Press Freedom, Covid 19 and Infodemic

-Patricia Mukhim |

World Press Freedom day on May 3 passed off quietly with many journalists not even aware about the importance of the day. Considering that information from official channels these days is sanitized before it is dished out to the media as press release, we ought to be wondering what we are actually reporting. We are told that medical ethics demand that names of any person testing Covid positive should not be revealed.  If the name of the person is not revealed how can people take precautions and stay away from him/her during the period of infection so as to prevent the spread?  That’s a question that people ask.

It’s here that we need to jump from medicine to sociology. Ours is both a medical and sociological problem. Governments are petrified that if people know of a Covid positive case they might ostracize the person and not allow him/her to come into a locality or a residential premise. I tried checking out for stories of ostracization of Covid positive people anywhere in the world but what showed up were stories only from India. Is this because we are a country steeped in discrimination? We already have caste and creed differences; discrimination based on wealth ranking; on how we look (some Northeasterners were called Corona in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi and spat upon), so its second nature for us to quickly discriminate people now, on the basis of an infectious disease that actually transcends all human differences.  What an irony!

Covid19 has willy-nilly forced us in the media to daily struggle to place our stories in a politically and socially correct format and that is a hell of a balancing act to be doing day after day. Interestingly, most of the misinformation and conspiracy theories about COVID-19 originate not from traditional, mainstream media but from social media. These have created what experts now call “infodemic.” Now here is a real time demonstration of how social media can be dangerous. Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad Sangma tweeted on May 5, “The 11^th patient who was positive was retested and unfortunately the results are still positive. We have to retest again after three days.” A WhatsApp post in Khasi interpreting the CM’s tweet immediately went viral stating that 11 Coronavirus patients have tested positive again. The person blamed the Government for being in a hurry to declare them negative earlier. This is the danger of miscommunication!

We don’t know how many have read that WhatsApp message but quite a few were perturbed to know that 11 more people had tested Covid positive when Meghalaya Government was about to declare the State  Covid free after the last contact person tests negative which should be sooner than later. While social media is an unmediated beast and has the potential to create fear, paranoia and to stigmatize people and even lead to communal riots it also has its uses. As a rapid communication strategy social media quickly disseminates information from government to the masses as has been seen during this pandemic. Government has been using social media to announce curfew timings and opening of shops and wholesale stores and also to convey important information on hand hygiene, use of masks and sanitizers etc. Hence all is not bad about social media. It’s the irresponsible and mischievous use of the medium that is problematic. What’s ironic however is that mainstream media is being blamed for the infodemic.

Covid-19 has of course taken a huge indirect toll on us media-persons. Many newspaper houses had to stop printing (because it was felt that newspapers could be carriers of the sly virus), hence advertisements have dwindled and as a result revenues had begun to dry up. Several journalists from across the country and the region too were laid off. Just like that, one fine day they were given the golden handshake! Journalists are perhaps the least protected categories among those working in the informal sector. For those on contract there’s no health insurance coverage, no retirement benefits…nothing. Some media agencies have given their staff at least a three month salary before letting them off. But that’s cold comfort when you consider the bleak horizon that states at scribes. Don’t know why Covid has this intense dislike of us media persons. Perhaps it thinks we are competition and that we are virus too. Perhaps like someone said this is the time to also put the mirror to ourselves and our profession. How many of us have become lap dogs licking out of the hands of politicians; tailoring news such that we say nothing against the ruling government and party; doing the bidding of politicians while pretending all the while that we are running a free and independent media!

It’s unsure how the media will come of out this Covid phase. But many media owners are hurting and hurting bad. The other day while on a panel discussion vis-à-vis World Press Freedom day, a lady panelist suggested that media should not be adversarial towards the government. I was appalled by this indiscreet or should I say indecent proposal. But being on Zoom media you are muted out unless it’s your turn to speak so you could hardly dissent with co-panelists. But since when has it become kosher for media to ‘not be adversarial’ towards the ruling class? What are we then? Is it time to redefine ourselves? Or are we now to conform to the new normal where prime time television channels are the real media? Is it journalism when people are called to engage in panel discussions and the dices are heavily loaded in favour of the ruling party with just a sprinkling of dissenting voices to pretend that the channel is objective? And those dissenting voices are finally shouted down?

And lest we forget, even during this pandemic there are many media persons who are hounded. Several have had FIRs filed against them on flimsy reasons but mainly because they are critical of the central or state governments. Have we in this country reached a point of no return as far as press freedom is concerned? Just at a time when people need an unfettered press because of Covid-19 so that they can make informed choices, we have government making it more difficult for journalists to function by imposing unnecessary restrictions on them. This is the time to critique our public health systems which have never been given the attention they deserve. Our primary health centres are in shambles in many states, more so in states like Nagaland, Meghalaya, Manipur and also rural Assam. The attention of our state governments has been to provide health insurance to the masses but that is hardly the solution. Even with health insurance you still need to go to the hospital and if you are in the periphery you want a hospital closer home. But that will not happen because hospitals closer home are run by government. They don’t have doctors or nurses and function only once a week. This is hardly the way to run health services in a poor country. What insurance has done is to push people to private health care institutions. Hence in a sense government is promoting the private health care industry. But at what cost? Now when the pandemic has hit us hard we realise how important the primary health centres are.

I wonder if governments will learn any lessons from the pandemic but I can say for a fact that without a free media to call out the government, it will be the poor of this country that will perish like flies because no one really cares for them.  The plight of migrant labourers is just one case in point. There are many other areas where government has not has not been circumspect about investing public resources judiciously. All these mismanaged institutions fail us at this critical hour.