It has always been difficult for the media to operate in a climate of coercion. The media is essentially a free agent and there is a reason why it needs to remain unattached to ideologies of any kind. Objectivity demands that the media report what it believes to the best of its knowledge to be the truth. While there will be detractors who will speak about different shades of the truth, in the media truth is anything that is supposed to have been said, or an act that has been committed and which is duly verified and has a bearing on the larger society. In militant hit regions of the North East the media has suffered for daring to stand up against forces that believe in the gun as an object of obtaining compliance from a paranoid citizenry. The case of Garo Hills today is exactly that! On one side are mushrooming militant outfits with obscure ideologies. On the other are the people who are affected by this climate of uncertainty, of extortion, violence, kidnapping et al. The media reports on the daily acts of commission of the militant outfits and their posturing vis-a-vis the state forces or their breakaway factions.
Militant believe in labelling individuals and institutions to delegitimize them. They cultivate some media persons who choose to toe their line. They castigate others who refuse to act as their force multipliers. By creating this rift militants are able to plant their views in a section of the media and also to use media platforms as their propaganda machine. Some in the media feel a sense of power because they are on a hotline with militant honchos of this or that persuasion. Is this what media is supposed to be? Where is the ethics here? And are media persons supposed to act as interlocutors between militants and the government? Is media supposed to favour one militant group against the other? No it isn’t but increasingly we are seeing a very worrying phase for the media in Meghalaya. Earlier the media in Manipur used to face the prospect of being banned or burnt because they printed some news that a militant outfit did not like. Militants forget that we still are a democracy and not a dictatorship where they can impose their views and expect compliance.
A militant outfit has called a section of the media, “anti-Garo,” “anti-people” etc. Why would the media be anti-people when they report the anti-people activities of militant outfits? Since the media serves the reading public, it is also the duty of readers to speak up against these wild attempts at gagging the media in Meghalaya.