NewsX didn’t play ‘raw footage’ on JNU, Mr Shivshankar

Considering the amount of time journalists spent reporting on the so-called Jawaharlal Nehru University row, you’d expect them to know the facts of the case like the back of their hand. That is, if you are a journalist who cares about facts.

On June 11, reports came out stating that the raw footage on the basis of which the Delhi Police filed a first information report on the matter — and later chargesheeted Kanhaiya Kumar, Anirban Bhattacharya and Umar Khalid — was authentic. This is the footage that was shot by Zee News reporters on February 9, 2016, when JNU students — some affiliated to the Left-wing Democratic Students Union — organised an event titled The Country Without A Post Office against the “judicial killings of Afzal Guru and Maqbool Bhatt”.

The Central Forensic Science Laboratory’s report, therefore, pertains to the raw footage shot by Zee News’ reporters, NOT the many edited videos aired on various channels. Quite unlike the twist News X Editor-in-Chief gave on his Twitter account.

Any journalist who has followed the case would read the latest development in the JNU case as CBI — CFSL comes under the investigative authority — authenticating Zee News’s raw footage; not as a clean chit to news channels that aired doctored footage.

One would assume that a TV professional like Mr Shivshankar would know this and get that fact straight, considering his keen interest in the JNU controversy and because of the use of the phrase “raw footage”. But since he doesn’t, we’re happy to help.

Raw footage is unedited footage that is captured by the camera. No TV channel airs raw footage — once recorded on camera, the footage is edited, the audio is balanced, effects and graphics are added and so on to make it suitable for TV programming. Consequently, what you see on television is not ‘raw’ by any definition.

In the current context, the Delhi Police has suggested that the CBI report states that the raw footage captured by Zee News’ camera at JNU is authentic. However, this does not mean that the commentaries that accompanied many of the JNU videos on various channels, pertaining to the JNU issue, were justified.

Like the video that NewsX showed as “definitive proof” exposing Kanhaiya, for example. Complete with #IndiaVsAfzalLeague, NewsX quoted Kanhaiya: “Hum leke rahenge Azaadi, Hum chheen ke rahenge Azaadi,” and took his slogans out of context.

NewsX’s video footage may look a little suspect with its out-of-sync audio, but then again, there are occasions when Shivshankar is on air and he looks he has a dubbing artiste to speak dialogues that he mouths a second too late, so we’ll move on.

According to the Delhi Government-commissioned report, a video indicting Kanhaiya of raising “anti national” slogans was found to be doctored.

It is unclear if NewsX used the same doctored footage, even as news reports like this one in the BBC suggest so. But, more importantly, one cannot take away from the fact that the channel used edited portions of Kanhaiya’s speech to suggest he chanted anti-India slogans when that was far from the case.

That, in a nutshell, is the central problem with much of the reportage on the JNU row, including what we saw on Zee News. The raw footage captured by its cameraperson may be authentic, but questions arise on the way the footage was used by the channel.

Newslaundry had carried a detailed report on the deception it resorted to in the piece Truthiness Labs: This is how easily TV news got you to hear ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ in a JNU video.

Meanwhile, Mr Shivshankar’s recent rant on Twitter is only a testament to how some TV anchors have used emerging facts of the JNU case to suit their agenda.