Doesn't Anandabazar Patrika do any fact checking any more?

Although India has a reasonably free press, I remain disenchanted with the quality of journalism in India. Most reports are superficial descriptions of newsy events, supplemented by transcriptions of pronouncements by this or that minister or bureaucrat. There's minimal or non-existent in-depth field or street reporting that illuminates for Indian readers the deeper layers of the reality of life in India. Every report reads like something dashed off in response to an editor's demands by someone in a rush to catch the early bus home. It is rare to read something that bears the stamp of a journalist who desperately wants to tell the story and passionately believes in and takes pride in his or her work.

This post, however, is about something more basic: simple fact checking.

On August 1, 2012, my hometown Bengali newspaper, Anandabazar Patrika, published an editorial-page essay by Sunil Gangopadhyay, a legendary poet and writer of novels, short stories, and travelogue, whom I much admire. The essay begins with a recent incident in Guwahati, in eastern India, in which a teenage girl was sexually assaulted in a busy street by several men. A videographer had recorded the entire assault and had posted the video on YouTube. Not unexpectedly people began raising questions about the videographer's responsibility: should he not have thrown his camera at the attackers and tried to rescue the girl? After this preface, Sunilbabu's essay goes on to further explore the issue of conscience at one's work. At one point he brings up the story of a famous photograph by the photojournalist Kevin Carter:

আমেরিকার বিখ্যাত ফোটোগ্রাফার কেভিন কার্টার গিয়েছিলেন সুদান। এই দুর্ভাগা দেশটায় যে কত কাল ধরে দুর্ভিক্ষের মতন অবস্থা আর আত্ম-হানাহানি চলছে তার ঠিক নেই, প্রতি বছরই এর জন্য বহু মানুষ মরে।

মাঠের মধ্যে পড়ে আছে একটি কঙ্কালসার শিশু। অনাহারে, অবহেলায় সে প্রায় মুমূর্ষু। আকাশে উড়ছে অনেক শকুন। শকুনরা সাধারণত মৃত প্রাণীদের মাংস খায়, এই শকুনগুলো কি ছেলেটির মৃত্যু পর্যন্ত অপেক্ষা করবে ধৈর্য ধরে, না কি নেমে আসবে আগেই? অদূরে একটা ঝোপের মধ্যে ক্যামেরা বাগিয়ে অপেক্ষা করছেন কেভিন কার্টার। অনেক সময় কোনও বিরল দৃশ্য ক্যামেরাবন্দি করার জন্য ফোটোগ্রাফারদের অপেক্ষা করতে হয় ঘণ্টার পর ঘণ্টা, এমনকী দিনের পর দিন।

বেশ কয়েক ঘণ্টা পরে আকাশ থেকে নেমে এল কয়েকটা শকুন, গুটি গুটি পায়ে তারা এগোল শিশুটির দিকে। সে তখনও বেঁচে আছে।

শকুনরা এক জীবন্ত শিশুর মাংস খুবলে খুবলে খাচ্ছে, এ রকম ছবি আগে কে দেখেছে? এই অসাধারণ কৃতিত্বের জন্য কেভিন পান পুলিৎজার পুরস্কার। তবু বহু মানুষের প্রশ্নের বাণ বিদ্ধ করেছে তাঁকে। তিনি কি শুধুই এক জন ফোটোগ্রাফার? এক জন বিবেকসম্পন্ন মানুষ নন? ছবি তোলার বদলে ছেলেটিকে তুলে, কিছুটা স্নেহ, কিছুটা সেবা, কিছু খাদ্য ও ওষুধের ব্যবস্থা করলে সে হয়তো বেঁচে যেত। মানবিকতা সেটাই দাবি করে। সম্ভবত সেই সব প্রশ্নে ক্ষতবিক্ষত হয়েই কেভিন আত্মহত্যা করেন এক বছর পর।

Here's my rough translation from Bengali:

Kevin Carter, a famous American photographer, had gone to Sudan. This luckless country had suffered from famine-like conditions and civil war for a long time, with many people dying every year.

A skeletal child lay in a field. He was close to death from hunger and neglect. Vultures were circling the sky. Although vultures typically feast on the dead, would these vultures wait for the boy to die, or would they move in for the kill before he died? In a nearby bush Kevin Carter waited with his camera at the ready. In many cases, photographers have to wait for hours, even days, to capture a rare event.

After several hours a few vultures descended from the sky and quietly advanced towards the child. He was still breathing.

Vultures feeding on a living child, who has seen such a photograph before? For this extraordinary achievement Kevin Carter received the Pulitzer prize. And yet he was troubled by the many accusatory questions that people asked. Is he merely a photographer? Is he not a human being with a conscience? Instead of taking pictures, if he had rescued the child, treated him with affection, provided some food and medicines, the boy may have lived. Humanity demands that. Possibly wracked by such nagging questions Kevin took his own life a year later.

Immediately upon reading this tragic passage, I opened up a new tab in my browser and Googled "Kevin Carter." It took me barely a few minutes to find a whole bunch of factual problems with the essay's discussion of Kevin Carter and that famous photograph.

He was South African, not American. The photograph was not of several vultures feeding on a still-breathing boy -- see his obituary in The New York Times. It was of a solitary vulture apparently stalking a hunched-over skeletal girl.

It is not even clear whether the girl died that day. Here's a quote from Carter's obituary in The New York Times:

The reaction to the picture was so strong that The Times published an unusual editors' note on the fate of the girl. Mr. Carter said she resumed her trek to the feeding center. He chased away the vulture. ...

Afterward, he told an interviewer in April, he sat under a tree for a long time, "smoking cigarettes and crying."

There is no indication that Carter took his own life out of remorse for his behavior on that fateful day in the Sudan. He had spent his whole life photographing in crisis after crisis, war zone after war zone. According to the web site of a documentary on him, "He was the first to photograph public execution by way of "necklacing": setting fire to a gasoline-filled tire around a person's neck." And, returning to the New York Times obituary, here's another shocker: "A few days after his Pulitzer was announced in April [1994], Mr. Carter was nearby when one of his closest friends and professional companions, Ken Oosterbroek, was shot dead photographing a gun battle in Tokoza township."

Any of these events -- or the cumulative burden of these and other events -- could have pushed Kevin Carter over the edge. The Wikipedia entry on Kevin Carter has this quote from Carter's suicide note:

"I am depressed ... without phone ... money for rent ... money for child support ... money for debts ... money!!! ... I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners ... I have gone to join Ken [recently deceased colleague Ken Oosterbroek] if I am that lucky."

That same Wikipedia entry also provides an alternative account -- by Joao Silva, a Potuguese photojournalist -- on the circumstances surrounding the famous photograph.

According to Silva, Carter and Silva travelled to Sudan with the United Nations aboard Operation Lifeline Sudan and landed in Southern Sudan on March 11, 1993. The UN told them that they would take off again in 30 minutes (the time necessary to distribute food), so they ran around looking to take shots. The UN started to distribute corn and the women of the village came out of their wooden huts to meet the plane. Silva went looking for guerrilla fighters, while Carter strayed no more than a few dozen feet from the plane.

Again according to Silva, Carter was quite shocked as it was the first time that he had seen a famine situation and so he took many shots of the children suffering from famine. Silva also started to take photos of children on the ground as if crying, which were not published. The parents of the children were busy taking food from the plane, so they had left their children only briefly while they collected the food. This was the situation for the girl in the photo taken by Carter. A vulture landed behind the girl. To get the two in focus, Carter approached the scene very slowly so as not to scare the vulture away and took a photo from approximately 10 metres. He took a few more photos before chasing the bird away.

Two Spanish photographers who were in the same area at that time, José María Luis Arenzana and Luis Davilla, without knowing the photograph of Kevin Carter, took a picture in a similar situation. As recounted on several occasions, it was a feeding center, and the vultures came from a manure pit waste:

"We took him and Pepe Arenzana to Ayod, where most of the time were in a feeding center where locals go. At one end of the enclosure, was a dump where waste and was pulling people to defecate. As these children are so weak and malnourished they are going head giving the impression that they are dead. As part of the fauna there are vultures go for these remains. So if you grab a telephoto crush the child's perspective in the foreground and background and it seems that the vultures will eat it, but that's an absolute hoax, perhaps the animal is 20 meters."

In short, according to this alternative account, the girl in the picture was hungry and skeletal, but in no danger from the vulture. The parents of the children at the feeding camp had briefly put their toddlers down to get food from the United Nations plane. The vulture was 20 meters away and was drawn by waste, not the children. And in any case, Carter chased the bird away.

It is abundantly clear that Sunil Gangopadhyay never even saw the photograph he was writing about and never bothered to do the slightest bit of research about Kevin Carter. He probably heard an embroidered account from someone and felt confident enough to use it, unverified, in his column. His irresponsibility and laziness may have been compounded by his fame. The editor at Anandabazar Patrika in charge of Sunilbabu's column probably could not even think of wielding the red pencil on anything penned by the great man. If the same account had come in from an unknown, some fact checking may well have happened. But in a demoralized culture nobody talks back to the Big Man.

I believe the Anandabazar Patrika owes its readers an apology for its lousy or non-existent fact checking, inexcusable in the Internet age. And Sunil Gangopadhyay owes his readers and all admirers of Kevin Carter an apology for besmirching Carter's name.