How the news flirts with disaster
April 17, 2013 § 1 Comment
As sure as night follows day, one of the things that happens when a natural catastrophe or act of terror or war happens is the scramble in news rooms to find out the nationalities of those killed or injured or who were there when it happened. It’s an automatic response. Journalists in news rooms hundreds and thousands of kilometres away from the epicentre look for the local area person or persons who may have been caught up.
The story priority cascades downwards from was a local area person killed; were they hurt; were they there but uninjured (can they tell us what they saw and did they have a lucky or miraculous escape). Bottom of the list as you drill down is did a local area person have a friend or in-law (a local area person of the said local area) who was directly affected by the tragedy and/or violence. If none of these apply, then the story is simply an international story that fails to make the crossover into national news.
When explained like that, it sounds faintly ridiculous but that’s how it works. It’s also how New Zealand news rooms would have responded to the Boston Marathon bombing this week and, given that the event regularly draws runners from all around the world, there would have been not unreasonable odds on there being at least one New Zealander taking part.
By the end of April 16, three people were dead and more than 100 people had been injured in what the American authorities are treating as a terrorist attack. To the relief of New Zealanders who may have had relatives and friends in Boston at the time, no Kiwis were seriously hurt. But the reaction of those New Zealanders becomes an important strand of the story here.
It was perhaps insensitive of me send a facetious tweet but this rush to action in newsrooms here to locate a New Zealander in the attack is its own way a fairly tasteless ritual. But it becomes more acutely so if the death or injury to a New Zealander is framed in sharp relief against the other casualties, making it seem as if those casualties mattered less.
At least one journalist took offence at my tweet but I think it’s a valid point expressed satirically. Journalists are not callous people unmoved by tragedy but the nature of the business can make them inured to the suffering of others and the old editor’s adage, if it bleeds, it leads, still holds true.
There were, of course, New Zealanders in the marathon and they were able to tell their stories to the New Zealand media as you will have seen here and here. But as any news editor will tell you, if there was no local area angle to dig into, the story would have less of a connection to a local area audience. My big issue with putting a tight focus on our local area is how if the editorial process is handled clumsily it can make our news industry appear more parochial than it usually is.
How else would you explain that images of the All Black captain Richie McCaw are more likely to appear on the front page of the biggest daily newspaper in New Zealand than the prime minister by a ratio of 11 to four? This is one of the observations made in a study called Selling the News by an Auckland graphic designer, James Wendelborn.
James has spent a considerable amount of his time over the past 15 months classifying and displaying New Zealand Herald front pages. He’s illustrated and published the data on a Tumblr. It confirms what you might already suspect.
The infographic at the top of this post is stylised depiction of what a typical Herald front page might look like. Yes, really. And the four ingredients that top the list for space are crime, tragedy, advertising and sport. He observes that the Herald features an expected strong emphasis on New Zealand stories and that crime and tragedy stories occupy a disproportion amount of space to the frequency in which they appear there (and they appear often!).
And here’s what Herald front pages looked like throughout 2012.
James has broken the stories down into three main categories – good news, bad news and neutral. One of his conclusions:
There’s a definite tendency to report ‘bad news’ which historically, readers will tell you they don’t want but editors will tell you that’s what sells.
This is supported by the probability that 43 per cent of the stories were in the bad news category, with good news at 27 per cent and neutral at 30 per cent. But wait, there’s more.
The Herald is much more interested in small, personal stories – the death of a teenager in rural New Zealand is always going to get the lead story over hundreds dying overseas. As they have no doubt discovered, this will be because that’s what sells – there is a well-established mentality of caring more about one local tragedy over many international ones.
James also notes that many important issues rarely get a look in on the front page. For example, environmental stories, and this includes that elephant, climate change, occupied 0.3 per cent of the front page acreage over the 12 month long study.
When climate change is such a major issue, only seven environment stories is kind of irresponsible. Richie McCaw shouldn’t be featured on the country’s front page more times than the Prime Minister. And I’m frankly over the paper’s infatuation with property prices and rugby players, although perhaps the country needs to get over those things first.
Draw your own conclusions. Visit Selling the News and connect to James on his Twitter or send him an email and let him know what you think of his work. He’s made a fascinating contribution to any discussion on what we as New Zealanders might want in our news and what matters to us as a society.
Death of a newspaper
March 27, 2013 § 5 Comments
The presses are to stop rolling for Wellington’s Capital Times and it is a moment for reflection. For as long as I have been a Wellingtonian, the free weekly newspaper has been taking the city’s cultural and social pulse. After 38 years, it more than qualifies as an inner city institution but there’s little room for sentiment in the economics of the digital age.
In matters of the life and death of a small, hard scrabble newspaper, nostalgia makes little difference if advertising revenue is tanking and last week, the owners of the Capital Times announced they had decided to call it a day. They could see no glimmer of an upswing for the paper and they are right.
The newspaper’s editor, Niels Reinsborg, says rival community publications owned by APN and Fairfax are slashing advertising rates by up to 50 per cent. While advertising remains steady at the Capital Times, revenue is down and costs are up. The owners think the situation is not sustainable and the prognosis is not healthy. It simply doesn’t make sense to keep going.
Capital Times will be ending publication after three issues. We wanted to say a huge thanks to our readers over the years. You all rock.—
Capital Times (@CapitalTimesNZ) March 22, 2013
The news has sadden many of its contributors and readers. Its long standing film reviewer, Dan Slevin, is disappointed. He thinks there’s a few more years left in newspaper that has carved a niche for itself as a metro giveaway with a heavy focus on the arts and entertainment scene. But even he agrees that the end will have to come – if not sooner than certainly later.
The end of the Capital Times – which has a circulation of 20,000 and a staff of eight – is another signpost on the breakneck road between traditional news business models and the increasingly digital, mobile, touchscreen, app driven world of publishing. Advertising is shifting online or being divided between the old and the new, making for a smaller pie from which all newspapers are trying to take a bigger slice out of. Caught in an advertising war for fewer dollars, the Capital Times was becoming increasingly vulnerable.
Factor in a wider business environment characterised by recession, job insecurity, redundancies, cautious consumer spending and a retail and hospitality sector that is, by and large, also pinching, and it all makes for a confluence of gloom for newspapers.
Advertisers are less reliant on newspaper advertising. They are learning that it is free to use social media and peer to peer sharing through online social networks. All of this makes it extremely difficult to keep a marginal, independent community publication going for longer when doing so would be postponing the inevitable.
While many publishers are attempting to future proof their publications by moving their content to the web, they are still baffled by how to make money from their online publications. Newspaper and magazine publishing is currently trapped in a kind of limbo between hard copy and digital and it is going to take deep pockets to persevere until the online rewards are realised. The business model that works for a 24 page free community paper isn’t the same as for a local community news website that relies on volunteers, subscribers and donors to keep its costs down and augment any advertising it can attract.
By and large, the bells are tolling for the newspaper industry. It has been in a sunset phase for some time now. It joins CD shops, postal deliveries, video game parlours, travel agencies, book and video shops in the endangered category. In the years ahead, we will be mourning the extinction of many animal species as habitat loss and poaching take their toll on the last wild Sumatran tiger or black rhino. To this melancholy list, we are also seeing the end of days for many brick and mortar businesses – to which I add newspapers. And that is cause of reflection.
The last edition of the Capital Times will hit the streets on April 10.
Forever dolphin love
March 1, 2013 § 2 Comments
As news stories go, it wasn’t supposed to be much of a news story. Word on Twitter this week was that a huge pod of dolphins was churning its way around Wellington harbour. The Radio New Zealand news room ignored it because it is radio without pictures and, anyway, dolphins come into the harbour at least once a year on the hunt for schools of fish. I wouldn’t call them a common sight but you could say they are a regular sight.
But in no time at all, the Wellington twitterati was cooing with pleasure as more and more people from vantage points in office blocks overlooking the water witnessed the massive pod of up to 100 bottlenose dolphins turn the inner harbour into a banquet. They laboured their way in front of the skyscrapers that lined Jervois Quay like a peloton in a road cycle race and Twitter was positively radiating delight at the sight.
I could just make out the pod from a window on the third floor of the eastern side of Radio New Zealand House before it ploughed across to the Overseas Terminal and Oriental Bay. There they lingered a while, casting a spell in glorious sunshine in front of hundreds of Wellingtonians on the waterfront. This was happening on a superlative summer afternoon – the latest in an unbroken series of beautiful days in what forecasters are calling the sunniest summer in a lifetime and longer.
Just got a little teary thinking bout how the dolphins were a fitting tribute to the last day of the amazing summer we had in @Wellington_NZ—
Beth Brash (@genkibeth) February 28, 2013
There are photos from the Scoop team here and there’s raw video from TV3 here.
Twitter transmitted the excitement to those of us trapped in our workplaces. All the while I was thinking what an endorsement this was for our city, for the cleanliness of the water in the harbour and for their status as a protected species, that this unusually large visitation by one of the most recognisable ambassadors of the wild oceanic world should feel so at ease and at home so close to us.
'dolphins' is now trending in #Wellington trendsmap.com/nz/wellington—
Trendsmap Wellington (@TrendWellington) February 28, 2013
The clock stopped at our Wellington office thanks to a pod of #dolphins in the @Wellington_NZ harbour! http://t.co/kOd8kAXvW9—
AJ Park (@AJParkIP) February 28, 2013
A sight you don't get in London! #Dolphins in #Wellington_NZ #purenewzealand #wildnewzealand @ Oriental… instagr.am/p/WQj9f7nUCF/—
Arpita Dutta (@ArpiDutta) February 28, 2013
Looks like East by West Ferry has taken a detour to check out the #dolphins in @Wellington_NZ Harbour. #lucky twitpic.com/c7dmul—
Angela Moriarty (@AngelaMoriarty) February 28, 2013
Genius from @lukeappleby – an artist's impression of the #dolphins scaled up by their twitter play twitpic.com/c7dtmr—
Angela Moriarty (@AngelaMoriarty) February 28, 2013
If you’re wondering where the headline came from, here’s a video of the inspiration – Forever Dolphin Love by New Zealand’s own Connan Mockasin.
Heading towards catastrophe
February 11, 2013 § 1 Comment
The economist and philanthropist, Gareth Morgan, is right. There are simply too many cats in New Zealand for the native bird population to prosper. The concentration of cats in our cities is completely at odds with an idealised view many New Zealanders have of their country as one that is clean, green and natural.
Morgan has started a campaign to make New Zealanders think again about being a cat owner. His website Cats to Go sets out the arguments as to why cats are menace to native fauna – not just birds, but skink, gecko, frog and insect species.
In 2011, New Zealanders owned 1.4 million cats and that number corresponded to one in two households owning at least one cat. On his website, Morgan quotes studies that show cats have contributed to the extinction of nine native bird species and raised the risk of losing another 33 native birds.
But for suggesting that people should think again about being a cat owner, Morgan has become a lightning rod for cat lovers, many of whom are in denial that their little Tiddles is a pathological killer of native wildlife.
It’s interesting that some of the reaction has come from people who seem to be in complete denial that their cat is a top of the food chain alpha predator because, apart from dogs, cats have no natural enemies in New Zealand.
Interesting what Gareth REALLY said –> "keep your cat confined" and "make sure it stays on your section" & "Get rid of cats with no owners"—
Jonathon Hagger (@HagmanNZ) January 30, 2013
One of the arguments used by the cat protection lobby is that cats also control rodents but as this science blog post points out, with fewer cats, we humans would simply raise own game to keep the numbers of rats and mice down, as we already do with possums and stoats.
Excellent posts on the cats debate from @sciblogsnz check them out here. ow.ly/hcxX1 #catstogo—
Gareth Morgan (@garethmorgannz) January 28, 2013
Morgan’s position has also been subject to a number of distortions, some funny memes, Facebook pages like this one and this one. But he never advocated for the destruction of pet cats but makes a case for destroying feral cats – as we already do to rabbits and possums – because he argues that the trap, neuter and release (TNR) programme employed is not effective in preventing the carnage caused by cats.
Well played #cat, well played… Take that #GarethMorgan …@mathewjohnsmith @NessSharpe you might enjoy this. http://t.co/XdLWIAKt—
Rebecca Smith (@Rebecca_FJ) January 24, 2013
The science is unequivocal. As this study shows – and this one and this one – cats are responsible for an enormous slaughter of small birds and animals. The danger is that cats are killing off the native birds at rates that are higher than they can replenish their populations or even grow their numbers.
If Morgan’s campaign gets people thinking about whether they will replace their ageing moggy when it finally passes on and hangs up its claws or to choose to have only one cat, that’s got to be more compatible with efforts being made by the Department of Conservation, local authorities and dedicated individuals who are working to protect New Zealand’s natural wildlife.
For the record, I feel it is necessary to mention that our household has a cat. She is lethal to the local rat and mice population. But she has brought home the occasional silvereye, weta and skink. I’ve come around to the pleasure of native birds because our home in Wellington’s Aro Valley has become a drop in centre for these guys. That these three kaka or native New Zealand bush parrots are in our neighbourhood is tribute to the work done by the Zealandia wildlife sanctuary.
Zealandia provides a safe, predator proof environment for native birds – a kind of fenced land ark which is repopulating the surrounding Wellington suburbs with birds that filled the pre-1840s tree lined natural landscape. The kaka, tui, morepork that are seen and heard on a daily basis in our immediate neighbourhood have only been made possible because they are able to breed in complete safety from cats and other predators within Zealandia’s fortified 225 hectare valley.
As Morgan’s Cats To Go website puts it:
Imagine a New Zealand teeming with native wildlife, penguins on the beach, Kiwis roaming about in your garden. Imagine hearing birdsong in our cities. Sure, we are seeing more tui and kereru these days, thanks to some good work on rat and possum control in some areas. But many other species are still endangered; such as the cheeky kaka, beautiful kokako and curious weka. These birds once ruled this land. Some species can’t coexist with cats and rats at all, such as mohua, saddleback and robins, so they rely on a few pest free refuges for their survival.
The call to reduce cat numbers in New Zealand has caught the eye of a number of international media outlets, including The Guardian, The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Atlantic and online websites like Russia Today and Boing Boing. While Morgan is described as a cat hater by Boing Boing, none of the others beats this indecent, over-the-top report from Taiwan’s tabloid NMA animation studio video. Enjoy but remember this is a bizarre and entertaining distortion and not an accurate reflection of the arguments.
Media freedom in China goes south for the weekend
January 10, 2013 § Leave a Comment
下午來了幫打渾的,無關左右,拉完橫幅後直接殺進南週旁招商銀行那座樓裡 http://t.co/jppWrSbJ—
公民小彪 (@oubiaofeng) January 09, 2013
The news out of Hong Kong is that the Southern Weekend newspaper strike is over. It ended quietly and some kind of agreement has been reached with the journalists angry at having their independence threatened by provincial propagandists in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.
It’s a no brainer to see how this brush fire over freedom of expression had the potential to become a conflagration for the Chinese authorities. Journalists generally stand shoulder to shoulder with their colleagues around the world, especially those who, by and large, believe in protecting the independence of their profession from controlling governments, big business and other powerful influences.
By their curmudgeonly nature, journalists hate interference and, most of the time, this works well in many countries as a check on abuses and corruption. The news media exposes corruption, waste and abuses of power and that in turn makes governments and corporations more accountable and transparent. That’s the theory and often the practice.
It is also one reason why the News International phone hacking story in Britain is so shocking. Instead of holding those in influence and power to account, it was the media that were committing a terrible abrogation of their responsibilities.
But that’s not the case in China where the Southern Weekend, a reform leaning newspaper that has carved out a reputation for integrity and independence, has been at the centre of a censorship row since last week. While it may be the latest in a string of clashes it has had with the authorities, for Southern Weekend, this is arguably the most important so far.
Here’s a New York Times article to help sketch you an idea of the newspaper’s crusading pedigree. That article is from ten years ago. It was breaking stories through its investigative journalism then, and has been a constant thorn in the side of the provincial Guangdong government.
Guangdong is not just any province. It is a key economic driver of the Chinese economy. Home of the Cantonese speaking diaspora, if Guangdong was a nation, it would be on a GDP basis the 13th largest economy in the world.
What happens in Guangdong matters a great deal to the rest of China. And news of any unrest, as in the case of the Wukan village strike, soon reaches Hong Kong and the news media there, unlike many of its counterparts in the rest of the mainland, is free to report it.
When the Guangdong propaganda ministry instructed its Communist Party representatives within the Southern Media Group (the company that owns the Southern Weekly) to publish a pro-government New Year editorial in the newspaper on January 3, it was duly done. But it was printed without the agreement of the newspaper’s journalists who rebelled after the fact and went on strike over what they viewed as an egregious breach of the newspaper’s editorial independence. Look here for a detailed breakdown from the University of Hong Kong’s excellent China Media Project on what went down after the editorial was published.
News of the strike and protests then sped through Chinese internet. There’s also been some spill over on Twitter which some Chinese netizens access by circumventing the Great Firewall. The Southern Weekend journalists may even have been emboldened to strike because of the support shown by many Chinese internet users.
In what has become a very familiar scenario in a much bigger struggle over information, the so-called ‘sensitive keywords’ are being scrubbed from the Chinese web by China’s state censors and by self-censoring micro-blog platforms. Check out the China Media Project’s Data Journalism Lab for a rundown on what is getting censored on weibo (a direct Chinese translation of the word micro-blog).
It’s all a bit like whack-a-mole. I have previously written about the war for information that is being waged on the Chinese internet. Blogging, micro-blogging and mobile telephony have exploded the old information monopoly once completely owned and controlled by the state. Information on the internet now flows from many to many and it’s a very different information environment from when the government was able to broadcast information in the legacy media landscape that existed before the internet.
As an aside, there is one common tactic that Chinese netizens use to circumvent the censorship – the use of homonyms. In Mandarin, Southern Weekend is nanfang zhoumo which is abbreviated to nan zhou. A homonym (same tones but different characters) for the abbreviated name of Southern Weekend is southern porridge and this innocuous phrase is doing the rounds on Chinese micro-blogs.
Full and abbrev. forms of "Southern Weekly" still blocked on Weibo, but you can search "southern porridge" (南粥)—
China Media Project (@cmphku) January 10, 2013
Photos of the demonstrations outside the Southern Media Group building in Guangzhou can be found by searching under the hashtags #nfzm and #nanzhou.
共产党统治之下,这事很显然会平息,不会有革命,不会有动荡。RT @liveshenzhen: 南周的走向就是未来中国的走向,政府是让步还是镇压,后果只有事后才知道,快点决定吧。。 @Benfilm63: 转……现场有部分公民拿着花。 http://t.co/BjEgtQYb—
邓二晃晃 (@dc_b) January 07, 2013
These two men have placards urging the protection of news media freedom.
袁小華兄勇敢“@raulmouse: 不能到现场,发张昨天路过的合影以示支持。 http://t.co/aQjG9Wf0”—
公民小彪 (@oubiaofeng) January 07, 2013
The striking journalists and supporters did not have it all their own way. Here’s a counter demonstration by a group of Maoists.
尼瑪難道今天毛左、五毛們拿了加班工資嗎?剛好像要收工下班了,到現在還不走。還是看到這邊公民們還在堅持,不好意思走啊? #2013公民行动之年 http://t.co/6iQWZtvG—
公民小彪 (@oubiaofeng) January 09, 2013
If the news today is accurate, the fixers have had their day and the embers of rebellion are being dampened down. A truce is in place and the Southern Weekend has resumed production. But for a while, the state authorities had a migraine and the authorities in Beijing were starting to get the headache too. The Southern Weekend showdown – and an associated kerfuffle at the Beijing News – is happening at a time of political transition for China. The country’s new paramount leader, Xi Xinping, is taking over from the incumbent, Hu Jintao, and it’s a sensitive time for China’s leadership. Once upon a time in China, it was possible to kill the rooster to scare the chickens but the internet makes it so much harder to clean away the mess and close the cooking pot.
2013第一個新詞: #「避言套」 “@zouxingtong: 好一個避言套~ #南周 http://t.co/S3l56EW2”—
公民小彪 (@oubiaofeng) January 07, 2013
Rest in peace, Nirbhaya
December 31, 2012 § 3 Comments
There’s been anger, sadness and shame in India over the ordeal of a young woman who was raped and critically injured by a gang of men on a bus in the capital, New Delhi. This shock reached an apogee on Saturday, December 29, when the unnamed 23 year old medical student died of her injuries in Singapore 12 days after being attacked.
The outpouring on social media has coalesced around a number of hashtags on Twitter including #delhigangrape, #delhirape and #braveheart. The Indian news media have christened her Amanat, Damini and Nirbhaya. Each of those names have been trending and now one of the most used hashtags is #RIPNirbhaya.
The Times of India says it started the trend to call the young medical student Nirbhaya which in Hindi means ‘fearless’. The other translation is ‘braveheart’ and she’s being called India’s braveheart which lends itself to being another of the trending hashtags used to express the grief and rage of many Indian Twitter users.
Facebook which is used by 60 million Indians has also been a venue of similar sentiments. This Times of India article shows just how many Indians have taken to the Internet to demonstrate their feelings and another TOI report says many Indians have turned their social media avatars to black in sympathy.
One tweet aggregator and tracking website, Twee.dot.co, says #RIPNirbhaya tweets ranked seventh in the world on December 29 when the word from Singapore’s Mount Elizabeth Hospital where she was being given specialist care was that she had passed away. The news burst onto Twitter and within hours, using Trendsmap, it is possible to see where the majority of #RIPNirbhaya tweets were originating.
#ripnirbhaya is now trending in #Bangalore trendsmap.com/in/bangalore—
Trendsmap Bangalore (@TrendsBangalore) December 29, 2012
As seen in the screen grab below, taken early on Sunday morning New Zealand Time, the main sources are the major cities of Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. Also featured are Hyderabad, Chennai and Calcutta.
Here is a sampling of some of the tweets.
The poor girl didn't die of multiple organ failure she died of multiple system failure of our government #DelhiBraveheart #RIPNirbhaya.—
Ruchika Vyas (@RuchsterV) December 29, 2012
The day women can walk freely on the streets of Delhi without getting abused, harmed or raped, India will become independent!#RIPNirbhaya—
Mahesh-CRAZY MSD FAN (@mahe28rockr) December 29, 2012
If the Girl was sent to Singapore for Better Treatment then the Rapists should be Sent to Saudi Arabia for Better Justice #RIPNirbhaya #fb—
Pragdish Roy (@PragdishRoy) December 29, 2012
RIP, Nirbhaya: Pay your homage to the braveheart [TOI] buff.ly/UslkvA | #RIPNirbhaya #India—
A.R.Karthick (@arkarthick) December 29, 2012
I wish we had a real superhero who would just shoot the bastards in the jail before any useless court trials #JusticeforWomen #RIPNirbhaya—
randomass (@saahilvd) December 29, 2012
#RIPNirbhaya: Pay your homage to the braveheart here – The Times of India timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/RIP…—
Times of India (@timesofindia) December 29, 2012
Let this movement not die out! Do as much as u can.. Stand up & oppose eve-teasing! Respect girls! Respect us! Respect me! RIP#Nirbhaya—
sumbul mashhadi (@sumbulmashhadi) December 29, 2012
There are tweets from celebrities, prominent media figures and even foreign diplomats. The actors, Shah Rukh Khan, Sonam Kapoor and Amitabh Bachchan, the tennis player Sania Mirza, the cricketer Yuvraj Singh, and the CNN-IBN television anchor, Sagarika Ghose, are among those that tweeted their tributes to the young woman.
Death of #braveheart needs total overhaul in attitudes.Violence against women not "womens issues" they are political issues concerning all—
Sagarika Ghose (@sagarikaghose) December 29, 2012
Heartbreaking to hear about damini ! Rip braveheart of india !—
yuvraj singh (@YUVSTRONG12) December 29, 2012
Please don't let her tragic death be in vain. RIP nirbhaya—
Sonam Kapoor (@sonamakapoor) December 29, 2012
(1) We couldn't save u but wot a big voice u have, u brave little girl.That voice is telling us that rape is not an aberration,not a mistake—
SHAH RUKH KHAN (@iamsrk) December 29, 2012
T 974 – 'Amanat', 'Damini' just a name now .. her body has passed away, but her soul shall shall forever stir our hearts !!!—
Amitabh Bachchan (@SrBachchan) December 28, 2012
To our friends in #India: we share your outrage over an act of unimaginable cruelty against one of our sisters. RIP Nirbhaya—
Susan Rice (@AmbassadorRice) December 29, 2012
If the reaction on Twitter and other social media platforms is representative, this crime that has convulsed India is to become a rallying point for changing attitudes in what is ostensibly a chauvinistic and patriarchal country. As one woman protestor told the BBC World Service, the movement sparked by this terrible news story is not just a protest but a revolution.
Many fair-minded Indians will be hoping that this crime will be, in the words of one Indian commentator, an inflexion which marks a turning point towards achieving a society that eventually values baby girls as highly as boys. This in a country where ultrasound and foeticide are commonly practised to ensure the greater likelihood that a baby is a boy.
In India, sexual harassment is commonly known by the euphemism ‘eve teasing’ which makes it seem almost a playful activity. But the death of the young woman that has galvanised Indian society has shown the phrase to have a sinister edge and shone a spotlight on the issue of sex crimes – most of which go unreported in India for a range of reasons. These include the reluctance of victims to report rape because the authorities are unresponsive and if the case goes through the legal system, it may be years before it comes to trial. Even then, conviction rates are woefully low.
Perhaps #RIPNirbhaya will go some way to changing India’s sexual inequality despite the depressing reality that there are untold Nirbhayas who will remain far from the public gaze. But for a short time at least, the news media will be looking to tell their stories and the government will be keen to demonstrate its willingness to listen.
Postscript: Since I wrote this, Google India has created its own tribute.
Google pays 'The Delhi braveheart' a tribute on India homepage gadgets.ndtv.com/others/news/go… http://t.co/Z3nzXcRp—
NDTV Gadgets (@NDTVGadgets) December 31, 2012









