| the real ashu |
Posted
on 16-Jul-01 03:40 AM
What follows is another piece by MANJUSHREE THAPA.
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In Defense Of Biased Newspapers
Back when I thought I knew everything, I looked down on newspapers with party affiliations. I criticized them for being what they were - party mouthpieces - but I also secretly feared them, sensing that the day I understood them would be the day I got addicted to power politics.
I never wanted to get addicted to power politics, believing that power corrupts, power pollitics corrupts powerfully and politically, and that an addiction to power politics corrupts powerfully, politically, and addictively. Which meant bad news, in the form of biased newspapers.
Eventually I got peer-pressured into reading them; all my
friends were reading them, and they insisted that I'd never understand the man on the street unless I did the same. So I overcame my fear of asking vendors which paper was published that day and began to pick up a stray paper on my way here or there.
Like one' s first puff of cigarette or first gulp of beer, one's
first party-affiliated newspaper baffles; Mine happened to be Dristi, and I failed to see its purpose. I read it with a scowl on my face, keeping it at a good arm's length, understanding it little, trusting it even less, doubting that the insinuations and double entendres that impressively studded its columns would ever make any sense.
My doubts waned after I read a few others, for I began to
decipher a pattern: things said in one paper were responded to in
another one. Certain public officials had not attended meetings they said they had, one paper wrote, though they had pocketed the Rs. 250 attendance allowance. Two days later, a back column in another paper said that certain persons had indeed been attending the meetings they said they had, and certain reporters had taken a Rs. 30,000 bribe in return for defaming certain persons.
Disputes like this escalated into full-scale war lasting roughly three weeks, after which reader's interest petered out, and journalists moved on to more current events.
Meantime, the concerned officials got transferred to the Potato
Development Section of the Ministry of Agriculture.
They drew me in, such battles. They made me crave for more. I
was, after all, participating first-hand in the heated dialogues,
caustic bantering, witty verbal sparring, and downright mudslinging between persons and parties of national and international importance. I felt I was feeling the pulse of the nation. (I don't know if I was; I wouldn't recognize the pulse of this nation if it slapped me in the face).
And soon, I was buying every newspaper I could lay my hands on:
Deshantar, Suruchi, Prakash, Dristi, Punarjagaran, Rastrapukar,
Nepalipatra, Aarati, Pristabhoomi, Bimarsha, Samikcha, Janabhavana, Chalfal.
In time, I learned a shocking amount of political trivia and
developed clear positions on them. Not only did I know the fine points of the corruption allegations facing the District Development Committee Chairman of he most remote of Nepal's districts, I had an opinion on the matter.
I began to astound people by winding my way through intricate
arguments before reaching forceful, if party-affiliated, conclusion.
When people spoke to me about current affairs, I began to say things like, "Dristi already wrote about that last week," or "Read today's Deshantar; it makes that point far more lucidly than you can." I began to sniff knowingly, make wry comments, use complicated language, and smirk a lot. The man on the street confused me no more.
In addition, for the first time in my life, I began to feel
close to our national leaders. I read about their past tribulations, and felt I had special insight into why they acted the ways they did. I forgave their terrible decisions in light of these insights. I began to refer to them by their first names: Man Mohan and MaKuNe, GP and KP, Surya Bahadur and ... well, for some rason, Lokerndra Bahadur Chand remained Lokendra Bahadur Chand.
Naturally, I burned out. After a few months I couldn't keep up
with every paper, so I cut down to a few essential ones. Soon even those got difficult to follow, but I bought them and kept them around, hoping their contents would enter me by osmosis. Eventually I had to give them up altogether. I no longer know what is really going on in our country, and I am wildly jealous of those who read all the wanted to be a person in the know.)
Well, at least I know more than I used to. Among the things I
learned from my brief, but powerful, addiction, was that
party-affiliated newspapers are actually a boon to Nepal. When reading a newspaper that claims to be objective, readers have to struggle to discover whose interests the paper is forwarding beneath its veneer of neutrality.
Party-affiliated newspapers eliminate this task, and
empower readers with full knowledge as to whose interest the paper is serving. For this reason, Nepal's biased newspapers must be discouraged from working towards objectivity; if they ever learn how to do that, readers like me will really be lost. THE END
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