Today we live in the age of the Internet, where news items compete for the same eyeballs. There is no burying a story in a single column under-the-fold on page six...

There might have been a time in human civilisation where a dastardly human beings like Brajesh Kumar would have been hung, drawn and quartered. The mastermind behind the Muzzafarpur shelter home rapes and assaults on innocent children, there can be little doubt that people like him even in today’s day and age should be put away for a long time, and given that India still has death penalty, he is a prime candidate for the State to put to death. What he did to those  children is unconscionable and the fact that it was allowed to happen right under the nose of the State police and bureaucracy means that even the Bihar Chief Minister’s reputation is stained by these incidents.

Thank God for those researchers from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences for bringing this case to light.

There should be more outrage about the incidents in Bihar and there should be candlelight marches and wall-to-wall media coverage across the country. There should be outrage on social media.

And while there has been a level of coverage of the incidents, the non-English language media taking the lead, it really hasn’t filled our television screens or newspapers as much as it would have in many other countries.

Some suspect this is because the prime accused and some other accused are close to the powers that be in the State. But, there is very obviously another cause for the reduced coverage, a cause that makes us all culpable.

Ask yourselves why did the gangrape of a physiotherapist on December 26, 2013 get the coverage that it didij Sure, it was a horrific case, what happened to that young woman was beyond description and one hopes that the President of India signs death warrants for the convicted criminals soon enough. But, it was not the only horrific crime committed on that day. In a country, the size of India where the rule of law is weak to say the very least, there are hundreds of barbaric crimes committed on a daily basis and  scums like Brajesh Kumar invariably get away with it.

The fact is the December 26 incident took place in the heart of South Delhi. And while the victim herself may not have been from the upper class society, it scared India’s English-speaking classes; could this happen to one of themij But when the police turn a blind eye to the rampant trafficking and prostitution that happens close-by, it’s no big deal.

Of course, this is not unique to India, it is quite evident in the West as well. In Europe and America, if a crime is committed against a white person it makes national headlines. A white girl gets kidnapped or raped and there is wall-to-wall coverage. The same happens to a girl of colour, worse still an immigrant, and there is just shrug of shoulders.

And while in India, some will argue that we are not racist in our coverage, there are other factors in play. For one there is the caste factor and we should not even pretend that it does not impact media coverage, especially in the mainstream media. Caste-based crime and discrimination is a reality in this country and those who claim that caste does not impact them rarely understand the level of privilege that they have.

The fact is that if a Dalit is raped or murdered, it rarely makes the headlines unless there is a motivation to highlight overall discrimination against so-called lower castes as has happened in the recent past. And there is of course the ‘tyranny of distance’ factor. living in a media hub in the city of Delhi, incidents in and around the Capital tend to get blown up. Not just in the local pages but also the national pages of newspapers across the country. And on that front, we all are guilty. The recent Yamuna floods in Delhi got more coverage across the nation than the hundreds who have been killed in natural disasters in the past few months. Again, this is not unique to Delhi or the Indian media. Incidents in New York, london or Paris get a unnaturally high focus in the national media of those nations as well.

 But why does this happenij Journalist P Sainath blames the media for this distortion. We, however, today live in an age of the Internet, where news items compete for the same eyeballs; there is no burying a story in a single column under-the-fold on page six.

Google and Facebook might have crippled the economics of the news business but the stories on the Internet are the same 0’s and 1’s at the end of the day. While the Internet has democratised the news, it has also made evident what people want to read — whether it is about agrarian distress in middle India or a salacious news item on a Bollywood starlet. And you know whatij When these stories get similar placement on a website, guess which one most people clickij The analytics of any Indian media site will reveal the numbers, even after the data boom of the past 12-18 months.

Traffic sources for most media sites are biased towards the upper classes. While improvements have been made in dealing with India’s literacy problems and while mobile data has become far more affordable, the fact is that most people only consume news about what impacts them.

The Internet might have democratised news but it also made that problem worse; many people might read about the shelter home in Bihar, do a cursory ‘tut-tut’ about it and move on to the antics of a Bollywood star instead. You read and you consume the news about you and people like you.

You read mainly the opinions of authors who buttress your beliefs and talk about your politics and even on social media you tend to live in an echo chamber. Each voice that you hear or read doubles your belief in your convictions whether they are right or wrong. Morals and ethics have nothing to do with this. We all are  guilty, and to blame the ‘media’, whether you are Donald Trump or a politician in India, is disingenuous.

How do we get people to careij I genuinely do not know, but we have to do something because we are headed to a very troubling space which we in the media have played a role in enabling.

(The writer is Managing Editor, Special Projects, The Pioneer)