http://www.expressbuzz.com/edition/story.aspx?Title=A+deep-seated+negligence&artid=jbKzxw//nVQ=&SectionID=XVSZ2Fy6Gzo=&MainSectionID=XVSZ2Fy6Gzo=&SEO=Praja+Rajyam+Party,+Pooja,+Media,+Hyderabad&SectionName=m3GntEw72ik=
By Ayush Prasad 05 Feb 2009 01:48:00 AM IST A deep-seated negligence The immolation of 18-year-old Pooja on January 20 by men from a rival family in a feud in Sultan Shahi in Hyderabad's Old City passed almost unnoticed among media, intelligentsia and the public at large. The media is a manufacturer of social information, and makes us consumers of such information. I wanted to understand the implications of the event, but the media provided no information. This indicates a palpable waning of its function as a social critic, of criticism intended and directed towards significant social events in order to incite debate, generate public opinion, and eventually anticipate and realise relevant sociopolitical responses to such an event. The poverty of scrutiny that marked Pooja's death highlights the insensitivity towards the representation of marginal political events that expose gender oppression and bias. Either the media as an agent of representation does not have sufficient trust in the 'saleability' of such issues, or, worse, it considers such violence unimportant and its analysis irrelevant. Only by choosing to evade social commentary of a sort can the media exalt, intensify, thereby generate hype, and consequently produce and market commentary on other issues. Consequently, the week's news was dominated by the international censure of Pakistan post-26/11, the obsession with the fate of the US under Obama, the machinations of the Praja Rajyam Party, Congress, and Telangana Rashtra Samiti in Andhra Pradesh, and further disclosures on the corporate bubble that was Satyam. Pooja's murder went unattended. It is not without reason, significance, and consequence that the title of The New Indian Express report, "18-yr-old girl set ablaze," is "Family Dispute," or that The Hindu let the incident go unchronicled. These responses and non-responses bare a deep-seated negligence towards the ethos of social justice. The incident has been trivialised as a family dispute. A potentially unsettling incident has been relegated to the category of the innocuously personal. This is a consequence of forgetting that workings in the domain of gender need the same specialised emphasis as other kinds of reality such as party politics, and that gender oppression serves as a legitimising context, and a symbolic engine, for other forms of political oppression in society. This insensitivity, as it gains ground, ensures that the agents of representation within this existence lie beyond the immediate (though not effective, and there, lies the irony) reach of such grotesque realities. In fact, the practice of attributing such realities adjectives like grotesque, macabre, or heinous, whenever they achieve representation, indicates a reaffirmation, and a consequent reconstruction, of the idea that one exists, and would like to continue existing, outside them, even if the network of socially manufactured power, and its incumbent attendant knowledge, does not leave one any chance of being actually outside them. The impact of such insensitivity is pervasive and is picked up by those with fanatic and hard line political stances to threaten the very ethos of freedom of speech and expression that is needed for achieving representation at all. Two recent cases of fanatic political attacks on the freedom of the press — vandalism as well as attempts at immolation of employees at the Andhra Jyoti office by MRPS activists on May 26, 2008, and the attack on the editor of Siasat by fundamentalist legislators and their politically grounded aides on January 23 — are proof that the matter-offact violence of silence with which the media treats glaring instances of oppression along lines of gender or caste or minority issues (like Pooja's death's), and the insignificance that it accords them to convert them into little snippets of social information, could get translated with great ease into other gross forms of violence that are related to them through a defining median: the lack of attention to the ethics of social justice. It is about time that the media realised that just as it cannot help being the space that manufactures the ethos of life as lived, it cannot also help being impacted by the very ethos that gets manufactured within it, and that it, therefore, needs to act with greater responsibility towards its identity as the generator of social criticism, response, and action. ------------------------------------ -- INFORMATION OVERLOAD? Get all ZESTMedia mails sent out in a span of 24 hours in a single mail. Subscribe to the daily digest version by sending a blank mail to [email protected], OR, if you have a Yahoo! Id, change your settings at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTMedia/join/ PARTICIPATE Share media news, discuss journalism issues and network with media professionals across South Asia on this mailing list. Just write to [email protected] TELL FRIENDS TO SIGN UP If you got this mail as a forward, subscribe to ZESTMedia by sending a blank mail to [email protected] OR, if you have a Yahoo! 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