Religion and the media

I had recently been to St. Stephens College Delhi as a panelist for a discussion on “Religion and the Media”. The other panelist was Prof. Vinod Chaudhari of the same college. This is a brief summary of the points I raised there.
Religion as faith is very different from religion as ideology, as Ashis Nandy has argued rather powerfully. Columns on religion and reportage on festivals, which pertain to religion as faith, therefore, constitute a largely unproblematic domain of journalistic writing. It is only in reporting mass mobilizations on religious grounds and situations of religious conflict that newspapers and television channels should be particularly careful.
The very nature of the media is such that they create communities over a vast geographical area.
Prior to the printing press -- and the advent of quick means of transport that could transport the mass-produced literature in printed form across a vast geographical space – notions of community were localized, based on personal interaction and interdependence. This is not to deny pre-modern inter-regional linkages, but these were rather elitist in nature, based on the movement of missionaries, traders and envoys across regions.
The printing press came as a watershed. It fostered “imagined communities” of little or no personal interaction. The very act of reading a newspaper, as Benedict Anderson has argued, is like a community ritual, for the reader is aware that the same writing is being read by many others over a wide area, thus leading to a print-community.
Seen in this context, a local conflict is no longer “local”. Historians often argue that communalism in India is a modern phenomenon. The reason perhaps is not the religious tolerance of pre-modern times but the absence of trans-local print-communities in medieval times. It is only after the growth of the media that a conflict in Malabar can have consequences in Saharanpur. A local rumour can spark off riots in regions far apart – something that calls for great caution in journalistic reportage of religious conflict anywhere.
The print medium has also been responsible for the creation of compact religious communities across vast geographical spaces. Hinduism, particularly, is unimaginable as a compact community prior to the coming of print. It earlier referred to a very loose network of practices, but the dissemination through print of Orientalist writings and the large-scale pamphleteering of organizations like the Arya Samaj fostered a modern, compact Hinduism. Thus not only does print create national, and even global, religious conflicts out of local ones, but it has also been, to an extent, historically responsible for the creation of compact, global religious communities.
Identities exist in overlapping, multiple constructs of the self: one can have co-existing religious, national, regional, caste, class and gender identities. But the nature of the media is such that they tend to make one of these variants the dominant variant in the moment of reading, or viewing. A Hindu or Muslim reader going through a story on a communal riot may become, during that moment of reading, primarily or essentially a Hindu or Muslim. This is not a fault of reportage: it is a limitation of the medium itself.
It is within such structural limitations that a journalist has to operate while reporting on religion as ideology. Thus, avoiding sensationalism and trying not to name communities is generally advisable.