Covid-19: Here is why reporting from crematoriums is a matter of shame

“Bodies piling up. Makeshift crematoriums burning nonstop. This is the shocking state of India’s COVID crisis,” wrote CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, confident that her reportage on funeral pyres in India will satisfy her Western readers about the grave situation here. This is precisely the kind of journalism that many Indians, who have more stake in the country’s future than Westerners, are calling out increasingly.

Several Indian social media users are miffed with the reports on piling dead bodies in both Western and Indian media. As far as the Western media such as CNN and New York Times are concerned, they never adopted this kind of “pandemic porn” when reporting on tragedies in their countries. Has any Indian media house, for that matter, reported from crematoriums in UK or US on the pretext of highlighting what coronavirus has done to humans there?

It’s clear that Western media houses, who think Indians (and other so-called third-world countries) are inferior, are indulging in pandemic porn of this sort like vultures. Writes columnist Pratyasha Rath, “Literally every foreign rag reporting on the Covid crisis in India, has the image of funeral pyres. We can pretend like this is nothing. But packaging the trauma of the ‘third world’, complete with all their exotic rituals, for the consumption of the West, is an old skill set.”

In India, journalist Barkha Dutt has taken a voyeuristic and perverse pleasure in reporting from graveyards.