From its humble beginnings of One-piece to Brazilian thongs,
Bikini has come a long way and so has our News channels.
While I totally love and fully support the evolution of the
bikini, I am mortified to see media taking inspiration from this shrinking!
One of the media’s responsibilities are to conceal the identity of a victim,
especially a girl victim of rape, domestic violence or molestation. Or a child
victim of abuse or any sort of discrimination.
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| strip tease??? |
There was a time when some News channels used to blur the entire
Video/image but these days they only blur the face which is still acceptable.
However, it seems they believe in censoring as little as possible and hence now they simply use a black strip covering the eyes. But nobody set the guidelines about
how thin that strip can be just like nobody set the guidelines of how tiny a
bikini can be.
So from a big black band which used to cover the eyes and a
large part of the face making the person virtually unrecognizable, they have graduated
to a micro-strip that is broad enough only to cover the cornea of the victim
while the eyeballs of the viewers get a crystal clear view.
What’s the need of this formality either? Just to save from
the ire of NBA? that's a toothless body anyways. So why not go the whole hog and do
away with covering the face with a shoe-lace altogether. Afterall you have the
job to report and your viewers want to know and see everything.
Who cares about the repercussions it might have on the life
of the victim; collateral damage I suppose? How can a person’s right to dignity be
ahead of your right to higher TRPs?? Astoundingly, sometimes it’s not even
about TRPs. Blurring is just too much of a hassle for the editors. And if the
news isn’t that sensitive (from their perspective), they don’t really want to
waste much of their time on a thankless job.
Blur the whole face, for god-partcle’s sake! You are not in
the business of enticing your viewers here by showing them almost the entire stuff
but hiding just a little bit for their imaginations to work. You can do that
with Sherlyn Chopra’s photos/videos posing for the Playboy cover.
