| ashu |
Posted
on 19-Dec-01 06:09 AM
Typecasting Nepali journalists
What follows was first published in The Kathmandu Post, circe 1997.
By Bhupendra Rawat
Overtly and covertly, Nepali journalists typecast public and, at
times, private figures. In doing so, they cite the lofty ideals of
freedom of speech and the public's right to know. But what happens if the tables
are turned -- allowing a 'never-gonna-be-a-journalist' reader like me to
indulge in some good-natured needling of the Nepali Fourth Estate? Three
categories come to mind.
MR. LECHER: As elsewhere, lechers abound in journalism too.
Often, Mr. Lecher playfully interviews a starlet or a fashion-model of Nepali
glamour-dom, prints her 'revealing' [WHAT is she 'revealing' anyway? I'm
too dumb to find out!] pin-ups, and then goes on to bemoan -- in writing --
how such pictures actually defile "our traditionally pure Nepali culture".
But why do the editors let Mr. Lecher get away with his self-serving reports? Simple. Most are undersexed voyeurs themselves who, despite all the jazz about treating women with respect, desperately hope that the snaps would bring in hordes of drooling subscribers.
MR. FAUX-SOPHISTICATED: As the title implies, this guy's a
phoney. He's never been out of the country, yet his pride emanates from his
second-hand knowledge about the peep-shows that take place on New York's
42nd Street. He also writes adolescently (in a breathless 'look-how-many-naked-pictures-I-saw' squeal) about 'Sex and the Single Girl', and urges us to buy glossies like 'Elle' and 'Cosmo', which he apparently gets to read for free, for providing in-your-face publicity for the distributors in Thamel! What's more, read his byline, and you'd think that no other than Helen Gurley Brown and Bo Derek had suckled him in his infancy!
Still, Mr. FS wants to be taken seriously when he writes about
tantalizing subjects such as sex, glamour and sleaze in Nepal. But
ultimately even readers who swear by Anais Nin have to go ho-hum, for Mr.
FS's exposes himself for what he really is: Not a Himalayan Nobakov out to
seduce a pouting Lolita, but a pitiable loner with a hand stuck inside his
fly.
MR. ECON-ILLITERATE: Mr. Econ-illiterate strengthens my biased
suspicion that the Central Economics Department at TU only teaches its
students ABOUT economics (i.e. biographies, for God's sake!, of dead White
male economists, debunked development-planning models, and all other
similarly irrelevant stuff) at the EXPENSE of teaching them the nuts and
bolts of clean, clear economic reasoning with a stress on exposition.
And one unintended result of such training is that we get
journalists with a business-cum-economics background who do a story on RD
Tuttle, and instead of giving us an analysis of Nepal's Casino industry,
end up comparing -- quite inexplicably -- Tuttle favorably with Larry Flynt,
the American porn-publisher!
Then there exist business-reporters who, in feature-articles in
newspapers, continue to let the spokesman of a bank alone tell the world
how wonderful his particular bank is, and so forth. Meanwhile, the reporters
never really bother to tally up that bank's balance-sheets and share-prices to come up with a critical analysis of Nepal's banking industry.
Still, the worst remain those, who -- never having understood,
let alone mastered, the sound economic arguments against Arun III -- go on
reporting, a la Pashu Rana the Minister, that the project had been killed
by dangerous 'anti-development brigade'.
Sure, the three categories above can hardly even begin to
showcase all the quirkiness of Nepal's fascinating journalists -- from the very
best to the very worst. Tyai pani, the stage is set for someone else to now
write more mischievously about this profession's inability to laugh -- from time
to time -- at its own self. THE END.
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