Tag: Zee News

There’s a scientistic eclipse

There is a solar eclipse today and news websites are as usual participating in amplifying nonsense. It’s prima facie not nonsense in and of itself but because it’s not qualified as astrological material. That is, it’s an example of news sites not exercising good judgment.

Science doesn’t have a monopoly on sense-making, so calling it “nonsense” isn’t fair. Science also isn’t implicitly entitled to be the prime belief system. So while these assertions are non-scientific, they shouldn’t be qualified with respect to meaning but to the scientific truth-value.

But assuming science has a monopoly implicitly elevates science’s ability and efficacy to make sense, especially in a non-exclusionary way. People who wouldn’t eat during an eclipse aren’t necessarily wanting for scientific facts. Sometimes, it’s because of how scientific literacy is currently limited. Pseudoscience enslaves but so does science. So we should be mindful of the words we use to describe pseudoscience, and keep open the possibility that the social consequences of these two knowledge systems can, in quality, overlap. As I wrote in an older post:

There is a hegemony of science as well. Beyond the mythos of its own cosmology (to borrow Paul Feyerabend’s quirky turn of phrase in Against Method), there is also the matter of who controls knowledge production and utilisation. In Caliban and the Witch (1998), Sylvia Federici traces the role of the bourgeoisie in expelling beliefs in magic and witchcraft in preindustrial Europe only to prepare the worker’s body to accommodate the new rigours of labour under capitalism. She writes, “Eradicating these practices was a necessary condition for the capitalist rationalisation of work, since magic appeared as an illicit form of power and an instrument to obtain what one wanted without work, that is, a refusal of work in action. ‘Magic kills industry,’ lamented Francis Bacon…”.

For example, hardcore, or by that same measure naïve, rationalists have been known to erect a pandal on the road and eat food during an eclipse, apparently in defiance of the beliefs of others. But that’s only defiance per se. Their actions say that they have underestimated the agility of the belief system and apparently ignored its punitive mechanics. Ultimately, it comes off as ignorant and is thus easily dismissed.

Why is science “the best”? It isn’t, and such scientism is harmful. What is “the best” is whatever empowers. The knowledge systems of Indigenous peoples predates science. Are they automatically disempowered? No. Other eclipse beliefs exist because of where social power and legitimacy lie. People believe it because others believe it. As Renny Thomas’s new book suggests, they may also believe it because we have erected a false binary between science and religion.

Zee News’s wording also presumes all “Indians” are “orthodox Hindus” and that their beliefs are indistinguishable from (unverified) Ayurvedic prescriptions – a form of the religion/culture superposition to which the regime has often taken recourse. (There is also a Hindiness to its language: “grahan” v. “grahanam”, for example.)

If astrology is pseudoscience, is science pseudo-astrology? The Indian right-wing is fixated on impressing the West, otherwise it may have noticed this. 😜 This said, astrology is bad and must be curtailed because it has a greater potential for harm. But we won’t fix anything by reflexively replacing it with another hard-to-independently-verify knowledge system. If one enslaves, the other must liberate. Otherwise, to quote from an older post:

But using science communication as a tool to dismantle myths, instead of tackling superstitious rituals that (to be lazily simplistic) suppress the acquisition of potentially liberating knowledge, is to create an opposition that precludes the peaceful coexistence of multiple knowledge systems. In this setting, science communication perpetuates the misguided view that science is the only useful way to acquire and organise our knowledge — which is both ahistorical and injudicious.

This post is also available as a Twitter thread.

On the NBDSA opinion against Zee News

On April 5, JNU PhD student Shehla Rashid tweeted that the National Broadcasting and Digital Standards Agency (NBDSA) had ordered Zee News to remove links to a show it had broadcast in November 2020, alleging that Rashid was indulging in “anti-national activities” and that she was “funding terror”.

The program was hosted by Zee News editor-in-chief Sudhir Chaudhary, who, the NBDSA statement found, hadn’t bothered to present Rashid’s defence of herself on the same show nor stopped to check if the claims being made on the show – by Rashid’s father, from whom she her mother and her sister are estranged – were true.

Even if they haven’t watched the show in question, readers of this blog must know by now what its tone, style and decibel-level must have been: shows like this have been regular programming at a clump of pseudo-news-sites trumpeting Hindutva ideals and hate. These outlets deserve without exception to be brought to book by the relevant national institutions, including the NBDSA – even as Rashid added, agreeably, that simply asking hateful content to be taken down from their pages doesn’t suffice. They need to issue public apologies and pay steep fines, say as a fixed percentage of their revenues, for every transgression identified by the NBDSA.

But even as we rejoice – just a little – in the knowledge that the NBDSA had some integrity where many other national institutions haven’t, I wish it had used different language in its statement upbraiding Zee News. Rashid had shared a screenshot of a part of the NBDSA’s statement showing the bottom fifth of one page and the top four-fifths of the next one. In this portion, the NBDSA is concerned repeatedly with the “impartiality and objectivity” and their absence in Zee News’s show. To quote:

With regard to the broadcast, NBDSA was of the view that the issue under consideration is whether the programme lacked objectivity, impartiality, neutrality and whether it violated the complainant’s privacy. NBDSA noted that by allowing the interviewee … the channel had presented only one side of the story. Further, not only had the broadcaster failed to approach the complainant for her version prior to telecasting the impugned programme but bymaking only a fleeting reference to her denial of the allegations, the broadcaster had also failed to adequately present her version. In any case, the Authority noted that to broadcast the version of the complainant available in her social posts was not sufficient compliance of the [Code of Ethics and Broadcasting Standards and] Guidelines.

That Zee News failed to accord any meaningful screen time to Rashid in a programme about slinging mud on her work and views is a cardinal sin. Even if you have a great investigative story on your hands, with documentary evidence for every claim, not giving the implicated parties a chance to defend themselves will only undermine the story. It’s a small step and often an easy one: either the parties will decline comment, as many in India have chosen to do of late, or seize the chance to air their side of the story. This opportunity reflects, among other things, the media’s refusal to serve as an arbiter but also its implicit acknowledgment of the possibility that it its narrative isn’t the ‘ultimate truth’, however that’s defined.

However, the NBDSA has tied this rule to “objectivity”, which doesn’t make sense. This is because Zee News, from its point of view, surely believes that it has been objective: Rashid’s father does hold the views that he does, and Zee News has broadcast them without alterations. There is no violation of objectivity here per se.

Even when unscrupulous outlets like OpIndia quote ministers and government officials spouting hateful rhetoric or articulating policies grounded in dubious assumptions, they are being objective in the sense that these statements do exist – i.e. their existence is a fact – leaving the outlets to simply report these facts to a larger audience. And even if OpIndia, and Zee News for that matter, aren’t objective in other ways (esp. when they publish false news first-hand), the definition of objectivity encompasses the reporting of facts and thus allows them to claim to the consumers of their bilge that they’re being “objective” where others aren’t.

This is how the pursuit of objectivity can be, and often is, anti-democracy. Many feckless (pseudo) news publishers in India have hijacked the false virtue of objectivity to project themselves as the purveyors of ‘real journalism’, while many of the rest of us have allowed them to do so by vying for the same objectivity. We don’t need to be objective; we need to be pro-democracy: the latter compels a greater fidelity to the truth, in substance as well as spirit, that proscribes technicalities of the sort that pro-Hindutva ‘reporters’ have been known to employ.

If the NBDSA had instead pulled up Zee News for not being on the side of democracy, instead of not being on the side of objectivity, (that part of) its statement would have been perfect. It would also have set an important precedent for other news outlets, at least those that are interested and willing, to follow.

Stenograph the science down

A piece in Zee News, headlined ISRO to test next reusable launch vehicle after studying data of May 23 flight, begins thus:

The Indian Space Research Organisation has successfully launched it’s first ever ‘Made-in-India’ space shuttle RLV-Technology Demonstrator on May 23, 2016. After the launch, the Indian space agency will now test the next reusable launch vehicle test after studying May 23 flight data. A senior official in the Indian space agency says that India will test the next set of space technologies relating to the reusable launch vehicle (RLV) after studying the data collected from the May 23 flight of RLV-Technology Demonstrator. “We will have to study the data generated from the May 23 flight. Then we have to decide on the next set of technologies to be tested on the next flight. We have not finalised the time frame for the next RLV flight,” K Sivan, director, Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) said on Wednesday.

Apart from presenting very little new information with each passing sentence, the piece also buries an important quote, and what could well have been the piece’s real peg, more than half the way down:

As per data the RLV-TD landed softly in Bay of Bengal. As per our calculations it would have disintegrated at the speed at which it touched the sea,” Sivan said.

It sounds like Sivan is admitting to a mistake in the calculations. There should have been a follow-up question at this point – asking him to elaborate on the mismatch – because this is valuable new information. Instead, the piece marches on as if Sivan had just commented on the weather. And in hindsight, the piece’s first few paragraphs present information that is blatantly obvious: of course results from the first test are going to inform the design of the second test. What new information are we to glean from such a statement?

Or is it that we’re paying no attention to the science and instead reproducing Sivan’s words line by line because they’re made of gold?

A tangential comment: The piece’s second, third and fourth sentences say the same thing. Sandwiching one meaty sentence between layers of faff is a symptom of writing for newspapers – where there is some space to fill for the sake of there being some attention to grab. At the same time, such writing is unthinkingly carried to the web because many publishers believe that staking a claim to ‘publishing on the web’ only means making podcasts and interactive graphics. What about concision?