Murder, They Said

The idea that the news that's fit to broadcast is an editorially responsible view of signficant recent events is quite dead. Consider the treatment (on Indian television's news channels) of the two big news stories to emerge from the World Cup: the violence that followed India's loss to Bangladesh and the death of Bob Woolmer the day after Pakistan lost to Ireland.

I was a talking head on a news show that was trying to examine the attack on Dhoni's house as a symptom of the unhealthy obssession of Indians with cricket. The anchor prefaced his question to me by observing that given the fact that cricketers enjoyed being in the news through the good times, that they liked being pictured on Page 3, given their willingness to milk cricket for celebrity, wasn't extreme public hostility after defeat part of the game?

I'm certain that the anchor didn't for a moment believe what he was suggesting. He was rhetorically framing a popular view of the Indian cricket team as a bunch of pampered, indulged, overpaid underperformers. He was being the modern news professional: if there was popular resentment raging without, it was his job to air it. I notice that when anchors channel the 'public mood', when they ventriloquize, they leer in a knowing way, as if to suggest to their sophisticated peers that the vulgarity of the popular view they are voicing has nothing to do with their own opinions.

In their coverage of Bob Woolmer's death, news channels went one better by trying to second-guess popular prejudice before it had the chance to form. By Wednesday morning the Jamaican police had indicated that since the autopsy hadn't confirmed death by natural causes, Woolmer's death would be, by default, treated as death in suspicious circumstances. Samples had been sent to pathology labs to test for toxins and other things and the reports hadn't yet come in. By noon I saw that Times Now was leading with the headline: Bob Woolmer Murdered. I watched horrified, waiting for new revelations. There were no revelations. The rest of the bulletin was a grudging retreat from that headline. The first qualification came when the anchor announced that there was a 'strong murder angle' to the story, whatever that meant. The channel's claim that Jamaican police sources had indicated murder was flatly contradicted by the statement of the Jamaican police commissioner who merely repeated that Woolmer had died in suspicious circumstances and that it would be inappropriate to speculate till the pathology reports came in. Despite the headline, I realized that the story was exactly where it had been earlier in the morning.

Undaunted, the news channels turned their cameras on Sarfraz Nawaz who said that Woolmer had probably been killed by bookies who were scared he would blow the whistle on them in his forthcoming book. Now it's reasonable for a news channel to speculate on the reasons for a murder, but equally a responsible news editor should have found a discreet way of indicating that Sarfraz Nawaz has been making headline-seeking accusations for decades. Finger as always on the public pulse, our modern newsmongers had decided that the People wanted murder (without pausing to consider that even if the reports confirmed the presence of poison, suicide was at least a possible alternative explanation) and it was murder they served up.

This post is extracted from a longer article in The Telegraph, Kolkata, that can be read here