In media circles everywhere and more so in settings of conflict of every kind, there is often a pertinent question that keeps getting asked often enough but one that is increasingly difficult to answer: is the media ‘free’? By ‘conflict’ we mean not just the conflict of violence but also encompasses the clash and the push and pull factor for ethnic identities, political aspirations, the tug between various power centers, the grab for resource et el. And in Manipur where there is conflict of every nature, the role of the media, its constraints and the pressure it operates under and the environment that it exists in is indeed a world of contradictions. Having to exist in a very limited sphere on the context of an incestuous social-cultural-economic-political wheel of relations, the nature of the media being the one medium or tool as a source of mass information, opinion shaping unfortunately means it gets caught in the middle of groups that want to use the reach of the media only for their own lines of thought and their take of things. Of elsewhere, media circles discuss over a free media means one free from prejudices and ideological slants, in Manipur there are more layers to the ‘freedom’ quotient. A simple case of the arrest of certain people who the state actors say are so and so of this and this group after due reporting is met with rebuttals by the group named. The media keeping with its sitting duck syndrome has to carry both sides given the constraint of having no independent means of fact checking on who is saying the truth and who is spouting propaganda. What happens to the credibility factor of the media is a foregone conclusion in such instances. In reality, the media in Manipur is party to the whirlpool that it is getting sucked into even as the natural reaction to say is that the media here gets short drift from various non-state actors. Even when it comes to the common people and the various civil society groups and student groups, there is a tendency to take everything at face value and publish everything as sacrosanct. Living and working in a tight knit small community means that everyone will put their pressure on putting ‘their’ releases through someone they know.
Even as there are more newspapers emerging, with old ones getting re-launched and new editions and more papers getting into print, what needs to be first realized and acknowledged is that the media needs a spine that has the editorial purview to decide what is news and not have them dictated from the end of a phone connection or a press release. The notion of a ‘free press’ or a ‘free media’ is debunked every time there is a mail from one group or the other that hints at how important the release is. If the armed non-state forces spout extra politeness with their directives, the civil society groups and student groups are the ones most difficult to cope with, starting from their question of why their ‘news’ has not been carried. Increasingly, there is the growing tendency for press conferences alleging everything under the sun without any room for verifying claims and counter claims. We end up saying we have resource constraints and that we cannot possibly follow up every story. And then we end up filling the pages the next day with counter allegations and counter press conferences. In certain phases of possible tension due to the conflicting interests in the state, the media and its way of functioning gets more critical for even as its role is to inform, there are various safeguards that it must ensue: that it does not in any way contribute to escalating further tension, that it does not end up pitting one group against the other.
There is no doubt that the media in Manipur today operates under the shadow of constraints and severe pressures. But there must be an accepted set of norms and practices to atleast arrive at a set of codes and ethics on ways of reporting and the editorial right to accept or reject what comes to media houses. In any case, any restaurant drive that ends in names of young people being photographed and their names given can never be accepted as news. So is the case with drug users ‘caught’ by people bent on ‘reforming’ them or non migrants being lectured upon. So long as certain media houses gives such news a space in their pages, all other media houses will be unable to exercise their editorial right to reject them.