Irresponsible reporting.

In one of their editions last week, Deccan Chronicle carried a news story of an illiterate woman in Bihar, beating up her husband when he came home in a drunken state. The accompanying photograph was quite graphic and showed the man badly mauled, poor chap.

I really feel that the media must exercise restraint and desist from publicizing such gory incidents. It has been scientifically demonstrated that stories such as these manage to stir some basic instincts and incite hatred and violence.

Just for the sake of argument, imagine that my wife has just finished reading that story in Deccan Chronicle and is now in the kitchen, where her olfactory senses tend to be in a heightened state of alert. I am a strict teetotaler, but let’s imagine for the sake of this argument, that I am coming out of the bathroom, after applying Gillette after-shave lotion on my face.

Somehow, wife gets the impression that the smell of Gillette after-shave is actually that of Scotch whisky. With her impressionable frame of mind, she quickly makes an association between the story of the Bihari woman in Deccan Chronicle and the strong smell of perfume which she assumes is whisky. In a flash, she lifts the pressure cooker from the stove and whacks my head with it. Slow motion replays later show that the pressure cooker cracks into two at the point of impact. The cooked rice spills all over the floor. What will we get to eat then? What will we mix the sambar in?

That’s why newspapers must practice self-censorship and cut out such stories. If cigarette ads can be banned and if names of castes/religion can be withheld to prevent communal flare-ups, why can’t they leave out stories of husbands getting bashed up by emotional wives?