Wanted: A humane reporter

It’s been barely three weeks since a boat capsized in Dhubri district on the Brahmaputra River taking more than 100 people with it to a watery grave.

What did we get in terms of stories?

Day 1 - a lead report

Day 4 – a page 4 report on lapses / steps of district administration and that was it. A week later it had become one more incident to be stowed away in a newsroom morgue.  So long …see you…until the next boat sinks.

I believe, perhaps in my misguided idealistic way, that there is a reason why even newspaper reports are called ‘stories’. Stories are necessary for every human being. They move us, make us ponder and keep us alive.

Identifying the ‘story’ behind the ‘report’

I read a report about what could be a wonderful story about a football coach training a group of village girls with bare minimum facilities and trying to build a professional football team but I got nothing beyond clichéd parallels to a Bollywood movie. Where is the story in that?

Last year, at the peak of Garo- Rabha conflicts, I looked desperately and hoped someone would perhaps do some story on the people who had been affected but the dead and the injured were reduced to mere statistics in a refugee camp on a piece of paper and today very few would remember the incident until the next ethnic clash breaks out.

These are just a few examples. Researched and detailed human interest stories could have been attempted on various topics over the last one year like man-elephant conflict, the issue of satras losing land to illegal immigrants, the security for elderly persons in the city or the Garo –Rabha conflicts. However newspaper houses do not seem to have the time, inclination or resources to invest in such an exercise but happily invest in run-of-the-mill sensationalist tripe.

The inhuman human interest

For all the criticism of the US media, they have not forgotten or given up on one thing completely – human interest stories or follow up stories.

All this leads me to make a rather sweeping statement that some of the most ‘inhuman’ form of reporting is done here. To be fair, to the journalists here, they have been brought up on the strict diet of ‘stick to the facts’ and ‘the inverted pyramid’. Secondly, many of these stories require lot of planning and endless hours of observation, something which can’t be done in the span of a day. But yet, these factors can be no excuse for churning out ‘fill in the pages’ kind of stories.

I struggle to find a distinct voice in any newspaper – a voice that  tells us a story, calls out to us, soothes us, reminds us to have faith in ourselves  and confronts us with the humane human inside us.

Are we really concerned as human beings? Are we are going to  go beyond our token 350 word report on the incident that calls for implementation of monitoring and safety measures every time a boat sinks only to forget it two weeks later? Can we raise the same points while portraying the story of the people and not by merely giving a collection of quotes?

Facts can be adhered to without letting go of the human element in the story and reporters can be objective too.   

‘Human interest’ in the Assamese dailies here is essentially reports oozing with melodrama and in English newspapers it is something too ‘soft’ and definitely not a way to do ‘serious’ reporting.   TV journalists seem to nurture the belief that showing images of a howling, grief stricken mother lamenting her young son’s death qualifies as ‘human interest’. Zooming in and zooming out on the face of the lady continuously is supposed to make me sentimental, I guess.

Sticking to cold hard facts is good but sometimes you need to go beyond that and bring alive the scenarios around you so that your readers can actually see and feel something in the words and it doesn’t become just another lump of black on a white background.

We claim that we are human beings, it’s time we became humane.