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The week before, student elections had ruled the news. Universities and college campuses, where young people learn and contemplate the complexities of the world, were taken over by serious politics – and violence.
Amid the chaos, the Nepalese media has no time to cover very important issues, such as the plight of thousands of internally displaced people. The grim life of these people is not as titillating as a picture of the drunken son of a prime minister, and it does not have the drama of student elections.
Nepalese media, which follows the “hot news” brand of journalism instead of the in-depth investigative kind, has not found the story of some 50,000 to 70,000 people, displaced during the decade of conflict in the country, worthy of coverage. This has been going on for so many years that it is no longer surprising.
True, student elections and the interesting pictures are fresh news compared to the decade-old problem of displaced people. Still, the media shamelessly covers other old issues, especially those that pit one party against another.
And yet, no editor, reporter or columnist in the mainstream Nepalese media has given the issue the coverage it deserves. When the displaced people launch street protests it is covered, and the next day the issue disappears from national debate.
My beef with the Nepalese media does not stop here. Before the Constituent Assembly elections, some well-known news outlets and media big shots engaged in open politicking, completely ignoring the ethics of journalism. Their conduct was so outrageous it shamed the entire journalist community.
Some openly campaigned for the Maoists, others claimed that the former rebels would lose the elections by a wide margin. In all they acted like paid spokespersons of the political parties rather than being fair and independent.
The media went into overdrive when two young boys from Kathmandu were murdered. They blamed the Maoists and their youth group, the Young Communist League, even before the police investigation was completed. They did not bother to print an explanation for their claim or to apologize to the group when it turned out to have been wrongly accused.
The list of instances in which the Nepalese media have flaunted professional ethics is long, and they keep repeating past mistakes with incredible regularity.
Unfortunately, there are very few who dare to speak up against the media’s excesses. In today’s world of media freedoms and all the political correctness that implies, Nepalese news organizations have a free ride in terms of professional ethics and quality of coverage. They are frequently attacked, not when they violate the rules of ethics, but when they write unflattering things about a political party or an influential person.
The result of the media’s sheer incompetence and negligence is that the public never knows what is really going on in the country. Issues of importance to the public are regularly sidelined in favor of “hot and fancy” news on politicians and criminals.
No wonder Nepalese parents are fearful when their children say they want to become journalists.
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(Bhumika Ghimire is a freelance reporter. Her articles have been published at OhMyNews, NepalNews, Toward Freedom, Telegraph Nepal, Himal South Asian and ACM Ubiquity. She is also a regular contributor to News Front Weekly, in Kathmandu, and Nepal Abroad, in Washington D.C. She can be reached at bhumika_g@yahoo.com. ©Copyright Bhumika Ghimire.)
