Its been a while now since I stepped into the journalistic world. My formal training however has been in the electronic media and I was pretty sure of making a career out of documentary making. Why that didn't happen is a million of your everyday reasons. As a part of my training I did an internship with a company called Miditech that was then based in Delhi. I worked on India's first observational documentary called 'Hospital' which was telecast on BBC World. Besides the fact that it was great honour to see my name scroll on the credits on this international channel... it taught me one of my first lessons on the job. We humans thrive on misery.
The case I faced was of a young couple who were blessed with a child after a very long time. Only to find out in the final trimester that the child would be born with two holes in its heart. As soon as the child was born it was taken in for open heart surgery. The child made it through the surgery. Our entire crew, me included were at the hospital the whole night. And through the surgery. I was allowed into the neonatal ward and was permitted to touch the child through protective gloves in the incubator. Tubes attached to the child were just too overwhelming. The doctors looked positive and we finally decided to call it a day. I reported back to the office (which took me around half hour. No sooner did I enter the office, my producer told me that a call had come through from the hospital and that the little child was no more.
My producer was ecstatic. We just completed one entire story of the series. I was heartbroken ... I had just touched the little thing with my own hands. I asked my producer ... how do you become so detached and not feel a thing. He said, "Being detached is part of the job in the media. You need to swallow your own feelings to be able to tell of the feelings of others." A lesson very difficult to implement but one that was drilled and ingrained over my internship.
I have seen the same swallowing of feelings across channels and reporters when they talk of devastation of human life. But the flip side to it all is that there is an audience who loves all the gory details. We stay glued on to every word and visual in the hope that we can see a little more of what happened. We have seen channels fall over each other to get "exclusive footage" to ensure that you stick to their channel. How different then does it makes us from those who actually cause the mayhem. They just seem to be catering to an ever waiting audience
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3 comments:
Congrats on entering the blogosphere Ruthie :-) As for the Mumbai horrors, I'm reminded of Yeats' timeless words:
‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.’
Hiya Ruth.
First of all.. congrats on jumping on to the blog wagon. Your writing is very neat. I like your style.
Secondly: my comment would be on your last sentence. How different are we? It looks like an oxymoron statement..like what came first the chicken or the egg?. Because its there, we watch! And we sympathies, send prayers, donate, volunteer, and get to know the hard realities of the world.
There is a very fine line between unbiased journalism/news and sympathy/feeling to the one's accused or in trouble ( not at all possible from the professional front,unless there are no stake holders of it which currently there are many, like -News Channel, Advertisers, vendors, etc. ).In todays world, a news has got to give a lot more than what it used to before and expectations by the world at large are way beyond imagination, irrespective of the nature of the news, and nothing under the sun can stop this until there is whole new revolution in the journalism industry ( which i wonder what could it be) .
If at all journalism was not bread and butter for some, may be then the feeling of the "producer" would have been the opposite .
Whose to be blamed ? may be a "Humans" never ending desire of wanting that little extra..that little more of it.
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