XCity: De-Murdochisation of News?

Ruhi Khan: Time for the De-Murdochisation of News?

– March 7, 2012

The News of the World a few years ago did a scoop in India, in Bollywood’s Tinseltown Mumbai. Their star undercover reporter Mazher Mahmood, the “Fake Sheikh”, tried to buy the Slumdog Millionaire child actor Rubina Ali from her father for £200,000.

I worked with Mahmood on a couple of follow-up stories throughout the sting. I reported on the police investigations and the mother’s reaction. I found Mahmood very professional and passionate about his work. News of the World was known for its investigations, though it often received criticism on ethical grounds.

The story made headlines across the globe. Indian media also reported it but I found the journalism fraternity on the defensive. “Why it that the foreign press only sees Bollywood, slums and corruption in India?” asked my colleague at Indian broadcasting channel NDTV. My answer was simple: “It sells.”

This was a perfect story for the British press. Slumdog Millionaire was a hugely popular film that did a rather exaggerated job of portraying Mumbai as a city of acute poverty, illiteracy and crime – though perhaps an improvement from the snake charmers and street elephants the country is most remembered for. The News of the World stories fit in perfectly with this theme and most importantly created the shock factor to attract readers.

And this is what the “Murdochisation of news” is all about. It’s simply a shift from doing hard-hitting news laced with details to soft news packaged in a short crisp manner, attracting viewers through shock and awe.
No doubt, most of the reports from the UK in Indian media also revolve around celebrities, high profile events, crime and controversial policies affecting the Asian diaspora. While the popular “foreign news” from the UK would feature the Royal Family, the Beckhams or Madame Tussauds.

The focus here moves from public interest to profits. But in this mad rush by media organisations to create titillating news to impact the bottom line, mistakes are often made.

Few journalists can forget the closure of the News of the World last year on allegations of phone hacking – many of those journalists once trusted the newspaper. Betrayal is hard to forgive and public outrage did not spare the paper.

It also beckoned a time for an awakening in the media, particularly in those outlets that have found themselves “Murdochised” in recent years – and that’s probably most media. Rupert Murdoch not only owns media conglomerates that span the length and breadth of the globe but is also a trendsetter in the media landscape wherever he goes.

In India, Murdoch’s Star News, a Hindi news channel, focuses its energy and resources on Bollywood and crime news – both big sellers to TV audiences. With Star News climbing the popularity charts, others began to replicate it. Now the ratings war dictates the style and content of most Hindi channels in India.
Experts argue that this has led to a culture of dumbing down of news: editors assume that audiences have a narrow vision, so local glamorous stories take precedence over serious global issues. It’s not surprising that tabloid-isation of news is the norm now, with broadsheets also carrying a tabloid supplement to reach wider audiences.

But in the haste to find exclusive news, sometimes ethics are sidestepped, rules are ignored, phones are hacked, people are stalked, paybacks are dealt out and trust is broken. So what is sometimes done in the name of journalism is nothing but theatrics.

Murdoch has revived the News of the World through The Sun on Sunday. But to revive the spirit of “real” journalism, perhaps it’s time to de-Murdochise the news?


Ruhi Khan has worked as a journalist in Mumbai and London in both print and broadcast media (including NDTV, Mumbai Mirror, Hindustan Times). A Jefferson fellow and recipient of the Mary Morgan Hewitt Award for Women in Journalism in 2008, Ruhi currently lives in London.

Cameras in courts will create transparency

                     

The case for welcoming cameras in courtrooms

Published: September 7th 2011 - at 10:54 am

contribution by Ruhi Khan

As a television journalist who has covered some high profile court cases (in India, where cameras are also not allowed in court), the proposal by Ken Clarke will save reporters a lot of work and create transparency in reporting.

I remember running from a court to give a live report and trying to remember the Judge’s exact words and the exact expression of the characters involved, to give the viewers an idea of what happened. It is a herculean task and often open to interpretation by the reporter.

And its not just the words but the descriptions of the accused – what he/she was wearing, whether he was shaven, whether they smiled etc – all have to be conveyed to the graphic designer to create the perfect courtroom sketch.

But most importantly, televised sentencing will bring in transparency and also closure for the victims and those in similar situations. This is particularly important in cases of mass murderers, terrorism or riots where several hundred people need to see for themselves the punishments handed out to their culprits.

But in the US, the most popular case was the murder trial of O.J. Simpson, which millions watched thanks and turned the courtroom into a theatre of the century, as one commentator put it.

But some critics said the witnesses stepped forward only to get their 60 seconds of fame. Another Judge thought some witnesses felt intimidated by the cameras placed less than six feet away.

The cameras can also be a check on autocratic judges and force lawyers to stay within boundaries of acceptable behaviour and prepare better arguments.

It won’t be an easy task to show televised sentencing. You simply cannot have television crews rushing in with cameras into courtrooms. This will only disrupt court proceeding, create chaos and turn it into a carnival.

There will have to be cameras installed in courtroom with feed available to newsrooms. But how do you decide which cases are important to broadcast? Is it fair to only broadcast sentencing? What about acquittal? And then why just show the end and not the entire trial?

Unless these questions are answered and hopefully with well researched alternatives, rejoicing on Cameron’s decision to welcome TV cameras in court is simply premature.

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Ruhi Khan blogs here. She has worked as a journalist in Mumbai and London in both print and broadcast media. A Jefferson fellow and recipient of the Mary Morgan Hewitt Award for Women in Journalism in 2008, Ruhi currently lives in London and writes on campaigning issues.

Mumbai slum fire story is not about one child star

Ruhi Khan writes: Indian media should rid itself of the Slumdog Millionaire fixation and focus on a generation being exposed to poverty, illiteracy and crime

Image Credit: Nino Jose Heredia/ Gulf News

• By Ruhi Khan, Special to Gulf News
• Published: 00:00 March 18, 2011

Every news media recently carried the news that a slum in India's commercial capital Mumbai was gutted in a fire. All 2,000 odd shanties turned to ashes, almost every possession of those who lived there burnt to dust.
This is not the first time such illegal hutments in Mumbai have been engulfed in a fire, but this incident made international headlines thanks to a 10-year-old girl who starred in Slumdog Millionaire, British director Danny Boyle's Oscar-winning movie.

This Garib Nagar (poor man's land) slum has been a part of Mumbai's queen of the suburbs Bandra for decades now. Bandra is a place with many contradictions. On the west side you have the palatial houses of Bollywood stars. To the infamous East, you would see some of the most heart-wrenching slums, acute poverty, illiteracy and hunger. Scenes that resonate similarities with the poor impoverished villages of Africa.

I grew up on the west side of Bandra. As a child, the only time I saw the East was when waiting at the railway station near an illegal settlement of slum-dwellers who built themselves hutments on a reclaimed patch of marshy land on the other side of the railway station.

I often saw men defecating on the railway tracks, women puffing away at a wood stove or children playing with marbles. At first, you are usually horrified by such images, but soon it just becomes an eyesore and you don't give it much thought.

Years later when I went back to Mumbai as a journalist, I visited many slums. It was an enlightening experience as I saw the city as I had never seen it before. Soon after the July 26, 2005 floods, I found myself on the eastern side of Bandra for weeks. I saw the poverty people lived in, their houses and possessions ruined in the raging floods and children and the elderly battling against diseases like dengue and leptospirosis that followed the floods.

I reported on the issue for Mumbai Mirror, a tabloid of the Times of India group, which was instrumental in getting help and resources to those affected.

Bigger picture

A couple of years later, while working on a feature story for NDTV, I spent a few days at Dharavi, one of Asia's biggest slums and the place where Slumdog Millionaire was shot. It was another eye-opener. For a week, my cameramen and I spent all day shooting in the bylanes of Dharavi.

We worked through our ‘sources' at Dharavi. People in the slum don't trust strangers because a lot of what happens there is illegal, including rampant child labour. But if you have someone to introduce you, they welcome you with open arms and share not just their life stories, but also some of their secrets. We could put most of it on camera and the bits we couldn't only added to the wisdom we acquired in this shanty town.

While I had seen most of Bandra East by then, I had still not entered the place I used to see from across the railway station as a child. Slumdog Millionaire was slated to release around that time and I received a phone call from my office asking me to find the two child actors of the film that actually came from the slums. All I knew was that Rubina Ali, who played the role of Latika, and Mohammad Azhar, who played Jamal's evil brother Salim lived in the Garib Nagar slum.

An address in a slum is irrelevant unless you have people who can lead you to your destination. So my cameraman Rakesh and I spent a good 40 minutes walking through piles of garbage and sticky mud on reclaimed marshy land.

It was tough trying not to inhale the stench of faeces and rotting plants and garbage. Finally, we met some children running precariously on a huge pipeline along the marsh playing what looked like a game of tag. Luckily for us they led us to Rubina's house.

The house looked much like every other house in the slum. A tin structure covered with plastic sheets that was as small as a toilet. It had a small kerosene stove on which Rubina's step-mother was cooking rice and a blanket under which two children, Rubina and her sister, were sleeping.

Rubina led me to Azhar, who lived across the road in equally appalling conditions in an illegal structure built on the roadside. I spent the next two days shooting with the two children in their natural environment. By now I knew many a nook and corner of the Garib Nagar slum, met many of its residents especially children and saw yet another generation being thrown to poverty, illiteracy and crime.

My feature story was about the Slumdog kids , but the recent Garib Nagar fire story is not about just Rubina (who incidentally has a house that she was given after she did the movie). It's not about Rubina losing her Oscar memorabilia in the fire; it's about the plight and future of hundreds of other real ‘Slumdog' children, who unlike Rubina, have neither any shelter nor any stardom to fall back on.

These children were living in a death trap in those slums anyway. Perhaps the fire that has destroyed these children's tragic past can be a hope for their better future. Its time the media took up this campaign.

Ruhi Khan is a journalist based in London.