It must be obvious to any observer of a developing current affairs story that Iran is an ordinary example at best, and by no means a rare one, of a place where the state has brutalised its people. —AP/File photo

A FARSI-speaking European student enrolled at an Indian university emailed the following message from Tehran on Tuesday to his friend in Delhi. ‘I reached and found a hotel and slept a bit. Everything seems to be as usual here.

Tried to call abroad, but didn’t come through. Will get a local number very soon though. Will have a walk around the centre and call the people I know. Everything seems to be normal. All news from you is more than welcome.’ Where should I fit the message in the relentless flow of twitter coming out of Iran these days?

While the tweets from mobile phones being assiduously pursued by the BBC and CNN underscore some kind of calamity that has befallen democracy in Iran, the message I received conveys clearly the opposite picture. Moreover, the credibility of the message is shored up by the fact that the writer is an avid observer of politics in Iran, Afghanistan, everywhere.

It must be obvious to any observer of a developing current affairs story that Iran is an ordinary example at best, and by no means a rare one, of a place where the state has brutalised its people. Just drive through the hills from northern Tehran, from where most of the Gucci protesters are trooping for their daily demonstrations, towards Mount Damavand. On the picturesque journey stop at a resort called Dizin. You would find here women who will take off their veils and ski in the snow, often writing large love messages across the glistening hills to their boyfriends. This is the haunt of the powerful elite that is protesting President Ahmadinejad’s election. Most news agencies are not even allowed into Saudi Arabia to be able to judge what deterrent is meted out to the protesters, if any are allowed. In India, the home ministry has just added the Maoists as a 34th terrorist group to its tally of banned outfits. How many of these have been ever discussed by the BBC or CNN or are even known to the rest of the world?

There is a bloodbath going on in the forests of Chhattisgarh, another was taking shape in Lalgarh, in West Bengal. There was no twitter out of Sri Lanka when the Tamils were being massacred mercilessly a few weeks ago. Kashmir of course seems to have fallen off the radar long ago. What happens there is of little or no interest to the global markets and, therefore, the global media.

Over the years we have given glorified names like ‘colour revolution’ to orchestrated street power that went on to subvert electoral choices made by countries like Ukraine and Georgia. This is not to suggest that elections in both those countries were fair and may not have been stolen. That is not the issue at all. The question is why those specific elections are of paramount importance. Why is their subversion by street fighters hailed as a revolution? (May I suggest that there was a colour revolution, to borrow the description, which went unreported in India? Sonia Gandhi had won the 2004 mandate but was threatened out of the race by rightwing protesters and a stock exchange that colluded with them.)

Over the last few days, recourse to patently untested sources for hard news has become the normal fare. Any serious school of journalism would shun these sources, which are tantamount to gossip, as unreliable. In a way their use marks a new low in the undulating history of the global media.

Their journey began with homing pigeons and now it seems to have come to its penultimate touchdown, the arrival greeted not with a bang but with a twitter. The signs came amid conflict. The crisis in Iraq first wreaked havoc on the global media’s credentials. It mutated seasoned correspondents into embedded reporters who were compelled to give a one-sided and often unquestioning view of the mayhem wreaked by the forces they were tethered to. The current chaos in Iran seems to have rendered whatever remained of their integrity into a business of decoding tweets. Let us see how we meandered our way through history to get here.

According to one account, it took 12 days for the news of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination to reach Europe. It came astride a British coaster, and one of the occupants of the boat was a professional punter who had brought along his pair of well-trained pigeons. A mile from Liverpool the pigeons were released with the message of Lincoln’s death. The scribbled notes were delivered, as programmed, to the right man at the bourse who promptly sold his positions in the US railroad market and made a killing when the European markets crashed.

Such was the trauma of the news gap between European and American markets that the first transatlantic cables were laid in 1866 immediately after Lincoln’s market-moving death. The pigeons were the harbingers of today’s real-time business monitors. But the monitors only reflect the market’s responses to a phenomenon. What if the phenomenon was concocted, as may well be the case with Iran today? An opportunity came on Tuesday for the global media to tweak itself back to journalism of probity. But it was missed at the news conference addressed by President Barack Obama. He was persistently grilled about why he had not offered a strong enough reaction to the alleged state violence in Tehran. No one asked the simple question about what he thought was going on in Tehran.

When the president said something milder than the media were expecting to goad out of him, the CNN anchor cast a look at his popularity rating, which to her surprise was intact at 60 per cent. The grudging punch line came from the channel’s political guru, who expressed his dismay at Obama’s unwavering neutrality thus: ‘This president has been more popular than his policies.’

Let me share an experience with an international financial news agency I worked with. The 1994 genocide in Rwanda was in full cry. It had already resulted in the systematic massacre of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in less than 100 days. The daily slow-motion killings with machetes soon became tedious news to purvey. One day the reporter in Kigali changed the humdrum routine with a dispatch about how the coffee crop in Rwanda was seriously affected by the massacre.

That was all it took to rattle the world. The New York Stock Exchange heralded the great news by sending the global coffee prices soaring. The news editor sent a congratulatory message to the Kigali reporter on the open ticker, a rarity, for other bureaus to emulate. His message read: ‘Thanks for the great coffee story from Kigali. Bag of gold follows.’ One wonders why we need journalists to dilate on market-moving gossip when homing pigeons do a better job.

The writer is Dawn correspondent in Delhi

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