Media watch.

I’ve been going on about the imminent invasion of Iran. Actually, I’m not the only one who’s been going on about an imminent invasion of Iran, there are many others. Hell, it’s all over the net.

But it isn’t on the Indian media.

I kid you not, I’ve been looking high and low and not one – not one damn newspaper or website I’ve accessed so far so much as mentions the imminent threat of an American or “Israeli” attack on Iran or the Iranian counterthreat to retaliate. No.

I have not found that news on the Indian media because of the current mess in government here. This government simply cannot, cannot, afford the possibility of another attack on a Muslim nation right now by its American patrons. Because, again, that would knock a great, big, enormous hole in the attempts at cobbling together a government to sign the Unclear Deal with Bush. Depend on it, even if the bombs begin falling, the news will be kept off the Indian media as long as possible.

So what is on the media instead of Iran?

Some time back I’d talked of Arushi, the girl whose father was arrested for her murder and tried, found guilty and all but executed by the media. Remember? Well, the man’s finally been declared innocent – sort of. Like Kafka’s protagonist in The Trial, though, he’s only been found provisionally innocent. Although the police now say there’s no evidence against him and say they have arrested the real killers, they say he could still be arrested if something new turns up. What? Like someone making a time machine and proving he did it after all?

Be that as it may, the same media that had crucified the poor guy earlier are now praising him to the skies. The grieving dad, you know? The unfairly accused innocent, whose daughter loved him so much, and all the birthday cards she sent him, and so on. Where was all this sentiment when he was in jail? Why were they screaming for his hide then?

Or are they hoping some good heavy doses of sympathy will stop him hitting them with libel suits?

I doodled Manmohan Singh being hanged by his intestines today in between specimens. Let’s see if I can work something out by Paint and I’ll post it here. I don’t know Photoshop, sad to say.

But the entire media need to hang next to Singh. Intestine City.  

What was the top story hogging media headlines in India this last week? The open rebellion by the Gujjar people of Rajasthan against the state, that has left about 30 dead in two days? The exploding rate of inflation? The fact that an all out state of civil war exists in Nagaland, with rival groups fighting each other with mortars and machine guns in the streets of the commercial city of Dimapur? No.

It was all about the murder of a 15 year old girl of NOIDA (a Delhi suburb), Arushi Talwar, who was found in her bedroom ten days ago with her throat cut and her head smashed in. First suspicion fell on the family servant, Hemraj, who was missing – but a neighbour later found his corpse on the roof, showing that the police were, let’s say, not exactly on top of their form.

Later, Arushi Talwar’s father, a dentist, was arrested for both murders. According to the official version, which keeps changing, Talwar had chanced upon his daughter and the servant together in “objectionable” circumstances, and had killed them both in a fit of rage. Alternatively, Talwar had had an affair with a colleague, and Arushi had objected, so he killed her (good riddance to the little busybody, wouldn’t you say, hm?), and the servant for good measure. Maybe tomorrow they’ll come up with yet another theory.

While the police case has more holes in it than a colander, it’s not that I’m concerned with right at this moment. I don’t really give a damn who actually killed this girl – as long as he gets punished eventually.

What I give a damn for is that,

First, the putative murderer, Arushi’s dad, has been tried, convicted, and all but executed by the media, something which routinely happens in India where the police and media treat accused as though they are automatically guilty. Unlike Britain, where the police say things like “A 30 year old man was taken into custody” and leave it at that, the police hear share every little titillating bit with the media while investigations are even still ongoing.

Now, after being convicted by media trial, just suppose the police version (which as I said is fragile at best) fails to stand up in court and Talwar (whether guilty or not) is released. Will he gain his professional reputation back? I say this also from my viewpoint, because I have a lot of crazy patients, and suppose one of them accuses me of something. How do I prove my innocence if the media decides in advance I’m guilty? Even if I’m absolved, how do I get my life back?

Then, with all the pressure of media coverage, isn’t it now imperative to find Talwar guilty, by concocting evidence if need be? So many reputations are riding on this now.

Secondly, as I said before, there are so many other and more important bits of news that are totally ignored by the media. I just wonder – suppose Arushi wasn’t a rich man’s daughter, not one of the members of what the Great Indian Muddle Class considers People Like Us. Suppose she had been poor (or at least lower middle class), ugly, fat and (oh, horrors!) dark. Would the media have spent a single moment reporting on this at all?

You know the answer, don’t you?

I remember being in complete sympathy with an article I once read about meaningless and infuriating terms that infested the media, most of them originating in the business world. That particular term was, if I recall right, “grabbing eyeballs” for “attracting viewers”.  The very infelicity of the term made me wince the first time I heard it. I ask you – would you rather watch something, or have your eyeball grabbed?

Over time, I find, eyeball-grabbing has tended to fade away from the pages and for a (very short) while there temporary dearth of obnoxious terms (apart from “Indian culture”, a perennial detestation of mine) that set my teeth on edge (and imagine how having one’s teeth on edge affects a dentist, while you’re about it). But now, I increasingly see another of those words that make me want, in Hermann Goering’s words, “to reach for my pistol”.

Footfall.

Why the f*ck can’t these people say visitors, or customers, if they’re going to write anything at all? What the hell does it mean if they say “this mall has a footfall of twenty thousand a day”? Does it mean 20,000 individual feet tread in the damn building? Since most people have two feet, that means ten thousand people, doesn’t it? Or, hang on, do they mean feet touch the ground twenty thousand times a day in that mall, which is what it sounds like to me? That could mean just one guy walking up and down, up and down from morning to night.  I don't suppose they mean the medical term called foot drop, do you?

I don’t suppose footfall will last any longer than grabbing eyeballs. But once it goes, I wonder what other meaningless term some vainglorious idiot will inflict on us.        

You’ve read Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin? If you’re Indian, you’ve read Tavleen Singh as well? And you wish – of course you wish, don’t you? - that you could write like them?

Yes, you can. Here’s how to be a true-blue right wing columnist:

First, make sure you find a media outlet. This is never very difficult, because an infinitely greater part of the media is controlled by right wing owners than left wingers. Look for magazines and newspapers that, for instance, back the invasion of Iraq or the right of corporations to strip the planet of resources as they chose. Publications that deny global warming are an excellent vehicle for your writing.

Make sure you know your market. As a right wing columnist, you won’t actually make any new converts. You’ll be writing for the converted. Fortunately, the number of right wingers in any given free market society is pretty high, so you won’t lack for readers. You’re in much better shape than the lot who write for the left, as will be obvious when you read on…

OK, so you’ve got your vehicle and you’ve got your readers. What next? How do you write?

The average right wing reader is, you must understand, not overburdened with a capacity for thought. Also, he or she isn’t constrained by what most people would consider good taste in language. For a right wing reader, irony is wasted. Sarcasm is wasted. You must drive it home, and in the crudest of language.

For instance, suppose you want to say something against some left winger. Don’t, for heaven’s sake, call him someone who may have taken a left, er wrong, turn. It will go a thousand metres above your readers’ heads. Call him an antediluvian idiot, a godless commie traitor, whatever. Just make sure you’re abusive. Your readers will lap it up.

Next, present every unsubstantiated accusation against your ideological opponents as if it were received truth. If someone says, for instance, that someone else knows someone who has heard that some leftist politician was seen in a restaurant with a woman who might not have been his lawfully wedded wife, call it proof of how that godless commie traitor is subverting family values.

Then, if any corporate lobby says something, remember that you must take it as the truth, and defend it vigorously, no matter how asinine it is. If, for instance, some company says everyone should burn their houses down, say that this should be done because all the rebuilding necessary will stimulate the economy. Trust me, this will go down well.

Present every question as a nationalist one. To put it more explicitly, hide behind the flag. Posit every question as us-versus-them. A good healthy dose of xenophobia can be relaxed only to accommodate nations which are so totally subservient to yours that they are virtually colonies.

Don’t forget – dispense with logic. Logic is the preserve of the centre and the left. Your position not only doesn’t need logic, logic is inimical to your standpoint. You can’t, for instance, defend the divine right of kings (or in this case corporations) without a total shutdown of all logical faculties.

Use religion shamelessly. The average right winger is a primitive religious nutcase. If nationalism won’t get him, religion will. Defend all religious violence by the religion your column is backing; and denigrate all other religions. You may, if circumstances so dictate, spare a few good words for fellow right wingers like the Dalai Lama, but only in order to target the left.

So here’s a sample right wing column, penned by yours truly:

…and we have idiots like that commie Bill the Butcher saying that religion shouldn’t mix with politics. I ask you – this nation was built on religion, it was meant to be a Christian country. That’s the way the Founding Fathers meant it to be. Anyway, when you come down to it, who would you rather have in charge – someone who has a faith in the Lord, to whom the Lord talks, or a godless commie traitor who wants to hand this nation over to CHINA, lock, stock and barrel?

The first thing those commies will do is strip you of the right to defend yourself. Then, once you have no weapons, they can take right over and hand over the country – and that means your town, your job, your house – to RUSSIA and CHINA. Guard your right to own a gun. Guard it well.

Then, again, those commies will try and deny your children a good sound religious education, so that they lose faith. The first thing they plan to do is teach evolution in schools and then, before you know it, your children are Satan’s slaves, homosexuals and suchlike.

After that, they intend to take your livelihood from you. They’ll say the companies that employ you are destroying the earth. Where’s the evidence for that? Nowhere. But they want to drive your employers out of business and then they’ll hand your job over to CHINA.

You get the idea…now get down to doing it.

We live in a strange, strange, strange world.

There is a nation which occupies the territory of another people, attacks and kills innocent civilians regularly – on TV!, denies them access to food and water and medical aid, uses internationally banned and morally indefensible policies of collective punishment, calls its victims terrorists, and justifies it as the necessity of survival.

You would think that nation would be an international pariah, despised and rejected by all thinking and feeling nations and individuals. Wouldn’t you?

Before we answer that question, let’s look at another country. This country stands accused of occupying the territory of another people; although the country in question claims the territory had historically belonged to it ; although not one person has claimed, far less been able to prove, that this country regularly bombs, bulldozes, starves or otherwise seeks to destroy the people it is supposed to be occupying. It’s said that this country is settling people from one part of the nation in this “occupied territory” and “destroying the indigenous culture.”

You would think this country hasn’t done anything other nations haven’t done before, in places like, oh say Hawaii, for example, would you? Yet, when it comes to it, which is the country you think draws international opprobrium – as measured in terms of media coverage and speeches made by people looking for publicity? Which?

Silly question. The country that bombs and starves people always gets the pats and bouquets. The other country – which hasn’t done any such thing, which in fact, as I shall set out to posit, has in fact improved the standard of life of millions of supposedly “occupied” people – is the one which is the target of a hate campaign.

Yes, OK, you know the two countries I am talking about. The first isn’t what I’m going to write about here – I’ve written often enough about my absolute abhorrence for the policies of that particular pseudo-state to need to repeat anything at this point. No, let’s move on to the other one.

Unless you’re deaf and blind and without access to the news media – in which case you aren’t reading this blog – you know all about the Olympic Torch and its travails following the riots in Lhasa, the capital of what is officially the Tibet Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China – in order to maintain brevity I shall refer to it as “Tibet”, making sure that you understand that by calling it “Tibet” I am not suggesting that it is a nation or that I’m about to make any claims about the historicity of China’s claims on Tibet. However, since the whole argument is about “Tibetan independence” I’d just like to point to a couple of things:

First, no Chinese government, Nationalist or Communist, has ever claimed Tibet to be anything else than a part of China, even if temporarily separated because of the weakness of the centre.

Also, the same media which pillory China for allegedly invading and colonising Tibet in 1949-50 seem to have no problem with “Israel” for invading, colonising, displacing and ethnic-cleansing the Palestinian people from their lands – a process that continues to this day; nor do they utter a cheep about the Moroccan colonisation of the Saharwian Arab Democratic Republic, where a total demographic transformation is being brought about, or for example Pakistan in Baluchistan or the Turkish occupation of Kurd areas or …well, you get the idea.

Having said that, let’s put aside the Tibetan question as unresolved (not that I believe any such thing – I support the right of countries to live as multi-ethnic identities if they should choose to do so and in such cases the citizens of any one part of a nation should be free to live where they want). But for the purpose of this argument, let’s say that the “Tibetan independence movement” is talking at least half-sense, that they had a historically independent nation that was invaded and colonised in 1949. Let’s assume that this invasion and colonisation is so much more evil than the bombardment and genocide of Palestinians and Kurds and, if one is to go back a few centuries, the Native Americans that this becomes the centre of a storm of legitimate protest. I’ll, very temporarily, grant all that. Fine?

The usual image presented in the Western media, of course, is of a Shangri La defiled by Chinese Communist butchers and murderers. Apart from the fact that Lost Horizons, the James Hilton book that created Shangri La, is – take it from me – almost unreadable and totally illogical, there are a few problems with that picture.

First and foremost is the little fact that there was no idyll to be defiled by Chinese troops in 1949. Tibetans were a poor and illiterate people living in a totally undeveloped society, ruled over by a feudal theocracy that put “reincarnated” monks over them as living gods. When the Chinese point this out nobody can seriously contradict them. Nor can they logically deny – since they have been saying, and saying, and saying, that the Chinese control everything in Tibet and the locals have no rights at all – that any and all development there has occurred due to China. With me so far?

How do they try and wriggle out of this self-painted-into corner? They – in the shape of such pseudo-liberal commentators as the Canadian Gwynne Dyer – claim that “Ah…but Tibet wouldn’t have remained at that level if the Chinese had stayed out! Tibet would have progressed!”

Would it?

Let’s see – we don’t really have to speculate, you know. We can just see the fate of two other monarchies in the region, both ruled by living gods like Tibet was. Those are Nepal and Bhutan. The former is a mess of the first water where a desperately poor peasantry finally rose in Maoist revolt against a corrupt royal regime and a compliant parliament and drove both from power. The latter is a mess of the first water which was so primitive it had not even a currency of its own till 1967, where a desperately poor peasantry is fobbed off by fancy terms like “gross national happiness” and where the ethnic Nepali-speaking population has been ethnically cleansed and is living in refugee camps in Nepal for the past two decades. There’s no reason to think the fate of Tibet under the feudal theocratic regime would be any better.

As I have said elsewhere, I don’t believe for a moment that the Tibetan “refugees” who were born and brought up in other lands and have lived there for their entire lives will even for a moment consider actually moving to Tibet if it got independence today. The “independence movement” is more an outlet for them than anything, a desire to prove that they are relevant, because it automatically – such is the current situation internationally – guarantees them a place in the sun. So they decide that the time has come for another round of protests.              

Now, the Olympics weren’t granted to Beijing yesterday – the world has known for half a dozen years who would be hosting the 2008 Olympic Games. For all these years damn-all happened on the “Tibet independence” front. Then, suddenly, as the Olympics grew close, out of nowhere or so it seemed, the Tibetan “independence movement” suddenly woke up to the realisation that there was a “silent genocide” (whatever that might mean) going on in Tibet, and the “peace loving” Tibetans attacked and murdered personally blameless Chinese civilians in Lhasa in the view of television cameras (yes, I have seen the visuals). Just in case someone might say the Tibetans had picked a fight, Tenzin Gyatso (aka the Dalai Lama, and I shall not not not give in to the temptation to call him the Dalai Llama) claimed that it was Chinese soldiers in Tibetan clothes and monks outfits who staged the whole thing. Yes, of course, that makes complete and absolute sense. If I were a Chinese desperate to ensure that the Olympics were going to be the most successful ever, the best thing I could do is to provoke clashes that would be certain to rouse a hostile media storm. It sounds completely logical – doesn’t it?

In fact it sounds so logical that I’ll remind everyone that Tenzin Gyatso, who is a man of peace, accepted a medal from George W Bush last year – who is a man of peace all right. What was that Shakespeare had Mark Anthony say about Brutus being an honourable man?

So I hope you will excuse me if I echo the Chinese view of Gyatso as a holy crook rather than a living saint.

As far as the attacks on the Olympic Torch go, then – I feel the whole torch thing is bloody silly, having no connection at all to the sports and being an invention of Adolf Hitler to boot – but the torch is a part of the Olympic ceremony, and silly or not, it’s been a part of every Olympics since 1936. Therefore, if the Olympics are to be kept free of politics, however notionally, the torch has to be protected as completely as the runners in the marathon, for example. Just as you wouldn’t allow Gyatso’s followers to disrupt the athletics, you can’t let them disrupt the torch. “Freedom of speech” can’t cover this.

Suppose, this time, they allow the attacks on the torch. What happens next time, then? The British, who are going to host the Olympics in 2012, are incredibly stupid if they think you can put the genie back in the bottle. Next time there may be protests by Argentines against the occupation of the Islas Malvinas (“Falklands Islands”) or by Mauritius citizens against the occupation of Diego Garcia or by Scots against the occupation of Scotland, and so on. What then? China might even organise some of the demonstrations in retaliation. Why not? Turn about is fair play, or isn’t it?

And, of course, the "protestors" are far from all Tibetan - a high proportion seems to be white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and one can form a fairly good estimate of where their political sympathies lie. I'd love to see how many of them would be willing to protest against "Israel".

Just wait till the Olympics are over. Suddenly, overnight, the “Tibetan issue” will fall off the media radar like a stone, what with the American presidential election coming. In any case, after the thrashing the rest of the world will get at Chinese hands on the sports field, most people wouldn’t want to remember these games anyway.   

In this post we had a bit of an argument going as to who, precisely, was most to blame for the rape-murder of Scarlette Keeling (in picture) in Goa. I’d said her mother, Fiona McKeown, was as much to blame as any of her actual killers, for leaving her alone in a foreign land.

McKeown, of course, is playing the sympathy card for all she’s worth, and is getting sympathy from people who should know better – in the media and also elsewhere.

I wasn’t exactly surprised, though, when English media began telling the world the truth about McKeown herself:

She lives in a broken down trailer in Devon, in scenes of squalor, with her family using sleeping bags instead of beds; she had nine children with five men, and none of those children has attended school. All of those children are consumers of alcohol, and the eldest broke his neck in the recent past in a car accident. She once did a year in jail for attacking a man with a knife. She knew Scarlette was using drugs and having sex, and she was “OK with that” – in her own words.

Doesn’t quite sound like the ideal family McKeown claims she had, does it now?

As for Scarlette’s experience in Goa – she told a friend that she was terrified at having been left all alone and without money, and she was sleeping around because at least that gave her food and some kind of shelter. Poor kid.

Meanwhile McKeown’s going around telling everyone she’s convinced the real killers of her daughter are yet to be arrested. It sort of keeps her in the limelight, doesn’t it? And the Indian media, at least, are swallowing her act whole.

And this is the woman who is, absolutely certainly, going to make her daughter’s murder her ticket to a book deal and big-time success. Just watch.

Even hanging by the intestines is too good for her.   

Jug Suraiya is a member of the editorial staff of what is arguably India’s worst newspaper, The Times of India. Normally, I enjoy reading his columns, because he has some smidgen of a sense of humour – something rare in Indian columnists of any hue.

Anyway, to get to the point – in one of his recent columns, after tipping his metaphorical hat in the direction of Barack Obama, he went on to write at some length as to why he wanted, craved, ached for Hillary Clinton to become President of the United States: to wit, that she was a woman, and he, Suraiya, had once talked to some redneck in the US who scoffed at the idea of a woman ever being US president.

In other words, it’s the same old tired argument as was trotted out by the likes of Gloria Steinem: support Clinton (the erstwhile Rodham Clinton, let’s not forget, ladies of a feminist persuasion who back her because of her double X chromosomes) because she’s a woman – nothing else matters, not her politics or lack thereof, not her blatant waffling on key issues like Iraq, nothing but the fact that she’s a woman.

Hell, as I said before, on that basis, if I were American, I’d vote for Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin before I’d vote for Clinton. At least those two are upfront about being evil vindictive right wing bitches – they aren’t trying to hide it. What you see, where they are concerned, is what you get.

As for Suraiya: I wonder if he has something against a black man becoming president of the US, then?