The award-winning documentary While We Watched chronicles the working life of broadcast journalist Ravish Kumar who, at the time of filming, was a senior journalist at Indian news platform NDTV. While India is swept up in a tide of Narendra Modi hysteria, fuelled by pro-government news channels which paint anyone (including Kumar) who don’t share their views as “anti-nationalist”, the journalist continues to report on issues on the ground in his country, the poverty and the growing religious divides that are tearing communities apart. At the same time, he pleads to anyone who’ll listen to seek out the truth and not always believe what’s being fed to them on a daily basis by other broadcasters. In return for his efforts, he gets a torrent of death threats and witnesses the slow decline of his station as staff members leave seeking more job security while advertising revenue dwindles.
This is not a happy watch, but it’s an important one. Director Vinay Shukla has created something which transcends the state of play in his native country. While one may know little about the media situation in India, resonances with the state of print and broadcast media around the globe abound. The central point of the film is how opinion is now packaged as news, while fact-based journalism continues to be starved of oxygen.
The film isn’t entirely hopeless, but sadly the twist in the tale, not covered by this movie, is that Kumar left NDTV in the years after this film was made when billionaire Gautam Adani took over the company. He’s since set up his own You Tube channel. The fact that he has done so shows the state of newsroom journalism in India is even worse now than it was when this film was made.
While We Watched is in cinemas now.
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