media coverage

With Bharat Jodo Yatra Set To Enter Hindi Heartland, Will Support for Rahul Gandhi Continue?

While observers feel the real challenge lies ahead for the yatra, party workers are confident that it will be received even better in Hindutva-driven states.

New Delhi: In a few days, the Congress’s Bharat Jodo Yatra will enter the northern precincts of India where the grand-old party will face stiff resistance from the hegemonic Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Since its beginning around two months ago, the Yatra spearheaded by Rahul Gandhi has had a comfortable run in the southern states, garnering widespread support and welcome. But it may be a different ball game in the northern states where BJP has been a dominant force not just electorally but also ideologically.

However, the Congress workers feel that the Yatra has the potential to draw in even larger crowds than in the South, especially since these states are affected the most by Hindutva-driven social polarisation – a phenomenon that the Yatra aims to counter.

A large number of party workers were initially unsure about the Yatra’s potential to benefit the Congress electorally. But over the past two months, many have come to believe that the long march will surely impact the current political environment significantly.

“‘Where is the opposition?’ is a question that the Congress has been facing for a long time. The Yatra is an answer to that question – the Congress is on the road with a leader who wants to unify India,” says Anshul Trivedi, a Madhya Pradesh-based Congress worker who has been participating in the Yatra for over two months.

He felt that the Yatra may also benefit the party in Madhya Pradesh, where assembly polls are scheduled next year.

“The opposition spectrum is wide and spread across India. However, the Yatra has foregrounded the Congress as one that can play the role of a principled national opposition when many other political parties are embroiled in a game of one-upmanship or have shown signs of compromising with their own ideology,” he said.

He added that Rahul Gandhi has shown his mettle in the Yatra. “Walking over 25 kilometres a day for over two months continuously is not a joke. His integrity, sincerity, his commitment, and uncompromising nature are there for everyone to see,” he said.

Representative image of a Congress party rally. Photo: Facebook/Pratibha Singh.

The Yatra has earned a lot of love for Gandhi. Most Congress workers said that people from diverse backgrounds have joined the Yatra to engage with him.

“Everyone who opposes the BJP or isn’t happy with the ruling party is happy with the Yatra. People from the social sector, women’s organisations, professions, social sector workers and actors have told us that such a pan-India Yatra was necessary. Some have told us that India needed a Yatra with a unifying message more than the Congress,” Trivedi said, adding that the Bharat Jodo Yatra is the biggest mass outreach after the BJP’s Rath Yatra.

Congress workers like Trivedi feel that the Yatra has great symbolic value given its message of ‘Bharat Jodo, Nafrat Chodo’ (Unite India, Reject Hate). “This has not only charged Congress workers for the long run but has inspired civil society to challenge the divisive forces in India. Even if the Yatra doesn’t bring the Congress any substantial electoral benefits, we are happy that such a Yatra was undertaken by the party,” a Congress worker who is currently in the Andhra Pradesh-Telangana leg of the Yatra told The Wire.

Also Read: Bharat Jodo Yatra Could Be a New Beginning for the Congress in More Ways Than One

Congress back in public conversations

To be sure, the Yatra has put the Congress back in public conversations despite sparse media coverage. More importantly, it has foregrounded Rahul Gandhi, more than any other opposition leader, as the primary challenger to the hegemonic BJP. Congress workers believe that if Rahul Gandhi leads the Yatra through its 3500-kilometre course from Kanyakumari to Kashmir over 150-odd days, he will reclaim his position as the only serious challenger to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

“Rahul Gandhi is leading the Yatra with a focus on unifying our diverse country. He has been writing letters to various influential people to join the Yatra and asserting his viewpoint that India is a land of multiple traditions, cultures, and communities, and yet we are one. He is leading the Yatra with a kind of selflessness that India hasn’t seen in its leaders for a long time,” says Sandeep Singh who is a part of Priyanka Gandhi’s team.

“But for an unbiased observer, he is also presenting a contrasting image to BJP leaders like Modi, Amit Shah or even Yogi Adityanath,” he added.

“Here is one leader who changes his attire even in the aftermath of a tragedy like the Morbi Bridge collapse. And then there is Rahul Gandhi, who has been using only three or four pairs of clothes over the last two months even as he is walking the length of India,” Singh told The Wire.

Singh said that the immediate impact of the Yatra may not be clear but it is acting as “a balm” for all those who have been left out – farmers, Muslims, Christians, Dalits, Adivasis and youth – of the BJP’s scheme of majoritarian politics. “Bharat Jodo, as far as my observation goes, has given the much-needed healing touch to a country that has been wounded by communal polarisation and crony capitalism,” Singh said.

“There are people who come to listen to Rahul Gandhi. Some just come to see him and touch him with extreme affection. I feel these are gestures of love and respect and a reaction to politics that believes in slicing Indians into different communities and identities,” Singh said.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi runs during the party’s Bharat Jodo Yatra, in Mahbubnagar district of Telangana, October 30, 2022. Photo: Twitter/@bharatjodo via PTI

“Rahul Gandhi is a leader who is absorbing the essence of India’s diversity with all humility. Tulsi Das in Ramcharitmanas had described Lord Ram as samanvyay ka mahanayak (a superhero of harmony). Even in our history, similar Yatras were undertaken by great people like Swami Vivekananda, Shankaracharya, Buddha and so on. Rahul Gandhi is following in their footsteps. So much strength – both mental and physical – is required to lead such a long march. The Yatra is Rahul Gandhi’s tapasya (asceticism), his bhakti at a time when politics has come to be characterised by strongmen, salesmanship and larger-than-life personality cults,” he added.

The Congress’s hope that the Yatra will bring political benefits may or may not prove to be true. But it has surely energised party workers, who are looking forward to taking on the BJP with renewed vigour. The Yatra will leave Telangana to enter Maharashtra on November 7, 2022 from where it will enter the northern states where the grand-old party will face its real challenges.

It also remains to be seen if the same energy will be exhibited by party workers if the party performs poorly in the Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh assembly polls. If the BJP emerges victorious in the two states, it will use the wins to deride the Yatra’s apparent success and run down Rahul Gandhi again. The Congress workers claim that they are working hard in the two states and admit that the Yatra may suffer a setback in case the party doesn’t stage a respectable performance.

With the conclusion of the Congress presidential elections, the party is showing a fighting spirit with a spark that was missing from the ranks for a long time. The credit for such an inspiration, even if a momentary one, must surely go to Rahul Gandhi.

Backstory: The Media Contributed to Hijab Face-off Spiraling Out of Control

A fortnightly column from The Wire’s ombudsperson.

Nagpur is seen as the seat of RSS power but one of the regions where it has had its deepest implantation is along the coastline of Karnataka. The saffron tinge to this land straddling the Arabian Sea is imparted not just by the setting sun or the colour of its distinctive sambar, redolent with chunks of pumpkin, it is the arduous, selfless labour of RSS swayamsevaks.

Men like Sanjeeva Kamath, a Gaud Saraswat Brahmin lawyer from a small village in Udupi district, helped set up the first RSS shakha in the region in Mangalore (Mangaluru) in 1940. Today, coastal Karnataka has possibly one of the largest concentrations of such shakhas in the country.

While reporting from this region during the 1996 general election, I met several RSS karyakartas and sympathisers who talked about Udupi – the town lies about an hour from Mangalore – as the natural seat of the Sangh given its history as a seat of several orthodox Hindu monasteries. Such conversations helped me understand how the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was able to wrest the Mangalore constituency from the Congress in 1991 in what was its first essay into southern India.

In many ways, this victory was a fruit ripened in the raised passions of the RSS-driven Ram shilanyas campaign but it is significant that it happened in Mangalore, which in turn became a staging post for the expansion of the BJP footprint in Karnataka and the growth of Sangh affiliates like the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), Bajrang Dal and more local outfits like the Sri Rama Sena in the region.

Not much of this history figured in the media coverage of ugly stand-off between hijab-clad students and college authorities in Karnataka, and that brings us to the various biases in media coverage on the story. Even after evidence surfaced of the Bajrang Dal having distributed saffron headwear and scarves in campuses, mainstream media houses were not prodded to try and understand the role of the Sangh. What was that they found easier to do was to target Muslim groups like the PFI and its affiliate, the Campus Front of India, for fomenting trouble.

Screengrab of a video showing students in saffron scarves. Their faces have been blurred because some may be minors.

By all means they should investigate the role of Muslim groups in whipping up communal passion and critique their attempts to impose dress codes on women, but it would be gross imbalance to generally overlook the manner in which Hindu groups have also worked assiduously to impose their own dress codes (remember the goons of Pramod Muthalik’s Sri Rama Sena attacking women in a Mangalore pub) and world view (Kalburgi was murdered in Dharwad after being framed as ‘anti-Hindu’). Times Now story titled, ‘Hijab Controversy: PFI ‘Toolkit’ Of Radicalisation Exposed On Times Now,’ is a case in point. Justice would have demanded that the channel should have conducted a similar “investigation” into, say, the Bajrang Dal’s involvement in the counter-protests.

Senior journalist Krishna Prasad, who uses the pseudonym Churimuri, recently wrote that the once-progressive Kannada media “is now an embedded wing. Seven out of the nine dailies have Sangh links, television is a barefoot soldier, and fake news enjoys deep political patronage. So the #HijabRow is just the latest manifestation of a state in deep rot.” He was referring to the Kannada media but the national media, it seems, are no less embedded. Most national coverage, in fact, actually chose to amplify the Karnataka government’s narrative without fact-checking it or issuing even a per forma disclaimer. Instead, we saw unedifying competition between the big national players over who gets to publicise the government’s statements the fastest as seen in this triumphant News18 headline: ‘Govt to Probe PFI Links with Protests’: K’taka Edu Min Tells News18’. This is journalism reduced to government publicity.

Such competition led to homogeneity of response to each development, whether it was in the excoriation of Nobel Peace laureate Malala or the Pakistan foreign minister for their observations, or the faithful publication of statements made by various Karnataka ministers. Even the ridiculous comment of energy minister Sunil Kumar, who said that if the Congress comes to power it would enact a law making Hindus wear the hijab, got full play. It was only some rare and courageous news platforms like The News Minute that attempted to correct the balance and provide information on how the Hindu Jagarana Vedike got the student community in Udupi all riled up against the hijab or how Muslim women students were having their privacy invaded.

Also read: Karnataka: Hindutva Activists Disrupt Christmas Gathering at School, Threaten Administration

Disturbing too was the utter chaos created by the media coverage. There were many sites where flashpoints were reached at different points of time: at the Government PU College for Girls in Udupi, where six students wearing hijab were locked out of their campus followed by a counter-demo organised at nearby MGM college; at the Kundapur’s Government Pre University College, where students donned saffron scarves and headwear in protest against the hijab and students wearing burqa were made to sit in a separate classroom; and at Mandya’s PES College of Arts, Science and Commerce where a young burqa-clad woman was heckled and harassed.

Many other incidents took place over the same span of time, whether it was Dalit students of IDSG Government First Grade College in Chikkamagaluru donning blue scarves and coming out in support of the pro-hijab campaign; the stone-pelting and police lathi charge in Bagalkot district; or the saffron flag hoisting that took place at the Government First Grade College in Shivamogga. These episodes played out in distinct geographies, in different institutions and times but viewers were left confused since most television coverage carried footage from everywhere in a continuous spool of images accompanied by poorly drafted scripts.

Such media coverage made no attempt to internalise the complexities of the situation or try to understand why senior academics argue that the classroom represents in a microcosm the macrocosm that is India. Neither did it gain from the wisdom of feminists who argue that every woman must be allowed “her own path in fighting patriarchy, and deciding what practices are in keeping with her faith and which ones to reject”, according to a recent statement. Most unhappily, there was also no attempt to understand the motivations and experiences of the women who are barred from entering their educational institutions for wearing a hijab.

The six women who were the first to confront their college authorities in Udupi were framed in broad, unthinking strokes as puppets of Islamist groups without any attempt to understand their points of view, their motivations and their trials. Yet, in an interview conducted with them by The Wire (‘Watch | ‘Hijab Is Our Fundamental Right’, Say Students Over Entry Ban in College’, January 21), they came across as articulate, intelligent young women committed to their education and who were pinning all their hopes on the Indian constitution and the country’s institutions of justice.

Today an issue that should have been sorted out at the level of a pre-university college in Udupi has been systematically blown out of all proportion and allowed to open fresh fissures in the country’s social fabric, pitting community against community, young student against young student. An anchor of prime time even emerged in a special afternoon broadcast to spin his conspiracy theories, hinting darkly about the hijab being weaponised by a “hidden hand” even as the publicity line of his channel claimed that it is “setting the news agenda” of the nation. In fact, the channel is doing more than that: it is setting the hate agenda of the nation during a particularly sensitive phase as five states were in election mode.

Also read: In Yogi’s UP, 48 Journalists Assaulted, 66 Booked, 12 Killed: Report

Remembering Sam Rajappa in the time of Fahad Shah

The criminalisation of journalism carries on apace. Towards the end of 2022, we saw how two reporters of the HW News Network were hounded by Tripura chief minister Biplab Kumar Das’s police for their temerity of doing their job of reporting on the large scale anti-Muslim violence fuelled by Sangh parivar outfits in the state last October. Now we have Kashmiri journalist Fahad Shah, editor of news portal Kashmir Walla, thrown into prison by the Pulwama police for reporting on four encounter killings in Pulwama (‘Outrage as J&K Police Arrest ‘Kashmir Walla’ Editor After Portal’s Report on Pulwama Gun Battle’, February 5) on January 30. The arrest takes place against the background of unrelenting assaults on freedom of media expression in the valley, with even the Srinagar press club “disappeared” before an astounded public.

The very fact that Fahad Shah was booked not just under Sections 124-A and 505 of the IPC related to charges of sedition and public mischief, respectively, but also under Section 13 of the anti-terrorist Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, indicates the extent to which the security regime will go to crush independent media voices. And for what reason? Fahad Shah was only attempting to put in the public domain the anguish of a Kashmiri family grieving over the death of a son in that encounter whom they claimed was innocent. Unsurprisingly, this arrest has rung alarm bells not just in India but internationally as well, coming as more evidence of the ugly media repression now in full view in this unfortunate region.

Kashmir Walla editor-in-chief Fahad Shah. Photo: Fahad Shah/Facebook

Fahad Shah is a courageous journalist, driven by a passion to expose the truth no matter the personal repercussions. Such passion, we need to recognise, makes for undying journalism. As I write this, I think of Sam Rajappa, a veteran journalist, largely associated with The Statesman, who died on January 16. As a young media professional Rajappa exposed one of the most notorious state-directed killings to take place during Indira Gandhi’s emergency rule – that of P. Rajan, a student studying in Calicut’s Regional Engineering College and accused of being a “Naxalite”. Taken into custody on March 1, 1976, he was tortured to death. It was the perfect custodial killing – no traces of his body were found.

The authorities simply denied any knowledge of Rajan’s existence, and the case would have remained lost to the world were it not for the intrepid Rajappa, who got himself arrested and jailed in the very barracks in Kozhikode where accused Naxalites were housed, with some assistance from a friendly officer. He could thus access the cell where Rajan’s classmate was incarcerated and could learn from him all the details of what exactly transpired, including the use made of the uruttal, a form of torture where a heavy wooden log is repeated rolled on the body of the accused.

In a recent blog, Sushil Rao who served under Rajappa for a spell in the now defunct newspaper, AP Times, recalled Rajappa telling him about how he went about unraveling the full story: “I met Rajan’s friend in jail. He explained to me what had happened with Rajan. I got it directly from the one who saw it, the only man who knew.”

It was Rajappa’s reportage in The Statesman – one of the few newspapers of the day which had displayed some spine – that allowed Rajan’s grieving father, Eachara Warrier, whose life was completely shattered by the loss of a son to file a habeas corpus petition. By doggedly fighting for justice, the father finally ensured the resignation of K. Karunakaran as Kerala chief minister shortly after the latter came to power with a huge majority in Kerala’s first post-Emergency election in 1977. Karunakaran was the state’s home minister when Rajan’s torture played out.

There may be a lesson in Rajappa’s story for the Kashmir security establishment. Murder will out and those who report on murders will finally emerge with their honour intact.

First, many apologies to those who mailed comments and observations during the spell that I have been on vacation. I will certainly try and accommodate as many as I can over this column and the next. Do keep writing in, a full mail box is a sign of lively minds!

Media control

Noted human rights activist and author Sumanta Banerjee observes: “This is with regard to P. Sainath’s bold and frank letter to the CJI (‘To the CJI, On His Lament that Investigative Journalism Is Vanishing From Indian Media’, December 24). He quite rightly points out that “media ownership (is) concentrated in the hands of a few corporate houses pursuing mega profits.” But this is nothing new. May I draw Sainath’s attention to the following observation made by the first Press Commission of India as far back as 1954, with reference to the major mainstream dailies owned by businessmen or industrialists: ‘The most obvious instance of bias that has been stressed before us in evidence is that the bulk of the persons who own and publish newspapers are persons who believe strongly in the institutions of private property and who in consequence, encourage the expression of views/news which favour the continuance of the present order, while discouraging contrary views and blacking out news from the other side?’ This view was re-iterated by the Second Press Commission of 1978 when it recommended that newspapers should be separated from industrial and commercial interests, to ensure press freedom. The media scene hasn’t changed since then. In fact it has worsened with the dominance of TV channels owned by the same commercial interests – now linked with the ruling party.”

Don’t stigmatise us

Prince Malik writes in: “This is regarding an article you published about lynching of a Dalit man by a ‘Jat mob’ (‘We Haven’t Eaten for Days’: Family of Dalit Man Lynched ‘by Jat Mob’ in Hisar’, December 24). Being a ‘Jat’, I lament upon and condemn the crime. But my question to you is this: do you hate the Jat community? It appears that you have deliberately stated our community’s name to defame us. The logical fallacy here is similar to that of a feminist branding all men as dogs just because some men commit atrocities upon women. Does no one in the entire The Wire team not know a single ‘Jat’ person who is a good human being? I recognise a pattern of ‘Dalit’ and ‘Muslim’ victim cards as The Wire’s unique selling points. The media constantly portrays ‘Indians’ as ugly, frugal and primitive. Even our accents have been made fun of! Amazon Prime’s ‘Hostel Daze’ depicts the Jat guy as being uneducated and uncivilised. The Wire does not raise such issues yet pours scorn at a particular community to promote the stereotype. Being a Hindu, I am disgusted by OpIndia which often states the names of non-Hindu communities. But articles like this one leave one with the impression that The Wire is another version of OpIndia. Loaded articles don’t suit the reputation The Wire has earned over the years. I’m a very peaceful man! I ask nothing of you apart from urging you to introspect.”

Courts and govt in cahoots?

Ahmed Hemani suggests a correction in terminology: “This is regarding the interview with Pratap Bhanu Mehta (‘Full Text | ‘Damage to Indian Democracy Under Modi Is Lasting‘: Pratap Bhanu Mehta’, December 17). In it, the phrase “the judiciary (especially the Supreme Court) has caved in” occurs. I would argue that the use of this phrase “cave(d) in” is incorrect. It implies agreeing to a view with which one disagrees with, but because of fear agrees to it publicly or outwardly. The judiciary in India has not “caved in”, it has found in this government a soul-mate, with whom it agrees, not under duress, but because of ideological resonance.”

Broken hyperlink

Bharat Sunei writes in: “I was reading the 2018 article “Modi’s Gas for the Poor Scheme Marred by Data Inflation, Poor Implementation“. It was a good article. However, at one point where there was a mention of the Mukhya Mantri Anila Bhagya Yojana, I found that the hyperlink was broken and led to the homepage of some other site. By the way, I am a blogger and I have researched this subject thoroughly (Mukhya Mantri Anila Bhagya Yojana here. I would be more than happy if you could link your piece to my content.”

Modi should learn from Shastri

Joy Makhal finds the SIT report on the Lakhimpur Kheri case absolutely disturbing: “The report stated that the incident was a ‘planned conspiracy’ and that there was a ‘common intention to murder’ (‘Lakhimpur Kheri Violence: SIT Submits 5,000-Page Chargesheet to Court’, January 3). Eight lives were lost in the tragic incident and yet the arrests were made late that only after public pressure and opposition’s outrage. The victims are yet to receive complete justice as new revelations in the investigation point out that the charges under which the accused were booked seems lenient. Moral responsibility lies on the part of the minister, Ajay Mishra ‘Teni’ to resign, but he has refused to do so and is busy trying to save his son. The inaction of Narendra Modi in sacking him speaks volumes about prime ministerial arrogance. While he is busy appropriating leaders like Gandhi, Netaji, Tagore, Patel and Ambedkar, he must also learn from Lal Bahadur Shastri. Shastriji who resigned as railway minister after taking moral responsibility for a train accident in Andhra Pradesh that claimed 112 lives.”

My comment: “Incidentally, Ashish Mishra the son of Ajay Mishra has just been granted bail by the Allahabad High Court.”

Write to publiceditor@cms.thewire.in

Telangana Govt Says 90% of Secretariat Demolition Completed

The demolition of the buildings was suspended for a few days following an HC stay order, which was lifted on July 17.

Hyderabad: Ninety percent of the demolition of the state secretariat is now complete and has resulted in no less than 4,500 truckloads of debris, the Telangana government said here on Monday.

The demolition of the buildings had to be suspended for a few days following the court’s stay order, which was lifted on July 17.

The K. Chandrashekhar Rao-led government began razing the secretariat building complex to the ground on July 7, days after the Telangana high court dismissed a batch of PILs, challenging the state’s decision to construct a new secretariat complex by demolishing the existing one.

The official information on the demolition came after several petitions were filed in the high court, challenging the restrictions on the media by the state government at the Secretariat demolition site.

“The government has taken up demolition of the old buildings and removal of debris of the Old Secretariat to pave way for a new building complex.

Also read: Hyderabad: Prospect of Pulling Down Osmania General Hospital Has Heritage Activists Up in Arms

As a preventive measure, the government did not allow anyone into the premises, as there is a danger of accidents happening while demolishing the high-rise buildings. As part of this, media is also not allowed, it said.

As there were requests from the media representatives to allow them to report the demolition works, the government decided to allow them into the Secretariat premises to cover the news reports on the demolition works and clearing of the debris.

Following certain observations of the high court, on Monday, the government allowed the print and electronic media personnel, accompanied by senior officials, including police, to record the proceedings.

They were taken in minibuses and open top vehicles.

According to TV visuals, social distancing norms were not followed while taking the reporters for the guided tour in the vehicles.

Meanwhile, the Telangana Advocate General on Monday informed the High Court that media was being taken to the demolition site with police escort.

Going Undercover to Expose the Ku Klux Klan

In 1979, David Duke told the media he had launched a wildly successful recruiting drive in Connecticut. A local reporter wanted to test Duke’s claims – so he filled out an application to join the KKK.

Spike Lee’s powerful new film, BlacKkKlansman, tells the true story of Ron Stallworth, an African-American police officer who infiltrates a local branch the Ku Klux Klan in 1979.

That same year, I also signed up to join the Klan. And at a secret meeting I even met the Grand Wizard himself, David Duke, the same Klan leader featured in Lee’s film.

I was a rookie Klansman at the time, and I’d been recruited to join the cause.

Sort of.

Like Stallworth, I wasn’t a true believer and had a very different agenda from the Klan’s.

The Klan descends on Connecticut

It was the fall of 1979, and I was a first-year reporter at The Hartford Courant when David Duke launched a recruiting effort in, of all places, Connecticut. His “Klan calling cards” and his newspaper, The Crusader, started appearing in factory parking lots, restaurants, high schools and college campuses.

To cover the story for the state’s largest newspaper, I was teamed with a veteran reporter named Bill Cockerham. We called Duke’s headquarters in Metairie, Louisiana.

David Duke was 29 at the time – an educated, clean-cut Klansman campaigning for a seat in the Louisiana State Senate.

“It’s the white majority that are losing their rights, not the blacks or the Jews,” he insisted. “We’re the ones being attacked on the streets and they call us haters when we fight back for our rights and heritage.”Duke was happy to talk. He made plain his aim to recruit young people and to remake the Klan into a gentler, kinder brand of bigotry. He wasn’t anti-black or anti-Jewish, he said. “We are simply pro-white and pro-Christian.”

It was vintage Duke. He was trying, as one expert told us, to be “everybody’s Klansman,” using his considerable marketing skills to sugarcoat racism.

He told us his recruiting efforts had struck a chord in the Nutmeg State, claiming more than 200 new members and several hundred more associate members. While no statewide organisation was in place, there were, he claimed, a number of robust, local dens. He did mention a statewide organiser, but when we requested repeatedly to speak to him, Duke balked.

The KKK was a secret organisation, he explained. He couldn’t do that. But because he was the face of the organisation, we could call the Metairie office any time – he’d be happy to talk Klan.

Getting access

The front-page article in The Courant appeared a few days later – “Klan Unit Attracting New Members: New Recruits Join Klan Through Mail” – and local radio and television stations pounced on the story.

Duke was suddenly a newsmaker, and the press and public struggled with the idea he could be successfully establishing a footprint in Connecticut, given that the Klan was mostly associated with the South.

Of course, no one knew whether Duke’s numbers were accurate; the story reported his claims of a groundswell of support.

Which is why I clipped out an application from a copy of his Crusader in our newsroom, filled it out using a false identity and mailed it to Metairie along with the $25 entry fee. (The use of deception in reporting is another story altogether, a matter regularly discussed in journalism ethics courses.)

My goal was to get inside Duke’s local outfit, identify his local leader and either verify or debunk his headcount of followers. In the mail, I soon received my Klan membership card, a certificate of Klan citizenship and a Klan rule book with a picture of Duke in his fancy Grand Wizard robe telling me to buy a robe for $28. Just like that I had joined the Klan.

Then I waited. I figured it wouldn’t take long for my compatriots to reach out and bring me into the fold, where I’d get the inside story. That was the game plan, and when I occasionally called down to Duke’s office in Metairie, using my new identity, I was assured I’d be hooked up with like-minded Connecticut racists in short order.

But nothing happened. Weeks went by. Meanwhile, David Duke continued to reap regular coverage in Connecticut media, with the imperial wizard claiming huge success in his statewide recruitment.

My break came in early December 1979. Duke announced he’d decided to travel to Connecticut and to two other New England states. The trip would be a kind of climax to his fall membership drive. He would visit several Connecticut cities and speak with the press at each stop, before holding a private rally at night with his Connecticut Klansmen.

And that’s when I got the call – all hands were summoned for the secret mass meeting on Friday, Dec. 7. I was told that for security reasons the location would not be disclosed until the actual day but to be on call.

The moment of truth

Teamed again with the veteran reporter, I spent most of that Friday afternoon on the move. I was instructed to call Metairie and was directed to head west from Hartford. While Duke staged a press conference at a Waterbury motel, I waited in a local bar, where Duke’s local point person finally contacted me. He directed me to Grange hall in Danbury, which they’d rented posing as a historical group.

I left my colleague behind and was met in a rear parking lot by three “enforcers.” They asked for my Klan ID card, and then waved me through. I walked into the dimly lit room on the second floor and looked around. The hall was nearly empty, except for around two dozen men quietly mingling.

That’s when it dawned on me why I’d never heard a peep from any other Connecticut Klansmen: There was no real organisation, or presence, to speak of.

While most were dressed in leather and jeans, the sandy-haired Duke wore a three-piece suit with a Klan pin on his lapel. He introduced himself to each attendee, showing off a three-ring binder with Connecticut newspaper clippings about him and the Klan.

Duke’s idea for a meeting was a simple one – a screening of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, the 1915 blockbuster about the Civil War and Reconstruction. (In Spike Lee’s movie, a Klan meeting also involves a showing of the film.)

To Griffith, a Southerner, the robed Klansmen were heroes, riding to the rescue and saving the South from the lawlessness and chaos of Reconstruction.

That night in Danbury, Duke used the film as a teaching tool, turning the darkened Grange hall into a classroom for a course on white power. Standing next to an American flag, he read aloud the film’s subtitles and then added his own bigoted commentary. When a group of Klansmen on horses dump the corpse of a black man on a front porch, Duke began to clap his hands – a firm clap that grew louder as others in the room joined in to applaud the death of a black man on screen.

I left that meeting with the story we’d been after for months – the identity of the Connecticut leader and, more importantly, the actual numbers in Duke’s much-ballyhooed statewide Klan. It wasn’t several hundred but closer to two dozen. Duke’s run of media coverage in Connecticut dried up immediately.

We exposed Duke as the con man who’d bluffed his way into a run of free publicity to spew is pro-white nonsense – a transparently perverse message that somehow has regained currency today. The imperial wizard’s rhetoric of 1979 is parroted almost verbatim by a new generation of haters who are attracting plenty of media coverage.

I never spoke to Duke again, but I did receive a Christmas card from him that holiday season – addressed to my Klan alias, apparently mailed before the article was published.

The red card featured two Klansmen in robes holding a fiery cross. The caption read: “May you have a meaningful and merry Christmas and may they forever be White.”

Dick Lehr, Professor of Journalism, Boston University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Race of Mass Shooters Influences How the Media Covers Their Crimes, Study Shows

White shooters are nearly 95% more likely to have their crimes attributed to mental illness than black shooters.

On January 24, 2014, police found Josh Boren, a 34-year-old man and former police officer, dead in his home next to the bodies of his wife and their three children. The shots were fired execution-style on Boren’s kneeling victims, before he turned the gun on himself.

On August 8, 2015, 48-year-old David Ray Conley shot and killed his son, former girlfriend and six other children and adults at his former girlfriend’s home. Like Boren, Conley executed the victims at point-blank range.

Both men had histories of domestic violence and criminal behaviour. Yet despite the obvious similarities in these two cases and perpetrators, the media, in each case, took a different approach.

When describing Boren, the media focused on his good character and excellent parenting, going as far to call Boren a big “teddy bear” despite a prolonged history of domestic violence. They attributed his crime to “snapping” under the significant stress of his wife’s recent divorce filing.

In Conley’s case, media reports made little attempt to include any redeeming aspects of his personality. Instead, they focused exclusively on Conley’s history of domestic violence and prior drug possession charges. If you were to read articles about Conley, you would likely infer his crime stemmed from his inherently dangerous and controlling personality.

What might explain the differences in media coverage? Could it have something to do with the shooter’s race?

Boren, it turns out, was white; Conley was black.

In a recent study, we explored whether the race of mass shooters influences how the media depict their crime, their motivations and their lives.

We found that the discrepancies in the media coverage of Boren’s and Conley’s crimes were indicative of a broader phenomenon.

Explaining the crime, portraying the criminal

For the study, we randomly selected 433 online and print news articles covering 219 mass shootings from 2013 to 2015. While definitions of a mass shooting can vary, we adhered to the one most commonly used in empirical research: an event in which four or more people are shot, excluding the shooter.

Next, we created a unique data set based on information provided in the articles. We coded each article for a variety of variables associated with the crime and the shooter, including setting of the shooting, number and gender of victims killed and injured and age of the shooter.

After analysing the data, we found that the shooter’s race could strongly predict whether the media framed him as mentally ill. (Less than 1% of the crimes had a female perpetrator.)

In all, about 33% of the articles in our study describing the crimes of a white shooter made a mention of mental illness. On the other hand, 26% of articles describing a Latino shooter and only 2% of articles describing a black shooter mentioned mental illness.

In fact – holding all aspects of the crime equal – white shooters were nearly 95% more likely to have their crimes attributed to mental illness than black shooters. Latino shooters were 92% more likely than black shooters to have mental illness mentioned as a factor.

An empathy gap

Furthermore, those articles that did describe a white shooter as mentally ill would often suggest that the shooter had been a generally good person who was a victim of society. The shooting, in other words, was out of character.

For example, in one case, a shooter in a rural trailer park set up a rifle in some bushes and began firing at the family trailer, with his wife, father-in-law and two young children inside. When the police arrived, he turned the rifle on them, hitting two officers before they gunned him down.

Yet subsequent news coverage noted his generally quiet demeanour and his willingness to help family and friends. The man who committed these crimes, one article noted, “wasn’t the same person who loved back-porch cookouts.”

However, such narratives – even within articles that mentioned mental illness – were less common when the shooter was black or Latino.

The graph below includes all news articles in our sample that framed a shooting as stemming from mental illness.

The chart shows the proportion of thematic narratives by race within the mental illness subsample. Credit: The Conversation

Nearly 80% of articles that described white shooters as mentally ill also described them as a victim of society and circumstance – a tough childhood, a failed relationship or financial struggles.

However only one article that described a black shooter as mentally ill did the same. Furthermore, no article in our sample offered testimony to black shooters’ good character, suggested that the shooter was from a good environment or that the shooting was out of character. Across the board, roughly the same pattern played out with perpetrators who were Latino.

Why does this matter?

Media coverage actively shapes how we perceive reality.

It seems as if media outlets tend to cast the violent acts of white criminals as unfortunate anomalies of circumstance and illness. For black shooters (and, to a lesser extent, Latino shooters) media outlets render their crimes with a brush of inherent criminality.

This isn’t to say that crimes shouldn’t be fully examined and that personal hardships and society don’t play a role. But if the circumstances of one group’s crimes are being explained in an empathetic way, and another group’s crimes aren’t given the same level of care and attention, we wonder whether this can insidiously influence how we perceive huge swaths of the population – criminal or not.

Laura Frizzell, PhD Student in Sociology, The Ohio State University; Sadé L. Lindsay, PhD Student in Sociology, The Ohio State University, and Scott Duxbury, PhD Student in Sociology, The Ohio State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

‘Media Bol’ Episode 45: Politics Over Ambedkar

Urmilesh discusses the media coverage of the politics over B.R. Ambedkar and his ideas with Vivek Kumar, professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, and senior journalist Poornima Joshi.

US Media Spoke More About Harvey Than Floods Elsewhere – but So Did Media Elsewhere

Our news is shaped by geographical and cultural proximity, the need for novelty, the frame of our existing narratives and how we value different individuals around the globe.

Where in the world? Credit: diariocriticove/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

August was an agonising month for weather disasters around the globe. Relentless floods in South Asia took over 1,200 lives and displaced another 41 million in India, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Sierra Leone was rocked by its worst natural disaster, with mudslides burying a 1,000, displacing another 2,000, and hundreds still missing. In Nigeria, President Muhammadu Buhari stated that over 110,000 had fled their homes in the state of Benue due to intense flooding. And in Houston, Texas, 70 were killed and 30,000 ousted as Hurricane Harvey swept away homes and devastated the city and its surrounding areas.

Of these four major disasters, the magnitude of devastation in terms of those dead and displaced was highest in South Asia, followed by Nigeria, Houston and then Sierra Leone. The South Asian floods killed more than 17-times the number of people in Houston and displaced more than 1,366 times the population.

However, when looking at media coverage across over 1,500 English-language news publications from different countries around the world, Hurricane Harvey received five-times as much coverage as the three countries in South Asia combined, 25-times as much as Nigeria and 10-times as much as Sierra Leone.

Global media attention in August paid to four weather disasters – in Houston, South Asia (India, Nepal, Bangladesh), Sierra Leone and Nigeria. The attention is plotted in the form of sentences published per day on each of the disasters in a set of over 1,500 English-language news outlets from around the world. Source: Media Cloud

A morbid death arithmetic points to the predisposition in covering death and disasters in Western countries over the developing world. For every person dead in Houston, there were over 2,750 stories published in global media on the hurricane compared to the negligible 33 for South Asia or 18 for Sierra Leone.

For every person dead in Harvey there were over 2750 stories published in global media on the hurricane, compared to the negligible 33 for South Asia. Source: Media Cloud

When looking at the trend coverage across specific countries, for the US mainstream media to have focused more on Harvey than South Asia is understandable. News within one’s own borders takes priority and provides information to those affected and those looking to help the affected. However, that the coverage of Harvey was as large as 21-times the magnitude of coverage for all the South Asian disasters is less understandable, but in line with the long-standing criticism that American media is little concerned with global issues that don’t directly affect them. In a blog post in 2015, Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the Centre for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab (where this author works), pointed towards a similar skew in US media in reporting terrorist attacks.

In the British mainstream media, the proportionate difference in coverage between Harvey and South Asia’s floods was lower but still significant. Harvey received nine-times as much coverage as South Asia did. Both India and the US are key trade partners of the UK, and nearly 5% of the country’s population is ethnically South Asian. The skew is less justifiable.

Still less defensible is that English-language news media in both India and Nigeria also covered Harvey in far greater proportions than they did of disasters in their own regions.

The floods across India this August were most intense in the states of Bihar and Assam, where hundreds of relief camps have been set up by the government, and in the city of Mumbai, where rains brought the financial capital of the country to a complete halt. Looking at a collection of over 650 English news sources in India for the month of August 2017, 3,282 stories were published about Harvey, 2,916 stories about floods in Mumbai, 2,250 about those in Bihar and 1,834 about Assam. The neighbouring regions of Nepal and Bangladesh got even lesser attention, with 1,182 and 344 stories respectively – although over 8.6 million people were affected just between these two countries.

The number of stories published about Harvey in the Indian English-language news media in August v. the coverage of natural disasters within India and South Asia itself. Source: Media Cloud

Similarly, in a collection of mainstream English-language media in Nigeria, Harvey received more than twice the coverage of the floods within Nigeria. Nearly 3,000 homes have been reported submerged and there have been complaints of slow government help.

The graph above compares The number of stories published about Harvey in Nigerian English-language news media in August v. coverage of other natural disasters around the world and in Nigeria itself. Source: Media Cloud

There may be a variety of explanations for why international reporting as well as local reporting focused more on Harvey than any of the other disasters.

For one, large-scale damage caused by disasters in developing countries is not surprising, given the poor infrastructure and disaster-relief systems. That kind of damage has a far less shock-and-awe element than a key American city like Houston getting washed away. Further, floods in South Asia are a more common weather problem: there have been nearly 10 major deluges in the last two decades, while this was only the third flood in Houston in the last 50 years.

That global news often focuses more on disasters in the West could also be a feature of foreign newswires. Reuters and the Associated Press, the two biggest services, are being increasingly used to access international happenings as newspapers face budget crunches and cut staff. And both newswires may come with their own skew: the Associated Press has one local bureau in every state in the US but one per country elsewhere; Reuters has 22 offices in the US but only 19 across all of Asia and four across Africa.

The minimal focus within Indian and Nigerian press on their own disasters could be due to the difficulties of getting data or images from the affected locations, compared to accessing international newswires for data on Harvey. Both states of Bihar and Assam in India can be tough to traverse during heavy floods, and reporting from Northern Nigeria is frequently a challenge due to the various conflicts in the region.

More likely, however, is that this skew in reporting is a continuation of the general trend in both countries to ignore regions outside the major cities. The English press in India is frequently criticised for focusing primarily on the metropolitan cities of Mumbai and Delhi at the cost of both rural India and smaller neighbouring countries. Even within the current context, the floods in Mumbai got more attention than the far-worse floods in rural Bihar and Assam as well as in Nepal and Bangladesh. In Nigeria, the northern area where the floods happened is primarily rural and often excluded from national discourse as well. This divide is further entrenched with a linguistic split: most English-speakers reside outside of Northern Nigeria, where Hausa is dominant.

In Johan Galtung’s and Mari Holmboe Ruge’s immortal paper, ‘The Structure of Foreign News’, they employ the metaphor of a signal to describe our perception. Some signals, such as the cultural proximity of the news, make it easier for us to tune into it. Similarly, how much the event fits into our existing narrative or how unambiguous a new piece of information is also serve as strong signals.

Africa’s disasters may seem far to the Indian press (Sierra Leone got minimal coverage while Nigeria got none), and South Asia it seems was equally distant to Nigeria’s press (India, Nepal, and Bangladesh together got half the coverage Sierra Leone did). But the US felt culturally important to both. America’s soft power permeates across the globe in the form of Hollywood, TV shows, music, celebrities and its politics. We cheered in the time of Barack Obama and now despair in the time of Donald Trump.

These factors reflect the values that shape our news – geographical and cultural proximity, the need for surprise and novelty, the frame of our existing narratives and, overall, how we value different individuals around the globe.

But if we are to consider all lives equal, then paying equal attention is important.

Anushka Shah works as a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, Boston. This study was conducted using data from Media Cloud, an open-source media analysis platform developed by the lab in collaboration with the Harvard Berkman Klein Centre.

Hillary Clinton Avoids the Glare of National Spotlight

Clinton’s advisers say they see little benefit in her going toe-to-toe with Trump over every personal accusation, generating sound bites that would dominate cable news broadcasts. Rather, they are happy for him to be embroiled in controversy while Clinton focuses on policy.

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton listens to her introduction at a campaign event in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States, March 28, 2016. Reuters/Jim Young

If you haven’t heard a lot about what Hillary Clinton thinks of a string of controversial comments by Donald Trump that have generated round-the-clock coverage on cable news broadcasts, there is a reason – it’s by design.

Since becoming the Democratic nominee last month, Clinton has been touring toy manufacturers, visiting tie makers and dropping in on public health clinics, where if she mentions Trump at all, it is usually to contrast their policies.

Her swift condemnation at a Wednesday campaign rally of Trump’s remark that gun rights activists could stop her from nominating liberal US Supreme Court justices was a rare instance where she has directly engaged her Republican rival in the 2016 race for the White House.

Aides say Clinton’s strategy is simple: let Trump be Trump.

Trump has suffered a series of missteps over the past two weeks that go beyond his remarks on gun rights activists, which he later accused the media of deliberately misinterpreting.

He has tangled with party leaders, clashed with the parents of a fallen Muslim American Army captain and this week accused Clinton, a former secretary of state, and President Barack Obama of “founding” the ISIS. On Friday, he said he was just being sarcastic when he made that remark.

“There is an adage in politics: Don’t get in the way of a train wreck,” said Democratic strategist Bob Shrum, a top campaign aide to presidential candidates Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004.

Trump’s campaign declined to comment for this story, but the New York real estate developer has accused the national media of bias toward Clinton. He re-posted a supporter’s tweet on Friday that said the “corrupt media” was deliberately exaggerating his remarks to favor his Democratic opponent.

Trump has slipped in opinion polls, and worried Republican Party leaders have urged him to stop making off-the-cuff inflammatory statements that generate blanket, often negative, media coverage and distract from efforts to highlight what they see as Clinton’s many shortcomings.

Sucking out the oxygen

“He’s sucking all the oxygen out of the room to his own detriment,” said Republican strategist and Trump supporter Ford O’Connell. It’s not enough to dominate media coverage, he needs to “win” it, O’Connell said.

Trump has boasted that the news coverage he generates means he does not have to spend as much on campaign ads, but political veterans say he is squandering the attention and missing opportunities to win over undecided voters.

For example, Trump gave an economic speech on Monday that was meant to help his campaign regain momentum, but it was quickly eclipsed by the fallout over his remarks on gun rights activists.

Clinton, meanwhile, has been busy courting local media in must-win states. Her national press pool, which seldom gets to question the candidate, often waits as she conducts interviews with local news outlets.

She has granted few recent interviews to national outlets and rarely holds press conferences, a strategy her critics say is calculated to avoid questions about her use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state, and the relationship between her family’s global charity, the Clinton Foundation, and the State Department.

Clinton, who has said she is one of the most transparent presidential candidates in history, has acknowledged her use of the private email server was a mistake but said she properly handled all classified information. She has denied any improper links between the foundation and the State Department.

In interviews with local outlets, Clinton is more likely to face questions about job creation, public health and raising wages – all parts of her platform that she is keen to discuss.

In Florida, a crucial battleground state, Republican lobbyist Gus Corbella says the contrast between the local coverage of Clinton’s campaign stops there and Trump’s events has been stark.

“Clinton’s campaign seems to have the more disciplined approach,” Corbella said. “The rollout that day is on a specific event she’s attending, a message she’s trying to deliver. Whereas on the Trump side, it’s what crazy thing did he say today and the response to that.”

After Clinton’s visit last week to a tie maker in Colorado, the lead story on the front page of the Denver Post was “Clinton pledges millions of jobs.” Trump also featured on the front page, but in a smaller story about “damage control” in his troubled campaign.

(Reuters)