At least 53 journalists in Mumbai test positive for coronavirus

All the media persons found infected with coronavirus will be kept in isolation and a process was underway to find out suitable places to the purpose, BMC spokesperson Vijay Khabale said.

At least 53 media persons from Mumbai have tested positive for coronavirus, a city civic official said on Monday. These journalists will be kept in isolation and quarantined wards of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC).

The BMC had taken the swab sample of 171 Mumbai biased journalists for COVID-19 tests at a health check-up camp. Out of 171, the 53 journalists swab samples came out positive for coronavirus while rest were negative. Out of the 53 journalists, most of them are photographers, camera persons with television channels and reporters who were on the field since the outbreak of coronavirus. 

A medic works on a sample for COVID-19 Rapid Test at a camp during the nationwide lockdown imposed in a bid to contain the spread of coronavirus. (Photo | PTI)

The BMC officer said that most of the coronavirus positive journalists were asymptomatic. "No journalist is critical. The symptoms in the journalist are very normal but they have to be kept in isolation or quarantined. All journalists are asked whether they want to stay in the at home in isolation or BMC provided quarantined facility centre. We are keeping them in a suburban hotel," said Vishnu Sonawane, president of journalist Association in BMC. 

One of the television journalists said that they have been asking their office to allow them to work from home but office instead of working from field and hospitals where are positive patients are reported. "We demanded the safety kids like mass loss and other equipment but we had given normal three-layer surgery mask, not other facilities. We were exposed to who this coronavirus outbreak very closely. We had no option but to work for the office and continue to do reporting from the field," he said requesting anonymity. 

BJP former member of parliament Kirit Somaiya has written a letter to Union Minister Dr Harshvardhan, BMC commissioner Praveen Pardeshi Maharashtra Health Minister Rajesh Tope and TV channels owner asking to take care of these reporters and their families.

NCP leader and member of parliament Supriya Sule had also raised this journalist exposing two vulnerable situations. She had demanded the Rs 50 lakh insurance cover to all journalist who is working during this pandemic situations.

(Source: TNIE)

Arnab Goswami: An absentee reporter

Where was he during every important news break over the last 10-12 years? asks Nikhil Inamdar on News Laundry. Read on:

Twitter went into a veritable meltdown after journalist Rajdeep Sardesai called out his ex-colleague and Republic TV editor Arnab Goswami for ostensibly fibbing about being present in Gujarat during the Godhra riots. Sharing a link to a YouTube video (which has subsequently been taken down) titled "Arnab Goswami talking on Gujarat Riots", Sardesai tweeted: "Wow! My friend Arnab claims his car attacked next to CM Res in Guj riots! Truth: he wasn't covering Ahmedabad riots!!".

Rajdeep Sardesai 

✔@sardesairajdeep

Wow! My friend Arnab claims his car attacked next to CM Res in Guj riots! Truth:he wasn't covering Ahmedabad riots!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB7fhgGa1SQ …

5:53 AM - Sep 19, 2017

•  999999 Replies
 
•  4,1344,134 Retweets
 
•  5,8615,861 likes

A string of journalists attested Sardesai's contention that Goswami's claims were bogus.

Maya Mirchandani 

✔@maya206

given that I was around in the newsroom in Delhi, I can confirm this too. Mr Goswami was full of bombast, but from safety of Delhi. https://twitter.com/sardesairajdeep/status/910021022656663552 …

6:08 AM - Sep 20, 2017

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•  1,3721,372 likes

Nalin Mehta @nalinmehta

Amazing: becos actually this incident happened with @sardesairajdeep in Guj riots. We know cos we were there@sanjeevrsingh https://twitter.com/sardesairajdeep/status/909973725226905600 …

9:00 AM - Sep 19, 2017

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•  1,2151,215 likes

Sanjeev Singh 

✔@sanjeevrsingh

Astonishing revelation considering Arnab wasn't in Gujarat when this incident took place with @sardesairajdeep. @bhavatoshsingh @nalinmehta https://twitter.com/sardesairajdeep/status/909973725226905600 …

8:53 AM - Sep 19, 2017

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•  571571 Retweets
 
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A volley of tweets was fired his way, asking for a clarification which, unsurprisingly, hasn't been forthcoming. But evidently, the pugnacious Goswami seems to have given his media colleagues a discernable kick in exposing his bald-faced attempts at stealing a journalistic experience that was perhaps not his.

"The pudgy little Billy Bunter with the soprano shriek turns out to be an utterly brazen liar!," tweeted a gleeful Sagarika Ghose, Sardesai's wife and Times of India Consulting Editor, as the story gathered steam on social media.

It's not just in a burning Ahmedabad of 2002, Goswami, one of India's leading news personalities, has made a career out being an absentee reporter on conceivably every important national story that's unfolded over the last 10-12 years.

Editors don't go out on the field every day. But during important news breaks, they fight to step out and get their feet dirty. We've seen all of Goswami's contemporaries hold forth from ground zero; during wars, terror attacks, floods or the election cycles. But barring his initial years as a reporter, Goswami has marked his attendance to stories, singularly from the safety of an air-conditioned news studio in Mumbai.

The tragedy of our times is, he's owned the national agenda on every big story despite this utter failing; whether it was 26/11, the 2012 Delhi gang rape, or the 2014 elections.

Arnab's brand of bellicose in-studio journalism driven by theatrics, name-calling and pre-fabricated agendas has triumphed. In an era of hashtags and gold-fish attention spans, where viewers don't have the time for nuance and complexity that a story reported from the ground brings, they are only too happy to lap up the instant binaries he lets fly.

A reporter who's toiled in the sun trying to piece together a story by hearing all sides and digesting conflicting insights will have an impossibly tough time pronouncing pop verdicts in the manner that Goswami does. Impartiality, accuracy and presenting all sides of a story are journalistic tenets best honed on the field. A studio armchair locks one into an echo chamber, where stripped of the ability to hear multiple narratives, one self-propagates views that support one's own limited judgment.

Arnab has let himself be afflicted by this malady and thrived as it spread across his every thinking pore.

But the tumor has now turned malignant, and unbearably toxic. Nothing other than relentless pressure from a pushy editor, hopelessly out of sync with the realities of reporting from the scene, can explain a Republic TV employee’s appalling behaviour with the grieving parent of a dead child recently. Nobody, other than a journalist who has never covered the horrors of a humanitarian tragedy from close quarters would dare spew venom like: "Let them [Rohingyas] be floating around a boat in the Indian Ocean…yeh hamara problem nahin hai [it’s not out problem]."

If Sardesai is indeed right about the Gujarat episode then it is clear that despite the fantastic popularity Goswami commands, from staging high-pitched dramas every evening, there is perhaps a frustrated reporter hiding inside him, yearning for that authentic field experience.

Journalists are a self-obsessed lot, forever looking for opportunities to regale anyone who cares to listen, with anecdotes and backstories of how they reported a landmark story. Despite all his sensation and nearly two decades in the business, Goswami's repertoire of tales from the field is so slender, that it appears he has had to fabricate one. That's enough reason to step outside the studio and start afresh.

A reporter’s final story

Alex Tizon struggled to write about Lola, the woman who helped raise him. He was 11 before he realized she was his family’s slave.

The pulitzer prize–winning reporter Alex Tizon built an exemplary career by listening to certain types of people—forgotten people, people on the margins, people who had never before been asked for their stories. Alex’s wife, Melissa Tizon, told me recently that her husband was always impatient with small talk, because he believed that all people had within them an epic story, and he wanted to hear those epic stories—and then help tell them to the world. “Somewhere in the tangle of the subject’s burden and the subject’s desire is your story,” he liked to say.

His mission aligned well with The Atlantic’s, and we were pleased to publish, in the April 2016 issue, “In the Land of Missing Persons,” a beautifully rendered story about ordinary people who mysteriously disappeared in the Alaska wilderness. And we were thrilled when Alex offered us the chance to publish a story he had been waiting much of his life to tell, the remarkable tale of Lola, the woman who was his family’s secret slave in the Philippines, and who remained their slave when they moved to America.

And we were heartbroken to learn on Friday, March 24, that Alex Tizon had died. His story editor here at the magazine, Denise Kersten Wills, found out late that evening that Alex had been found dead in his home in Eugene, Oregon. He had died in his sleep, of natural causes. He was 57 years old.

His death is a tragedy for Melissa; their daughter, Maya; his daughter from an earlier marriage, Dylan; and Alex’s brothers and sisters. His death represents a loss for his students at the University of Oregon, where he was a beloved journalism professor. And his death is a loss for the editors and readers of this magazine, who were just coming to know Alex and his gifts.

Alex Tizon at a journalism workshop in 1991. He believed that all people have within them an epic story.

Alex was a much-admired reporter in the Pacific Northwest. He shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 while on the staff of The Seattle Times, and he served as the Seattle bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. He was also a well-reviewed author; his 2014 memoir, Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self, was a self-lacerating examination of the complexities, humiliations, and small victories of Asian men trying to adjust to life in America.

His interest in the lives of people situated far outside the mainstream was abiding and deep. When he came to us with the enthralling, vexing story of his immigrant family and its terrible secret, we recognized that this was the sort of journalism The Atlantic has practiced since its inception. The magazine was founded in 1857 by a group of New England abolitionists eager to advance the cause of universal freedom. When I first read a draft of Alex’s piece, I imagined that the founders—people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Harriet Beecher Stowe—would not have believed that 154 years after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, humans would still be enslaving other humans, in America and across the planet. The eradication of all forms of slavery remains an unfinished goal of civilization, and of this magazine, and stories like Alex’s help us understand slavery’s awful persistence.

Melissa told Denise and me that Alex wanted, more than anything else, to bring Lola’s story to the world. “This was his ultimate story,” Melissa said. “He was trying to write it for five or six years. He struggled with it. But when he started writing it for The Atlantic, he stopped struggling. He wrote it with such ease.”

Alex did not know that we would be putting his piece on the cover of this issue; he died the day we made that decision, before we had a chance to tell him. His death, quite obviously, could have derailed publication of what turned out to be his final story, but his family, led by Melissa and his siblings, worked with us during this uniquely trying time to make publication possible. We are grateful to them. And we are grateful that Alex shared his story—his epic story—with us.

(Source: The Atlantic)