve a total domination by killing the juridical person in a citizen. This is done, he says, by “creating a system of law that is outside the penal system”.

So you charge the journalist with an anti-terror law like UAPA. This is comparable, he argues, to how the concentration camp functioned outside the juridical system. “You create a criminal, a terrorist, by completely killing all the juridical protection that a human being has under a system of law”. 

If you go through the FIR filed by ACP Mohan Negi, a certain anxiety is writ large over it. The case is made out (of course, no evidence is required at this stage, they have UAPA don’t they?) that NewsClick, an organisation of modest proportions, based in a modest neighbourhood (in spite of the extravagant claims being made about it) is on the job of doing nothing less than disrupting the “sovereignty and territorial integrity of India”. This fear is expressed at least three times in a text that is a little over a thousand words. Words like these put a genuine fear, not just in the minds of journalists reporting the story and readers who read or view it, but in the minds of judges called upon to adjudicate on it.

It would have been good if this FIR had been dissected by the larger Indian media, those which have spacious offices in the national capital region and don’t have to operate out of cramped spaces like NewsClick. It would have been great if they had tried to contextualise that irrational fear that Negi and his constabulary are expressing. In an earlier era that may have been possible. Today that police FIR has been met only the silence of the grave which unfortunately could become the right metaphor to describe the Indian media in the very near future. 

This is why journalists, those who have the courage, should not allow themselves the luxury of ever forgetting those 88 knocks on the front door by the Special Cell of the Delhi Police.

Journalists at the Press Club of India, New Delhi, at the release of the joint letter to CJI Chandrachud. Photo: The Wire.

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Look at those images from Gaza again: What do they tell you?

Consider some of the images of the war raging in Israel-Palestine that we have all just seen – on television, on our social media feeds, on newspaper pages. They throw us into a spiral of doubt about our very faculties of comprehension.

Palestine represents a unique and abysmal moral and political failure for the human community. The world’s major powers have wilfully allowed injustice after injustice to pile up against the Palestinians, beginning with that very first foundational lie that gave rise to Israel: A land without a people, for a people without a land. Palestine was not a land without a people.

Today, 75 years after the Nakba (‘catastrophe’ in Arabic) that visited Palestinians with the establishment of Israel, the world and its institutions have to ask themselves whether their human rights codes, international laws and conventions, are worth the paper they are on. As for the media, they need to ask themselves how much they have contributed to the rubble that is slowly asphyxiating the people of Gaza by failing this story.

It is not as if powerful reportage has not emanated from this region. Robert Fisk, reporting for The Times (London) on the massacre at Shatila, Lebanon, in September 1982, could have been reporting on the present war:

“Even twenty four hours after the massacre… no one was sure how many had been killed. Down every alleyway there were corpses – women, young men, babies and grandparents – lying together in lazy and terrible profusion…Each corridor through the rubble produced more bodies…”

But the story of Palestine has never been allowed a free run to yield up its truths. Those who have hijacked it have created and circulated their own master narratives, creating the conditions for the apartheid state that Israel has become, with its forced occupation and massacres, time after sickening time. Today, we are witnessing a region of over two million people under the threat of being wiped out, with the world’s most powerful countries standing by and allowing the brutal scenario to perpetuate itself in the name of justice for Israel. 

So how is the story being framed today?

In her analysis, ‘Telling the Palestinian story: An uphill battle against Western media bias’, written over a year ago, Palestinian academic, Dr Abeer Al-Najjar, points to editorial policies that “erase the huge power asymmetry between both parties” – Israel and Palestine. The very structures of media houses – deeply enmeshed in the foreign policies of the countries they function from – ensure that the “globally recognised journalistic values of accuracy, fairness, and balance” are discarded. News sources are overwhelmingly biased towards Israel; Palestinian sources are underplayed or, worse, the coverage consciously frames Palestine as non-human. In some newsrooms, even the word “Palestine” is verboten and with it is the general erasure of any awareness about Israel’s unrelenting, often murderous, military occupation of Palestinian land. 

Destruction in Gaza following Hamas-Israel war. Photo: X(Twitter)/UNRWA

Journalists courageous enough to break through these deceits face immediate blowback, ranging from being labeled “anti-Semite” to being fired. In this way, through both institutional censorship and self-censorship, the dominant pro-Israeli narrative remains the de facto one.

Many of the observations made by Dr Al-Najjar a year ago are proving devastatingly true in the present coverage. The first ever armed intrusion into Israel by Hamas on October 7 must be strongly condemned for the massacre of civilians, as also the immensely disturbing capture and abduction of Israeli citizens by Hamas militia. The fact remains that it is these images that are playing on a loop over screens across the world and are dominating the news space even here in India. Simultaneously, the agony and trauma of the inhabitants of Gaza staring at death is viewed, directly or tangentially, through the prism of collective punishment. Some of this coverage ( it is almost difficult to believe) has a triumphalist, they-asked-for-it, tone, focusing on long-distance shots of bombed out buildings, and dark skylines as another night descends without power supply. Hamas’s “terrorism” is played up at full volume, while the “terrorism” Israel has been, and is, perpetrating in the region is muted, most often deliberately. Even a single word in a report can change this story. As a tweet to the BBC recently pointed out, how is it that in BBC commentary “Palestinians die”, while “Israelis are killed”.

What was also very apparent this time was the flood of fake news and images unleashed by both sides. Since attacks on young lives create instant revulsion, much of the fake content featured children. The story of Israeli soldiers kidnapping two Palestinian girls, aged three and six, did the rounds before being exposed as disinformation. The “beheaded babies” story was allowed to circulate for a very long time before its veracity was denied. Meanwhile it impacted perceptions and policies across the world, including at the White House.

Courtesy & source: The WIre

https://thewire.in/media/backstory-newsclick-prabir-purkayastha-palestine