The question is whether it was necessary to point out what the precise nature of the infraction was. How necessary was it to highlight the fact that the husband sodomized his wife and filmed her? Was the fact that a husband would stoop to film any act of sex with his wife and threaten to circulate a video not disturbing enough? The specific nature of the offence might increase reader interest given its apparent unnaturalness, but is there not a line that newspapers should respect and stay within?
There are other instances of how seemingly factual news takes on a thin film of salaciousness in the manner in which it gets reported. The tragic saga of Fiza is another case in point. It is intriguing how throughout the whole saga, the woman concerned was called by the name that she took on in order to get married by changing her religion. Anuradha Bali just does not carry a whiff of doomed romance as does Fiza, all Urdu yearning wrapped up in Hindi film song pain. The surname, Mohammed, too was dropped deemed to be too clunky and too real sounding for the story. The man involved continued to be called by his original name Chander Mohan; no one referred to him as Chand Mohammed, his adopted name. The story was dramatic enough in any case; we had a minister chuck up his position for the sake of love, getting married in public glare, changing his mind and dumping the other woman, who eventually passed away in mysterious circumstances a year later. The urge to laminate reality with superimposed drama serves to exoticize what happened. Also it locates the victim in a larger narrative that serves as an invisible background score that pushes us towards certain judgmental conclusions. In this case, the woman is made into a wisp of romance, reduced to a stereotyped not ion of the temptress, by removing her from a social context, and exhausting her of any other identity but that of the tragic siren.
At a certain level, all news does get packaged. The reason why news items are referred to as stories is perhaps because they need to resonate with human beings at some emotional level. These are facts polished subtly to become narrative accounts of life that connect with some anxiety, hope or need that the reader experiences. This is particularly true in the case of crime reporting where other people's misery is usually dramatic, random and dreadful all at the same time, and this induces a thrill of anxiety in the reader. Attempts to bring the victim closer, to instil the feeling that 'this could happen to any of you just as easily' is one of the underlying drivers of how stories get presented. This is why victims and criminals are both usually identified in a manner that invites some form of empathy and vicarious excitement. Descriptions like 'son of IAS officer' or model (even if only an aspiring one, like a million applicants for a reality show), MBA student, MNC executive are routinely used to place the event in a context that elevates the story value of the event.
But this takes on a more insidious character when crimes against women are involved. Devices employed include making the victim more attractive, and in many cases actively adding a sexualized layer of description. The photographs most used are invariably the ones where the person looks her youngest and most attractive, even if the picture might have been dated. In the case of Bhanwari Devi, the woman who was allegedly killed by her paramour, a Rajasthani, for becoming inconvenient, the photograph most in circulation showed her in the prime of her youth. This tends to be true of female victims in general — the coverage tends to be squint-eyed in that it simultaneously expresses horror and outrage while exploiting the victim sexually in the manner in which she is presented.
Much like the Hindi film rape, which uses the horrific to excite the base, the coverage of crimes against women takes on an exploitative hue, even without apparent overt intention. In some ways, the actions of the moral police are a more extreme version of this schizophrenic instinct, where morality becomes an excuse to do precisely what one is seemingly condemning. The recent instance in Mangalore of a bunch of right-wing activists crashing a party and attacking the boys and pawing the girls, while apparently overcome with moral concerns illustrates this dichotomous behaviour. The pornography of morality is more frightening than the real thing for it comes cloaked in righteous legitimacy. The appropriation of women and their behaviour as a societal responsibility of which one becomes the self-appointed guardian results in being able to justify hooliganism and sexual exploitation in the name of moral reform.
For media in particular, the need t o draw sharper boundaries is more critical. The complicity of media in the Guwahati pub incident is an extreme manifestation of the extent to which media participates in acts of exploitation in the name of garnering viewership. But it is in the more subtle and everyday occurrence of dressing up news, packaging it for more ready consumption, the squeezing out of more voyeuristic elements from the story, that the real transgression lies. All under the cloak of outrage and shame.
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