John Pilger, an Australian based journalist and filmmaker in London, has been subjected to persistent abuse, in Britain and his native Australia, for his reportage that spreads over last 50 years across Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor, Burma and Palestine. One of his books ‘Tell Me No Lies’, is an anthology of write-ups from diverse people like Edward Said, Seymour Hersh, James Cameron and some committed reporters. The book ranges across many of the critical events, scandals and struggles of the past, exposing the lies perpetuated through media by the people in power. For instance, the book carries an investigative piece Under Siege by Amira Hass, the Israeli correspondent, who lived among the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip during year 1993. Amira has put forth certain realities that have never been presented by mainstream media. She is a reporter who is despised by most people in her own country, but she believes that “she cannot stand by while the Israeli state persecutes a dispossessed nation”. This is a broad perspective which is rarely fostered by today’s journalists.
Coming to Indian mainstream media, there is only prejudice and no perspective. From national newspapers to television news channels, there is just ‘opinion-injected’ news spiced with misleading commentaries. In relation to Kashmir coverage, even the prejudice is not thorough; it is simply a narrative of lies. Lies and just lies. News about Kashmir is no longer about happenings; it is about rating rants. As such, the concept of accuracy has become irrelevant and lies are manufactured endlessly.
The loud-mouthed crabby news presenter, the quarrelsome talking heads and discreetly edited visuals—real journalism takes a disgraceful nosedive whenever Kashmir hogs the headlines. Is Kashmir too hot a news to be made a hash of, or is jingoism increasingly shaping the media treatment of conflict places like Kashmir? Why are journalists internalizing the interests of established power, amplifying propaganda to distort facts and parade preconception?
To quote John Pilger, “The information age is actually a media age. We have war by media; censorship by media; demonology by media; retribution by media; diversion by media – a surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions”.
Day in and out, war is waged against Kashmir by Indian media. Kashmir is demonized, distorted and disregarded by a well-packaged web of lies in the form of media trial. Some so-called news people even display their sickness through verbal abuse and slander. Queer Journalism!! And, a few ‘spokespersons’ and ‘bureau correspondents’ from Kashmir offer themselves to be mentally mortified and molested repeatedly, lending credence to self-appointed Kashmir experts and con media stars.
Not just fuel, mainstream media has always added fire to the situation in Kashmir. It has faked objectivity to frame events into firestorm. And it couldn’t happen without the patronage of agents of power. The one who want to disfigure public perception and deconstruct genuine discourse in Kashmir to protract their interests.
That’s perhaps why father of public relations, Edward Bernays, opined in his book that propaganda is no longer an “invisible government”. It is the government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability to separate truth from lies (Propaganda, 1928).
So, lies are everywhere. Lies that dominate our comings and our goings; lies fed to us since childhood; lies noshed by our family and friends; lies our teachers tell us; lies our politicians say to us; and all such lies that are reinforced by media. Everyone has turned our truth upside down and inside out. Kashmir and its history have been framed up in the lap of lies, and its denouement too seems to be engineered by fictitious facts. However, unlike what former Director CIA, Willam Casey, proclaimed in 1981 about Disinformation Program that “we will know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false”, what public mind in Kashmir thinks today is quite actual. People can classify fact and falsehood. Of course, they cannot control media but media has also failed to control their minds. The decades of conflict have reared such maturity here.
Bottomline: In modern times, when facade of liberal democracy is glorified, flags are increasingly becoming more significant than unwarranted human killings. Slogans more lethal than political treachery. The jingoistic jargon more meaningful than sound logic. In such a scenario, the upsurge in hostility is a foregone conclusion. The vicious cycle of bloodshed will continue to be nurtured by lies. As long as falsehood is bombarded relentlessly, the boomerang effect will persist. What is happening in Kashmir can’t be rationalized in editorial newsrooms and noisy television studios. It requires more than a bundle of printed and televised lies, which when repeated to the hilt, drop their bearing.