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For not crying out loud
Self-serving though this may sound, we can?t help but feel that the media are getting a raw deal these days.
Self-serving though this may sound, we can’t help but feel that the media are getting a raw deal these days. Months passed by since a Danish newspaper carried a set of insensitive cartoons before the issue blew up in everyone’s unsuspecting faces. In fact, the cartoon controversy seems to be picking up momentum in various parts of the world even as we instinctively wait for the next big brouhaha. So, in our finite wisdom, us media folks, thought that not printing anything remotely controversial would be the right way of going about things. Now it seems that such a method of protection is also futile.
The Ahmednagar office of the Hindi daily, Loksatta, was ransacked on Sunday, not for publishing something that hurt the sensibilities of a group of people, but for not publishing anything that the group had jolly-well expected to have been printed. The Sambhaji Brigade mob was furious because the newspaper had not published any article on the occasion of Shivjayanti.
The Sambhaji Brigade first came into the limelight in January 2004 when it vandalised Pune’s Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute after historian James Blaine acknowledged using research material for his biography of Shivaji in the book. The goons must have looked really hard to lash out against something for the last two years. Finding nothing, they’ve opted to unburden their frustrations on an invented ‘error’ of omission. Which makes us media-folks wonder: are we now damned if we do and damned if we don’t? Maybe the solution lies in every angst-in-their-pants group starting their own newspapers.
