Winston Churchill could not have imagined how prescient his words would be; how decades after he uttered them, they would be truer than they ever were. “A lie gets half way around the world before truth gets a chance to put its pants on,” he once said. This is equally true of rumours too.
Kate-gate, as the infamous doctored photo incident might well be called, has a voyeuristic world in its hold. An image of the Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton, posing with her three children, her arms wrapped around two of them, released by Buckingham Palace on the occasion of Mother’s Day, was in the news for all the wrong reasons. The media discovered that the image had been manipulated and spent time and energy speculating about it. Rumours swirled at greater speed after Kate herself admitted that she had edited the photo. The memes and updates fed the relentless interest of the world, as the ‘non story’ travelled everywhere.
Across the world, journalists battle with the ability of rumours to capture the imagination and attention of the public. Sometimes, this support from the public offers a bulwark of resistance against truth itself, making the job of countering rumours with facts burdensome.
In the Indian subcontinent, it has become common for rumours to gather moss until rigorous fact-checks lead people to sometimes delete their posts. But rumours are most resilient; they keep cropping up. It is true that some may not be very harmful — for instance, old videos of heavy rainfall often circulate repeatedly, much like boot cuts become fashionable every few years. But others are more significant and impact the life of the person/persons involved. All of them, though, are gloriously at odds, in varying degrees, with the facts of the case.
It is not that easy to prove that something does not exist. This makes a journalist run around in circles to look for evidence that something has not happened. Among journalists who have done this, the worst job is to confirm that some one is not yet dead. A well-known example is the recent declaration by a fake account on social media that Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen was no more. Telugu film star Sarath Babu, too, suffered a hasty end at the hands of social media, while he was ailing. Journalists who constantly and compulsively trawl social media probably caught this rumour earlier than the families, and the scramble began to “break the news”. But how do you decently ask someone if they are alive? Or for that matter, ask them if their mother, spouse or children are alive? We journalists hem and haw. Sometimes we may also come across as slow-witted to the people to whom we say, “I hope all is well. Just calling to check.”
The lack of access to the truth is frustrating. Some of the toughest things to confirm are facts about the hospitalisation of celebrities or political leaders. Unlike parts of the West, where a culture of voluntary disclosure of information by the managers of celebrities is common, in India, you hear only what the celebrity’s family or coterie want you to hear. Even those in the know are probably barred from speaking. Fair enough, but it only creates an atmosphere where rumours not only germinate but also thrive.
The case of former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa, who spent months at a private hospital before she passed away, was one such instance. A Tamil news channel announced one night that she had died, but there was nothing official to confirm this — neither a bulletin nor an official release from the government that she was technically still heading. The short period that followed that “news break” might best be slotted in the ‘berserk phase’ of every journalist’s life. It turned out, of course, that the channel had jumped the gun. In this age where there is a burning desire to break news, even if tragic, without confirmation, there is no peace, neither for journalists nor the people involved.
ramya.kannan@thehindu.co.in
