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Overview
SAFHR’s Media and Conflict Programme
is conceived as an integral part of its vision to develop a regional
public forum that fosters peace as value within a framework that
promotes human rights and substantive democracy. It is patterned on
SAFHR’s programmatic culture of building regional dialogue and regional
networks aimed at transcending the nationalist orthodoxies which have
divided us and destroyed our capacity to dialogue across borders. Like
other SAFHR programmes the ‘Media and Conflict’ programme seeks to
foster the possibility of exploring shared regional perspectives and
defining a common future oriented towards a peoples security and rights
framework.
The media programme addresses a particular constituency - media
practitioners reporting on conflicts in the region. It recognises the
mass media’s role in mediating the public sphere and affirms the media’s
democratic commitment to expose the abuse of power. The Media programme
is designed to sensitize media reporting of conflicts by facilitating a
peer group radical critique of media practices, inset within the
political economy of the media as industry and news as a product. The
programme is driven by the growing power of the media industry in South
Asia and the need for media practitioners to be more self aware of the
journalist as a significant political actor in regulating social and
political conflicts. Turning the partisan argument on its head, the
programme explores the possibility of media as advocacy for human rights
and peace.
In post colonial South Asia’s cauldron of conflicts, the media’s role
has been to defend status-quo elite interests at the expense of the
media’s democratic imperative of contributing to an informed public
debate on whether policies pursued (especially involving armed conflict)
are in the interest of citizens. As the reach of the media has grown in
the region, so too have questions about the mass media responsibility in
the constitution of a community and its implications for aggravating
inter state and internal conflicts - ethnic, communal, social and
territorial. Evidently, power and interest are inscribed in the
institutions of the media as well as in the production process. The
result is that professional cannons of ‘objectivity’ and ‘fairness’ are
increasingly subject to the structural and ideological reality of –‘we
have a point of view’.
SAFHR’s media and conflict focus has been driven by the emergence of
the media as the third front in war, e.g. the aggressive media coverage
of the Kargil war and by contrast the non-coverage of the eelam
war (Sri Lanka) by the regional mass media and its ethnically polarized
coverage within Sri Lanka. Further, endemic clashes on the Indo
Bangladesh border highlight the split media frames derived from
'nationalist' coverage of border conflicts, the media’s vulnerability to
manipulation by intelligence agencies when reporting at a distance and
the marginalization of the human rights frame in the territorialization
of the nationalist imagination. The media has become an adjunct of
nationalist bureaucracies ethnicizing and essentializing antagonism. In
the hills of Nepal, the Maoist insurgency has been reported from the
privilege and power location of the Kathmandu valley, producing
dangerous distortions and falsification of the nature and power of the
insurgency. Self censorship has driven journalists to follow the
changing political context, overnight dubbing the Maoists terrorists,
post ceasefire as representatives of a parallel government and then back
again as terrorists.
The regional footprint of the satellite revolution has produced less
democratization than hegemony in South Asia. It is characterized by the
'Indianization' of satellite television. South Asian TV has become an
instrument of Indian political, cultural and linguistic hegemony.
Focalization by the Indian media on the Pakistan intelligence agency,
i.e. the ISI factor, has produced dangerous distortions in national and
regional reportage. “Glolocalization’ has resulted in mimetic
reproduction of the US pathology of terrorism in the context of armed
resistance to established order in our region, translating conflicts as
terrorism, hollowing out politics from violent conflict, predicating
militarist and anti democratic response to struggles in Kashmir, North
East (India), Sri Lanka and Nepal.
Objectives :
- to
develop a radical critique from within the mass media, i.e. by media
practitioners of media responsibility in reporting conflicts/violence,
- to
explore the pros and cons of media as partisan in covering human
rights and peace issues,
- to
develop a hands on training module of dos and don’ts of reporting
conflicts
- to
produce a comprehensive publication on Sensitive Conflict Reporting
for use in mass communication institutes, peace studies institutes and
defence colleges,
- to
create a network of concerned and sensitive South Asian journalists,
- to
connect media practitioners with NGOs and Social Movements to promote
human rights and peace.
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