Date: August 25, 2020.
This artifact is an episode of NDTV’s popular show- “Prime Time with Ravish Kumar” where he takes us on a flashback journey to the occurrence and media coverage of Delhi’s Nizamuddin Tablighi Jamaat, citing headlines and stories of other media channels which are not just skewed, overstretched proposition but also promote a culture of Muslim hatred underneath the veil of patriotism. Ravish candidly states that this hate-spewing and manipulation was all a part of the media’s propaganda, which actually originated from the State’s propaganda to shift the blame of corona-spread over to the minorities-Muslims. This fits exactly into Chomsky's piece- "What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream" proving that the "mainstream or agenda-setting media" decide the framework and the conversations that can exist. According to Chomsky, mass media’s main role is not in informing but in diverting the audience from actual issues, which is exactly which the Indian news channels and newspapers did in the Tablighi case. Amidst the countless challenges and injustices occurring amidst a global pandemic, this was an attempt to shift the audience’s attention from issues like unavailability of COVID beds in hospital, unemployment, woes of migrant labours etc. By using hashtags like #CoronaJihad and #MasjidoMeiSarkariTalaLagao and luring headlines like- "Nizamuddin Ka Villain Kaun" and "Islamic insurrection", the government via the media-manufactured consent of the mass- it made sure that people, unanimously hate Muslims and see them as the cause of the pandemic, and structure their attitudes and behaviors aligned with this belief.
This is not a stand-alone event of projecting minorities (especially Muslims) in such a negative light, past episodes of the Babri-Masjid-Ram Mandir conflict and the Shah-Bano case have also seen such acts of polarising the audience by the media. This asserts Asghar Ali Engineer’s article- “Media and Minorities” on how the media has shaped public opinion with respect to Muslims in a way which is contrary to the evidence available.
The Bombay HC in its judgment in a petition ruled that Muslims who attended the Tablighi Jamaat were made scapegoats by the State in order to free themselves from the blame and responsibility of addressing the pandemic. The Big Media very conveniently chose not to disseminate the judgment to the public.
This narrative, on its face urges the media consumers to become critical citizens, but it is important to take it with a pinch of salt. After all, this can be seen as propaganda by NDTV to set themselves in the eyes of the “public” as different, despite the fact that it too is a constituent of the mainstream media. By this act of trying to establish itself as a separate entity from the propaganda-generating media houses, NDTV is, in turn, trying to shift the blame of a failed media to the other channels. Is that not what strategic propaganda is?
To conclude, the COVID-Tablighi relation has been made very strong by the media, and in the process, media has lost its objectivity and has transformed the Tablighi Jamaat into an event of “narrativized terror," making the Muslims analogous to terrorists by its crafty news hours, debates and prime-time episodes. This was accompanied by a “circulation of speculation” (as described in the reading- Mediatised Terror: Terror in the Age of Media Explosion) of what Muslims might do to demolish our country, remediating past coverages of the Ayodhya-Babri Masjid case.