“Arrests, Beatings and Secret Prayers: Inside the Persecution of India’s Christians,” declared a front-page item in the New York Times two days before Christmas. It was a massive, well-illustrated story that I first read, or rather, experienced, richly in its online version.
The headline, in white letters, hung across an intense photograph of hands raised in prayer, framing a pastor and a Cross in the distance. It was composed, clearly, to engage, immerse, transport you to church in India from wherever you were reading it, whether a Manhattan high-rise, Brooklyn brownstone, or Silicon Valley suburb.
At least a dozen photographs followed, echoing for me many media memories such as old Life magazine spreads and Pearl S Buck’s The Good Earth type compassion-aesthetics. One image though followed a more recent media code for India stories, and that one involved a low-angle point of view, suggesting an ominous, horror movie mood. This was reserved for what otherwise seemed a serene image of Lord Rama on the wall of an alleged “Hindu nationalist”.
‘What’s That?’
The visual codes dominated at first glance (which, in our age of ever-glowing and never-relenting phone screens might well turn out to be the only glance), but the words offered up what to me seemed like familiar characterisations of people by identity in the New York Times. The Christians were “mid-hymn when the mob kicked in the door” while “to many Hindu extremists… Christianity is a threat to their dream of turning India into a pure Hindu nation.” And in Bihar, where Pastor Patil is conducting a secret service in an unmarked farmhouse, a dog barks outside and instantly, “one woman whipped around and whispered, ‘what’s that?’”
This tone of particularly intense fear reminded me of not one but two lines, albeit identical ones, from the New York Times and National Public Radio in 2019. In an NYT article dated 11 April 2019 titled “Under Modi, a Hindu Nationalist Surge Has Further Divided India,” we are introduced to Adnan and other Muslims from old Delhi’s “catacombs” who are afraid to walk alone and whose “voices drop to a whisper” when they talk because they can be lynched. A few days later, NPR’s April 23, 2019 report titled “India is Changing Some Cities Names, and Muslims Fear their Heritage is Being Erased,” presents to us one Ashraf, whose voice, also, “drops to a whisper.” (Read my article on this from 2019 here)
Media critics and apologists
I see patterns, codes, tropes, in media because that is what I believe it is my professional responsibility to do. But I see it also as an act of human decency not to deny that these stories might be about real people and real suffering somewhere out there. It is not easy to do both at the same time, and in the days when I was active on social media, I used to find friends getting upset with me for “nitpicking” media reports when “Hindu Nationalism” was sweeping across India.
It is not uncommon for those of us who teach or write about media to be confronted with such charges. Just a few hours ago, I saw a tweet from Ashley Rindsberg, whose book on the New York Times’ egregious record covering world affairs has been making waves, sharing a similar complaint. How can you criticise an institution on “our side” just for a few small mistakes?, is the tone of this sort of pushback to media criticism.
The publishing establishment hates that I wrote a book about @nytimes. Here's one representative response I received.
Maybe they hate it because NYT Bestseller list is the most powerful tool in book marketing. Maybe it's just politics.
Either way, f' em. pic.twitter.com/Xk0ST3kzNR
— Ashley Rindsberg - TheGrayLadyWinked.com (@AshleyRindsberg) December 26, 2021
Of course, the fact is that while some of my friends might see my decoding of this NYT article as a distraction from the really important work of combating Hindutva, some of my friends will probably see what is quite obviously the trouble with NYT’s massive article already.
These friends, like me, would have probably seen not only the NYT’s claim about minority persecution in India but almost around the same time, also read the news that India’s “Hindu nationalist” government long criticised in the same media for minority persecution has actually managed to get a long-closed church going again in Srinagar (read this AJE piece for fun on the same news for its interesting slant on the whole thing).
These friends would have also seen the news about people being massacred over accusations of blasphemy, and not once by Hindus. These friends would probably also remember very well how the last time there was a blasphemy attack on Christians by Muslims in Pakistan, an NYT columnist blamed it on Pakistani Muslims having been influenced by the “Hindu Caste System.”
And most of all, these friends probably also remember, like me, the photo of the weeping archaka of the Ramateertham temple in Andhra Pradesh holding the head of his beloved Rama earlier this year when a spate of attacks broke out against Hindu deities and temples there.
Polarisation and News
I often wonder about the deceptive familiarity of our social media feeds, about how easy it is for X to assume that Y has also been seeing the same things and how on earth could he or she possibly think differently. That we live in silos, even as we seem to be always in each other’s lives and minds through our feeds, is the reality today. How can we hope to “agree to disagree,” as the saying goes, when we can’t agree even on what is actually happening in the world, on how much violence against Hindus there is, for example, beyond the pages of the New York Times?
I think one way for us to overcome the divide is to step back from the way we normally think about news. We are so accustomed to thinking of news as a source of information (or disinformation) that we forget that it is essential, and perhaps increasingly, only a consumer product, designed and delivered with marketing precision rather than lofty ideals about serving the cause of truth and so on.
In his recent book, Hate Inc, Matt Taibbi makes an even more compelling comparison — news is more like a drug than a discourse, the outcome of a “marketing process designed to create rhetorical addictions.” Scrolling, he writes, has become “a similar tactile trigger to grinding a lighter with a thumb.” The way we pick up our phones constantly is one part of it. The way we get sucked into rivers of anger and outrage at what we read, either in agreement, or in disagreement, is another part of it.
Pandemic of propaganda
As we come to the end of our second year under the crushing weight of a pandemic accompanied by a propaganda explosion that leaves us with ever lessening trust in institutions like media, it is perhaps useful to distance ourselves from the nitty-gritty of the claims and counterclaims around news these days.
I know that some of my friends will never feel the way I do about the pictures I saw earlier this year from Andhra Pradesh, and later from Bangladesh, of dozens of cruelly destroyed Hindu deities, to understand why I feel less and less persuaded by lavish photo essays of the sort the New York Times presented to its readers recently. But I can, perhaps, try to understand why this object, this phenomenon, this experience, exists in the first place, a little more. Even after three decades of studying, teaching and writing about media, it seems there is more to learn. And this year has been a particularly instructive if also humbling one.
The year began with the war on Hinduism in my home state, unsung and unnoticed in the New York Times, naturally. The year peaked to a devastating summer with families struggling for breath and life during the second wave while propagandists on one side preyed with drone-cams over funeral pyres and propagandists on the other went into uppity denials over it (at first at least).
The year ends now with depressing reports about hateful acts and words everywhere; poor pilgrims seeking food accused of blasphemy and getting lynched, lunatic “religious leaders” issuing calls for violence, and clever politicians assuring us that they only meant the police and not everybody really when they spewed fanatical calls for vendetta.
The year ends, as it began, as it was, with untruth and fear. But there is one optimistic footnote (though, I must caution you this I mean somewhat ironically). After reading the huge December 23rd NYT piece on how Hindus are persecuting Christians in India, I took a look at the print version too, to get a sense of where it was placed in the paper.
Luxury lies
The story was at the bottom of the front page, and right under the headline was a bright colour advertisement for a luxury cruise company. It seemed an apt illustration of the point that this year’s best critics of media have made.
Behind all their walls of words about “Hindu nationalism” and “White Supremacism” companies like the New York Times were really elite productions selling elitist markers of belonging to elite audiences (Batya Ungar Sargon notes in Bad News that between 38-46 percent of readers of New York Times, National Public Radio, Wall Street Journal and the Economist fall into the $75K+ bracket).
What they sell, really, are customers who can afford to go on luxury cruises around the world in the middle of a pandemic at that, to advertisers who want just that sort of exclusive audience. And what they offer to keep those audiences hooked of course, is that sense of moral superiority; about race, religion, political ideology, everything that helps them deflect the obvious realities of class.
The phrase “luxury beliefs” are being used in some American circles to describe the worldview of this elite segment. I think “luxury lies” is a more appropriate term to describe what the New York Times delivers with its India stories though.
The writer teaches media studies at the University of San Francisco. Views expressed are personal.
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