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THERE is a belief that good journalists remain neutral in a conflict between two or more sides. Had they been privileged to sit in Howard Zinn’s history classes they would be disabused of the illusion. In his autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, Zinn is direct. “From the start … I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it.”
In the conflict between Narendra Modi and democracy there cannot be a neutral perspective, nor is there scope for neutrality in the unfolding tragedy of Ukraine.
Something or somebody decides the worthiness of a story even before it is tested for probity. The answer lies in expediency. The ethnic massacres in Rwanda had turned into a single column story below the weather box. Then one day in Kigali a wire service stringer made an unusual observation about Rwanda’s new murderous capital with its suspicious communities who otherwise shared a common language, colour of skin, mixed marriages and a single church. Reporting for his global news agency, the stringer was shrewdly aware of the high premium set on the ‘market-moving story’ by his editors. He told them with trained emphasis in the dispatch that the year’s coffee crop was being ruined in the violence-wracked country. Lo and behold, the New York Stock Exchange went berserk with excitement. The editor sat up to lavish fulsome praise for the business story, and promised the stringer a bag of gold for the feat. The human tragedy was lost.
The market-moving story is a particular favourite of wire agencies and business editors. There are rules for a snap story, a one-line flash on the monitor, say, of an airplane disaster. The details would follow very quickly, but the alert would already alert businesses to do their quick calculations from the arriving news. The snap would not apply to the Russian-built Ilyushin plane, however. A sturdy workhorse since the communist era, the link stalled its stock exchange listing. Never mind the toll or tragedy.
In war, they say, truth is the first casualty. But the market-moving story is not concerned with the moral question.
A recent example of bad news ruining a business corporation was of the ill-fated Boeing 737 Max project, which suffered a huge setback with two tragic crashes in a row. There’s always scope for tilting the fortunes here with one bad call. The Indian government grounded its entire Airbus 320 fleet following a crash in Bengaluru of one of the planes. Yet the same fleet was deployed to flawlessly rescue stranded Indians from Kuwait during the US campaign against Iraq, leaving the European makers of the fleet very intrigued.
Journalists are prone to making similar bad calls. Many in the media line-up batting for Ukraine today were baying for the blood of Saddam Hussein with the lie that he had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Saddam was eventually hanged for using chemical weapons to murder an entire community, weapons his Western benefactors had given him to fight Iran.
Colonialism sets ethnic fault lines aflame with missionary zeal, but it could just as easily meld mediaeval rivalries into a fighting force for its own purpose. Historians in India boast of the 1857 rebellion against British rule as a classic example of Hindus and Muslims joining hands for their country. They appear less enthusiastic to accept that colonialism just as easily harnessed the energies of local rivalries for its single-minded pelf. The shepherding together of Hindu Marathas and the Muslim Nizam to lay low the budding French ally, Tipu Sultan is an example.
Misplaced enthusiasm has also allowed the leaders of Ukraine and Russia to be projected in the media’s easy good and evil format, almost to the exclusion of historical dynamics that would better explain the region’s leap into its current crisis. Leftist intellectuals and right-wing pamphleteers are equally averse to admitting this oversight. They see Vladimir Putin as a villainous killer but are unwilling to explain the source of the alleged bloodlust.
Assume for their sake the unlikely scenario that Putin is defeated, or he is overthrown in a palace coup, as two former Indian foreign secretaries have sententiously speculated in TV interviews. A colour revolution is staged and Moscow chooses a latter-day Boris Yeltsin, a pliant ruler who does Washington’s bidding as Volodymyr Zelensky has done out of Ukraine. The hurly-burly’s done, and the battle’s lost and won, Macbeth’s witches muttered to themselves. What then? Logically, the US, having reined in Russia, would settle scores with Syria, move Nato forces to China’s border whose belt and road initiative would already be in tatters with the fall of Moscow. In the meantime, the US would supplant Russia as the provision store for Europe, specialising in natural gas. Since this is only a dream, however, how does the reality fit into the frame of a market-moving story?
In war, they say, truth is the first casualty. But the market-moving story is not concerned with the moral question. A BBC analyst went overboard the other day in trying to offer a bunch of possible outcomes to the conflict. One such projection was predicated on the possible assassination of President Zelensky. Was the analyst cursing the luck of the Ukrainian president or simply describing Putin as a bloodthirsty assassin?
Journalists are readily bamboozled into taking sides in a conflict but they are not the only victims. Remember the nightclub bouncer-like toughie from the US State Department who rattled and unnerved the tough-as-nails Gen Musharraf into taking a grudging decision for Pakistan in the US bombardment of Afghanistan. The ferocious campaign promised the impossible: gender rights, justice and democracy for the Afghans. They were then a market-moving story, which they are not any more. Musharraf is battling poor health in Dubai.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, March 8th, 2022
