Webinar at Kandra RKK Mahavidyalaya
The Politics of
Gender Discrimination in Media: Critical Perspectives
September 20-21, 2020
REPORTING THE OTHER: MUTINY AND
MUTILATION
On June 7 this year amid the height of Covid-induced pandemic, I got a distress call from one of our senior field reporters that someone had been sending her lewd messages for the past few hours, and if I could intervene to stop the abuse, as the sender was a Bengali – a language she does not understand. In our field of work, such harassment by unknown people against women is not uncommon these days – that will be discussed in details later − but our reporter was stunned for two reasons – first, she helped the migrant labourers, many of them women with children, arrange transport back to West Bengal while writing about their ordeals for days, and secondly, while doing so, she was putting her family at risk of being infected with coronavirus. Why the mother of a six-year-old kid should be at the receiving end of such abuse while doing her job?
The answer to the question lies in the system – a centuries-old patriarchal society that puts up stumbling blocks in her pursuit to find happiness while chasing her passion. Our reporter is the sole breadwinner of her family, as her husband has lost his job during the start of this financial year that coincided with the pandemic. The society could only possibly offer such abuses to a woman who struggles to make ends meet. Historically, for women aspiring to build a career, media has been the go-to sector where one can write stories and report incidents highlighting the plight and pleasure of the Other, the marginalised. But in the process to unshackle the bonds of patriarchy, the reporter herself is many a time tormented out on the field. In a postfeminist world when gender discrimination is sometimes called a thing of the past, the clamour for equality is often heard but not quite practised.
A case in point is Mona Eltahawy, the Egyptian-American journalist who faced police brutality while covering the Tahrir Square uprising in November 2011. Later, she writes in The Guardian, “I suffered a broken left arm and right hand. The Egyptian security forces' brutality is always ugly, often random and occasionally poetic. Initially, I assumed my experience was random, but a veteran human rights activist told me they knew exactly who I was and what they were doing to my writing arms when they sent riot police conscripts to that deserted shop…. The viciousness of their attack took me aback. Yes, I confess, this feminist thought they wouldn't beat a woman so hard. But I wasn't just a woman. My body had become Tahrir Square, and it was time for revenge against the revolution that had broken and humiliated Hosni Mubarak's police. And it continues. We've all seen that painfully iconic photograph of the woman who was beaten and stripped to her underwear by soldiers in Tahrir Square. Did you notice the soldier who was about to stomp on her exposed midriff? How could you not?” [1]
In one of her early despatches from Kundli in Haryana off the Delhi-Chandigarh highway, Barkha Dutt posts a 10-minute news story. Barkha, in the April 8 video on her YouTube channel, Mojo Story, says, “Nobody is focusing on how Covid-19 has been impacting women. Of course men are suffering but women have the double burden of running homes as well as taking care of children.... In this colony, there is an entire settlement of widowed women who are the most vulnerable. They run single-income homes in a deeply unequal society that still offers only limited opportunities to women but discriminates against those who have been widowed.” [2]
Five months down the line, i feel had there been no Barkha, who hit the road in a car for about 90 days across several states, we would certainly be devoid of a narrative that could have buried with the virus one day. She says, “As a journalist, you can’t give in to the fear. We signed up to do this. This is the biggest story of our lifetimes. How can we sit it out because we’re scared? The most depressing part is talking to the children of the migrants. When you ask a child, do you get food? He says: I get food when the NGO comes and gives. The mother is domestic help, the memsahib has said don’t come to work. There’s no money, so there’s no data on phones. There’s no data, so there’s no online classes. It has wrenched open an existing class divide, and it makes a certain class too uncomfortable. You have to tell a good story so people will care about it despite themselves, despite their guilt, despite their discomfort.” [3]
Writing as a tool for women emancipation and empowerment started long back in the 18th century. Today, we all know how Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ in 1792 set the foundation stone of feminism in literature. But what about her contemporary women journalists? Not many have read Anne Royall (1769-1854), or her life. Royall, the first professional woman journalist who forced the US President (John Quincy Adams, the 6th President) to give her an interview, turned a rebel, as her in-laws had denied her property shortly after her husband’s untimely death.
In Washington DC with her petition for a federal pension as widow of an American Revolution veteran to the Congress, she could convince the President to support her plea in 1824. A new law for pension was passed in 1848 to her favour. But in between, she carried on writing books and started a newspaper, Paul Pry in 1831, two years after she had been termed a “public nuisance, a common brawler and a common scold” by the court for writing against the Presbyterian church. She was to be punished the medieval way of ducking stool but fined $10 instead. Incidentally, the $10 penalty was paid by two reporters of Washington’s The National Intelligencer, as she had been known among the press circles by then.
Till her death in 1854, she consistently faced financial woes as her battle was not only with the state and hostile advertisers but also with postmen who used to deny mailing of her newspaper to subscribers. Don’t we see the similar pattern in our digital world? Have we changed much? Are not the so-called social media heroes pleading others to attack women journalists? Ask Mumbai-based independent journalist Rana Ayyub, who wrote the book, The Gujarat Files, based on her investigation into the 2002 riots. She routinely calls out the current dispensation on policy and governance. She has come often under violent trolling from right-wing handles determined to drown her voice.
But what happened on April 22, 2018, with Ayyub, was terrible. Someone attributed a false tweet to her on the Kathua gang-rape, and opened the troll floodgates. Journalist Rituparna Chatterjee, quoting her, writes that it almost broke her, and she had to go to the hospital for an emergency health check-up. “I couldn’t sleep for three nights. I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t believe what was happening. I was numb. My parents called me to see if I was OK,” Ayyub says. “The trolls posted my phone number, the address of my house online.” She feared for her safety. “If this is the depth of their hatred, what will stop them from coming into my house as a mob and kill me?” She decided enough was enough. Accompanied by lawyer Vrinda Grover, Ayyub filed a criminal complaint at New Delhi’s Saket police station four days later on April 26. But her ordeal hadn’t ended. A policeman at the cybercrime cell asked Grover, “Why she did not file the complaint at a police station in the area in which she first saw the fake tweet?” After much persuasion by her lawyer, the police accepted the complaint and promised to send it for further investigation to the special cell.
“I’ve been trolled before, but I have never faced anything like this. I don’t know what else I have to fear after this. There are marches when people are killed. I’m repeatedly telling the state that I’m under attack and I fear for my safety. Will they take action only after something happens?” she asks Chatterjee. [4]
From Anne Royall to Rana Ayyub – the mutiny goes on for 200 years. It’s a mutiny against patriarchal hegemony thrust upon a woman at every step yet a journalist’s storytelling goes unabated withstanding such mutilations and humiliations every day. In the process, sometimes we get stories like Rukmini Callimachi’s historical take on Yazidi sex slaves of Islamic State terrorists in March 2016. Sometimes, we lose a journalist like Kim Wall whose mutilated body, practically just the torso, washed ashore 11 days after she had gone missing while interviewing Danish inventor Peter Madsen in August 2017 on board the scientist’s submarine. Madsen claimed that Wall had fallen down a set of stairs, but an autopsy revealed that she had been stabbed numerous times, including at least 14 wounds to her genitals. Footage of women being tortured and mutilated was also found on Madsen’s hard drive.
In an essay for The Guardian, Wall’s reporting partner, Italy-based Caterina Clerici argues that her death should not be used to blame women or exclude them from this sort of reporting.[5] But it does reanimate the fears many female journalists swallow or otherwise suppress. US-based independent journalist Liana Aghajanian says, “When you read about Kim Wall, your worst fears get confirmed. I think back to every situation I’ve been in, even in the US: getting into a car with someone, visiting someone in their home. Every instance is one where what happened to Kim could happen to you. As journalists, we all want access. We want to go in that submarine. But at what risk do we get that access?” [6]
Risk is something that has made a news reporter’s job, over the past few years, one among the five most stressful jobs worldwide according to several studies. However, journalists every day risk their lives to get to the bottom of a story. I think the Yazidi sex slave story[7] of 2016 by Callimachi, a Romanian-American, is a seminal one in gender studies in journalism as a woman from an ultra-modern city travels at least thrice to war-ravaged Iraq and Syria to gather details of tormented ones and interview them for a story in world’s one of the most respected and widely read newspapers, New York Times. It not only lets a woman journalist to explore the intricacies of sex slave trade of a different religion in a different region and culture but also depicts deep-rooted discrimination against children and women – marginalised to the horizon in a troubled time terrorised by fanatics of Islamic State.
More than a year after the story was published, Callimachi writes, “Being a woman was helpful. I say that with caution, because some of the most revealing and sensitive stories on rape have been done by my male colleagues: Jeffrey Gettleman on male rape in eastern Congo and Adam Nossiter on the rapes inside of a soccer stadium in Guinea, for example. Both stories put important issues on the map. But I could get these girls to open up by telling them, Somebody very close to me, in my own family, was gang-raped as a teenager. I was raised with her story. I’d tell them they should not suffer any shame for what happened to them. It was not their fault. I tried to make it clear to them that what they’re about to describe is something quite personal to me, given my family’s history, and I do not come at this with some morose curiosity.” [8]
On one hand, women journalists across continents are coming up with such narratives that have usually, and to some extent deliberately, been untouched for ages while on the other, they are waging an everyday battle against various levels of the system to leave an indelible mark in the society. It’s no longer only a struggle for women to get the desired space that is long overdue but also to work successfully within that space. Some battles are easily won but several others are not. And, here comes the role of editors in the newsroom. In Callimachi’s words, “My editor has been Doug Schorzman. He was really instrumental because when I pitched the story there was significant pushback from other elements in the newsroom. This is a story that has already been done. We know about the Yazidi rape victims; what are you going to say that’s new? Doug is the father of two young girls. I’m not sure he would describe himself this way, but I see him as a feminist. He really had my back and rallied for me to do this piece.” [9]
For any news organisation, it helps to highlight several issues if the editor understands the reality of marginalised Other – from women to gays, from transgender to queer. If a newspaper is run by women in the top, as in my case at present, it’s great to have different voices both in print and newsroom. In July 2009, I was working with Kolkata’s largest English daily that came up with a graphic portraying the chief minister and senior bureaucrats wearing sari, as they apparently could not do much for West Bengal.
One of the first critics was my university professor who wrote on my Facebook wall: “What’s the big deal about that sexist graphic? Is that all you have to say? It doesn’t make me proud that I was once your teacher and that you did my gender classes. Maybe (I) am a total failure or is this what being a savvy cool journalist means?” Why i am quoting her verbatim is not to defend myself, which I could never do before I was unfriended, but the real reason is that there was no woman involved while the graphic was ideated. It’s needless to say sane and sensible male voices like me were also not heard.
Today, 11 years down the line, a graphic with such gender discrimination will hardly be conceptualised in a mainstream media, as the space has not shrunk for women rather myriad avenues on social media have been created for her to talk and raise the voice for a mutiny. And, even if something of this sort happens, journalists within the organisation will protest, as has recently happened with Shantashree Sarkar, who quit an English news channel on September 8 over ethical questions, as being asked to suit the patriarchal propaganda of its misogynist owner-editor. She writes, “I am finally putting out on social media. I have quit (I’m not naming the channel) for ethical reasons. I am still under notice period but I just can't resist today to throw light upon the aggressive agenda being run by (the channel) to vilify #RheaChakraborty. High time I speak out! I was taught #journalism to unearth truth. In #shushant case, I was asked to take out details of everything but not truth... Of course it didn’t suit (their) agenda... Then I witnessed how my colleagues started harassing any random people who visited Rhea’s apartment... They thought shouting & pulling a woman’s cloth will make them relevant in the channel! As I was dealing with trauma of how wrong this story is getting reported and how a woman is shamed publicly, I was punished for not bringing out biased stories by making me work round the clock as a punishment. I worked for 72 hours straight without rest. Whatever stories I have done so far, I can proudly say, there was never any bias. When time came for me to sell my morals to vilify a woman, I took a stand finally.” [10]
This mutiny will continue even as women are mutilated in news or newsrooms. Out of such conflicts, a new perspective in journalism will emerge.
[1] Eltahawy, Mona. ‘Bruised but defiant’, The Guardian (December 23, 2011), London
[2] Dutt, Barkha. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmE4G5EahcM Accessed on September 6, 2020
[3] Jha, Rega. ‘How Barkha Dutt Took COVID-19 Coverage From Studios to the Streets of India’. www.shethepeople.tv/home-top-video/how-barkha-dutt-took-covid-19-coverage-from-studios-to-the-streets-of-india Accessed on August 29, 2020
[4] Chatterjee,
Rituparna. https://www.dailyo.in/variety/rana-ayyub-trolling-fake-tweet-social-media-harassment-hindutva/story/1/23733.html April 26, 2018. Accessed on August
29, 2020
[5] Clerici, Caterina. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/12/my-friend-kim-wall-journalist October 12, 2017. Accessed on September 7, 2020
[6] Petersen, Anne Helen. https://www.cjr.org/special_report/reporting-female-harassment-journalism.php
Winter 2018. Accessed on September 5, 2020
[7] Callimachi,
Rukmini. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/world/middleeast/to-maintain-supply-of-sex-slaves-isis-pushes-birth-control.html
March 12, 2016. Accessed on September 7, 2020
[8] Green,
Elon. https://www.cjr.org/the_feature/isis-rukmini-callimachi-new-york-times.php
April 10, 2017. Accessed on August 29, 2020
[9] Green.
[10] Sarkar,
Shantashree. https://twitter.com/sarkarshanta/status/1303391282841092096
September 8, 2020. Accessed on September 9, 2020
