On April 5, there was an unfortunate incident of food poisoning in a prominent school in Noida. Despite school management responding effectively to the crisis, the issue was covered extensively and irresponsibly by the media. This is my response to the actions of the latter, as a 14-year-old student of the school.
To me, the incident at my school was as much a problem about the health and safety of the students as a report (see what I did there) on the ever-deteriorating, already sub-par journalism that otherwise-uninformed consumers of news are forced to consume.
The absence of unbiased, reliable reporting is a far more long-term, pressing issue than the anger and hate that one school is facing. Of course, I absolutely stand for the school, grateful for what it has given me and determined to deliver to it whatever degree of ‘justice’ I can. However, from anchors cutting off accounts defending the school mid-sentence, saying that they don’t want to hear something that has ‘obviously been fed to the speaker by the school’, to publications stating that the children fell ill after eating potatoes in school at 5 pm Thursday (school closed by 2:30 and no potatoes were served in school that day), to news outlets accusing my school of trying to poison its students, the media’s sensationalizing of this incident is just another mirror we can hold up to the face of the press: by and large, the nation’s only source of information.
I don’t know how many reporters sitting at their desks realise this, but a 10-year-old school ranked in the top ten in India is about as likely to attempt to poison its students as I am to spontaneously turn into Uncle Ben from Spiderman. With great power comes great responsibility; the delivery of information is a vital part of a properly-functioning society. The press has a duty to listen to every side of the story, and its negligence of this is, forget revolting, just downright silly.
As I write, I’m listening to the news and the anchor – one of India’s most prominent at a very influential TV network – has been, talking for 30 straight minutes about Salman Khan’s ‘controversial love life’, providing his viewers with disturbingly in-depth accounts of all of the actor’s girlfriends (even going so far as to detail an incident of someone dumping a drink on someone else’s head at a bar). This, supposedly, has to do with the actor’s recent arrest over a case in which he was found guilty of killing a blackbuck in the wild. What it has to do with the poaching of a blackbuck I cannot fathom. All this does is reinforce the media’s fantastic ability to turn any incident into something completely different, through the usage of brilliantly-chosen vocabulary and Morgan Freemanesque voiceovers.
I can’t believe it takes a student to say this, but DESPERATION FOR CONTENT CANNOT AFFECT ACCURATE REPORTING AND BEING UNBIASED TO ALL PARTIES IS NOT THE SAME THING AS TRYING TO DRAG ALL PARTIES’ NAMES THROUGH THE MUD. The reporters saying malicious things about my school were speaking when the police filed FIRs, but they weren’t there when our teachers and school management abandoned all other tasks and clustered around the infirmary with doctors, anxiously discussing students’ individual medical records and personally speaking with children, enquiring how they were feeling. The press was right there, doing all they could to garner information about how expensive my school is and how much power it has in political corridors, but no amount of investigative journalism could have revealed the amount of effort our management put into making sure every child was alright, calling parents individually if students felt they wanted to be taken home.
I’m not usually this vocal about issues, but my motivation for writing 700+ words this evening was simply the fact that this school has given me a family for ten years. It has taken care of my every need, even before I knew I needed anything. Right from the beginning of the crisis, everyone concerned has been working phenomenally hard to make sure students’ health improves. They’ve all done everything they could, and I am not about to let this hard work go to waste.
I’ve heard everything the reporters had to say, and I am not okay with any of it. Content does not mean sensationalizing incidents or portraying concerned parties as criminal. I’m very, very tired of the vicious reporting that is being hurled at the school that has raised me, loved me, nurtured me and been my safe space for ten years. I am not going to be quiet anymore, because if there’s one thing the school has taught me, it is that I have the power and ability to make a change no matter where I come from. And, well, if I can stand by the people who have stood by me whenever I needed them, then I believe our faith can move mountains and enlighten all minds.