Troubled Reflection: Reporting Violence: Medias Symbiotic Relationship with Violence , Ethnic Violence, Terrorism and War

Gobind Thukral, who has spent over three decades as an active journalist with various leading newspapers of India, broadly explores in his present book the media-violence relationship. The first part of his book sets the stage by dis-cussing how newspapers are structured and how they function? Various filters that allow or stop news from reaching the public and various players that decide all this is adequately covered in this part, besides a detailed dis-cussion on media reporting about Gujarat Carnage and Kashmir Trouble, in India. What follows in the second part of the book is an analytical study of media’s coverage of violence and militancy in the Punjab state of India during 1980–1995. Drawing upon his experiences gained through extensive coverage of his home state Punjab (during the period of militancy), Thukral explains how communalism infected the press right from the beginning and how some newspapers played an active role in the communal politics and the consequent violence.