Society
Sensationalism, Media
Competition
Blew Up Goa's Scarlett Murder Case
by Frederick Noronha
Over six weeks after her
death, British teenager Scarlett Keeling, believed to have been murdered
on a Goa beach, continues to make news as few other cases involving
tourists and crime in India have done.
The 15-year-old was found dead, almost wholly naked, on Anjuna beach in
North Goa, on the morning of Feb 18, sending the media in the UK, in Goa
and across India on a tizzy to follow up a case that has links to sex,
drugs, crime and, allegedly, even the local mafia and political
connections.
"It was the sort of story where editors urge their reporters to keep
turning up angles, to feed popular interest.... The Scarlett Keeling
story has gone off the pages in some newspapers, but not all," said the
media critique site thehoot.org, in a comment titled 'Living off
Scarlett'.
One prominent insider in Goa's tourism circle hinted that all the
negative publicity hitting Goa could be the result of a "conspiracy
against Goa."
Goa Chief Minister Digambar Kamat took off on a similar track. Kamat
said: "I don't know if there is some motive or some lobby working to
blow up the case and malign an important tourist destination like
Goa...."
But while the media blitz has been inexplicable to some observers here,
the conspiracy theories about the publicity is far off the track.
Never in Goa's living memory has a single case warranted so much of a
media blitz, as did Scarlett Keeling's. Even three weeks after the
girl's death, Google news, the online global news tracker, notched up
some 800 to 900 articles on the case, before tapering off.
Ironically, the coverage didn't start from Goa itself. It originated in
London, and quickly became a big issue in the British press.
But Goa's media, often willing to take the police version for it and who
seldom undertake sustained follow-ups, caught on next with a section of
the local press taking an active stance on the case. Latching on to the
foreign coverage, and obviously influenced by it, the New Delhi and
Mumbai-based press, apart from others, soon descended on Goa.
BBC's website reported: "Dozens of journalists have descended on a
corner of India to follow the investigation into the murder of British
teenager Scarlett Keeling...." It spoke of the "media scrum" in Panjim,
using a word originating from rugby and whose British usage reflects a
disordered or confused situation involving a number of people.
In the first reports - which broke in the UK and in Goa only five days
after the girl's death - the British media highlighted the teenager's
death on the beach, the signs of sexual assault, and what smacked of an
official attempt to brush aside the case.
Soon, questions started being asked about Scarlette Keeling's mother
Fiona Mackeown's own responsibility, or lack of it, in leaving her
daughter alone in an alien and rough terrain.
From there, the British media mainly doggedly dug up details about who
might be involved, and cited names of waiters, eyewitnesses, shacks,
drugs and even politicians.
Facing the competitive pressures of garnering the audiences, Indian TV
channels swung into detailed coverage too. NDTV's Barkha Dutt descended
to the beach at Baga, North Goa, to conduct a Sunday afternoon debate,
leaving some Goan audiences dissatisfied with the confused messages from
the hurried soundbytes offered by national television.
NDTV's rival national telecaster CNN-IBN's Rajdeep Sardesai, himself of
Goan origin, on the other hand, penned a piece, critiquing "an
increasingly tabloidish media" and said that "for many Goans, the
foreign tourist is a needless intrusion into their community life."
Later, excerpts from the 15-year-old diary, including her sexual
details, got splashed across the mainstream broadsheet media across
India and in Goa too.
Some journalists voiced concern about the ethics of such a practice,
both on the part of the police who released these details and the media
which quoted salacious details from it.
At least one lawyer, who has taken the brief for the accused, has joined
the media debate, by writing a series of articles, some of which got
published in the newspapers here.
Public opinion was sharply divided over who was "at fault" in the case.
Some sections of the British media were blunt in castigating the girl's
mother, an alibi which both politicians and police in Goa quickly
latched on to.
But the conservative politics of some British papers, the class and
hippy-like background of the family, and possibly even their Romany
gypsy roots could account in part for such approaches.
Other questions were raised. Kashyap Sinkre, who runs The Sincro Hotel
at Fatorda, said: "Who is Adv. Verma (the lawyer of Scarlett Keeling's
mum)? What is he doing in Goa if he claims to be a Supreme Court
advocate? Why is Scarlett's mother Fiona staying at his place?"
Give that there are four to five dozen foreign deaths in Goa each
November-to-February peak party-and-drug season, wasn't the media
blowing just this one case out of proportion?
Though the number is high in itself, Goa's tourism-related deaths aren't
significantly higher than those of, say, Thailand. Figures from London
say 381,000 Britons visited Thailand and 224 of them died. To make
matters worse, nearly half of tourist deaths are not natural or
accident-related.
The Times of London argued: "The problem for Goa is the same as the
difficulty faced by other tourist destinations 'discovered' by the young
and the adventurous and trading on their fashionable, hippy
associations. Ibiza, Bali, Gambia and parts of Thailand are all places
where the prevailing hedonism attracts a large number of free-spending
tourists but runs counter to the more conservative views and mores of
the host country."
But the media, both international and domestic, decided to make an icon
of Keeling.
In the Scarlett Keeling case, the girl was young. There was also the
sex-drugs-crime-corruption links to the case, which only arouses the
reader's prurient interest.
"I'm tired of writing on this case," confided a local reporter who was
one of the first to focus on it here.
Added thehoot.org: "The story is now moving on, as it should have done
long ago, to focus on the drug trade and rising crime in Goa. But the
focus comes from the victims' mother's fresh allegations, not from
newspapers deciding that the reasons for the decline in Goa's law and
order climate needs probing."
Sensationalism, enhanced by somewhat unhealthy competition among the
media, and the new trends in the tabloidisation of news, clearly has
more to do with the way the media focussed on the case.
(Frederick Noronha
can be contacted at frederick.n@ians.in)
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