The reporter her story

The reporter her story

Women reporters have faced misogyny and sexism, and yet they have travelled a long distance. MeToo provides an acknowledgement of the hurdles in their way, and their resilience.

What needs to be celebrated and written about is that, in twos and threes, and later in larger numbers, women reporters carved out spaces for themselves and for the generations that followed.

The MeToo movement’s impact on Indian media led to strong responses from senior women journalists and even controversies. One such was over veteran journalist Tavleen Singh’s three articles in the Indian Express (‘Stories beyond MeToo’, January 1, Fifth Column: ‘Why I am not MeToo’ October 15, 2018, and ‘Can MeToo get beyond me’, October 21, 2018). The burden of her song was that women journalists must not become the story themselves by writing about the sexual harassment they face, but focus on the exploited women in the country. In a pithy response, another veteran journalist Pamela Philipose has pointed out fallacies in Singh’s argument (‘Her blind spots’, Indian Express, January 2).

As women journalists who entered English media newsrooms in the mid-1980s as junior reporters, we feel that both Singh and Philipose have, in separate ways, left out some significant aspects. Their stress on investigative stories and exposures etc does not do justice to the long way that women reporters have travelled.

Winning the right to do “hard news” beats, night duty and cover “difficult” beats did not happen overnight. Besides the prominent veterans, there were and are many women reporters who performed a difficult job very well and handled themselves with aplomb in the newsroom. Their number has grown tremendously in the past few decades.

The focus cannot be on whether women journalists should seek to become celebrities or not, should report on other exploited women or not or how many investigative stories they have broken. The point is how far women reporters have traversed in terms of doing “hardcore” reporting and not simply being ghettoized into doing lifestyle features. In fact, Singh is seeking their ghettoization by arguing that they should report on the exploitation of women and girls in the country. Why cannot male reporters do so? In the newsroom, often women find themselves writing on women because the men simply refuse or are not assigned those stories.

In the mid-1980s when both of us entered journalism, there were very few women but those numbers rose gradually and today they are a critical mass. Yet, most of the stories on women, still considered a soft beat, are still done by women. We still have to see male reporters doing a series on rapes or dowry deaths or prostitution unless there is a perceived hard news angle. Women are yet to break the proverbial glass ceiling in many media houses, but they are doing beats earlier considered male terrain. By writing on gender and violence or “women’s issues”, they are keeping the flag flying, but that alone cannot change a patriarchal newsroom.

As young reporters, we looked up to women like Singh and Philipose, Coomi Kapoor, Olga Tellis, Usha Rai, Mrinal Pande and so many others. Lata Raje, who was the chief sub editor at Indian Express, was one of the few women in a senior position in the late 1980s, as was Carol Andrade who was the only woman reporter when she joined the Times of India, and went on to become a chief reporter of an evening paper. Women faced undefined and unarticulated but nonetheless gargantuan obstacles to become political and crime reporters.

In the mid-1980s, the issues facing women reporters specifically were about being “allowed” to do night duty, and cover “dangerous” areas like crime and riots. For instance, the United News of India (UNI) did not allow women on night-shifts which went on till 1 am, till three women — Bharati Sadasivam, Sujata Anandan and Meena Menon — demanded it and were willing to put up with the resistance to the idea.

What needs to be celebrated and written about is that, in twos and threes, and later in larger numbers, women reporters carved out spaces for themselves and for the generations that followed. The issue is not simply that of investigative reporting or exposures. It is doing beats that were different and doing them well.

Even then, in sports and business reporting, women were rarely seen. Female reporters were readily assigned campus reporting or education and lifestyle interviews and so on but political reporting (considered the crème de la crème) eluded them as did reporting on sports and business. The arguments against were all couched in “protective” language around their physical safety, commuting late at night, fending off unwanted attention and so forth.

These were the days when the mobile telephone was in the realm of science fiction. All that we had was the MTNL black box that sat on the Chief Reporter’s table. No personal calls were allowed to be made or received by young reporters except in cases of dire emergency and it was to be used only to fix appointments or get an urgent deadline-bound quote. You were expected to roam the streets in search of stories and meet your contacts and others face to face. That it did wonders for our contact diaries and our reportage is another story. Covering fires or riots in the night meant we would be exposed to unwanted attention, but many of us realised that the main danger was in the newsroom itself where standing up for women and doing stories on them identified you as a “feminist” or an “activist”.

We remember the first smell of newsprint and the mad delight of a “by-line”; the joy of going out there and getting a story, persuading reluctant bureaucrats or others to talk. It was bliss to know that your story had forced the authorities — municipal, police, corporate — to redress the grievance. Nothing came close to the euphoria of knowing that your report had made a difference.

It is this that must be celebrated whilst talking of women reporters — they have carved out a space despite so many hurdles. In many places, women are not hired since it is too much for the management to provide for their security after night shift. Then, there were other problems: No separate rest rooms, lack of sleeping space after a night shift, male reporters feeling their turf is being challenged, sexism not only in the newspaper but everywhere else.

All this was compensated by the freedom to roam and report, get inside the “news”, meet people, stand up for rights and report on what was wrong, and be appreciated for exposing that. Women have covered wars, riots, bombings, politics, crime, the economy and social sectors, exposed and unearthed so many facets of the world that had not figured as news, and are responsible for “mainstreaming” gender in the news.

The fact that women put up with so much harassment which has now been exposed, is a tribute to their spirit. The trauma has stayed with them for so many years, and has only surfaced now. It is something to be acknowledged and addressed, not dismissed. To eradicate patriarchy is a common goal. Sexual harassment has to be addressed and acknowledged as a reality.

Quite simply, if women journalists have been victimised, courage lies in their standing up for themselves.