Shortly after it dawned on all and sundry that what was initially thought of as only a gang war, was in fact a concerted attack by terrorists on the night of November 26, 2008, all eyes of the nation, and the world, were trained on Mumbai. The coverage of the attacks was to become a watershed in India’s television history. But hardly had the first night wore on, signs of criticism of the coverage began surfacing. Over Facebook status messages, through SMSs, and subsequently through blogs and other outlets. Even as National Security Guard (NSG) commandos fought a pitched battle with the terrorists, and television cameras and journalists kept viewers updated all through, coverage itself became news. For all the wrong reasons, one might argue.

After two months of silence, the nun who was raped and paraded naked by a frenetic mob of Hindu rightwingers in Kandhamal in Orissa, chose to speak about her horrifying experience at a press conference in New Delhi on October 24, 2008. She narrated her ordeal, and issued a signed statement. Many news outlets reported the heart-wrenching tale. But there were others who threw elementary media ethics to the winds and went overboard—they named the victim. Though two-thirds of the news stories that were tracked by Newswatch desisted from identifying the nun by name, a substantial one-thirds did. If this proportion was not alarming enough, when the researchers narrowed down the number of news items tracked for the study to distinct and original stories, it was found that slightly more than half of the news establishments which reported reported the press conference were guilty of naming the victim.

Every time the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) announces its Red List of Threatened Species, the event is awaited with bated breath by wildlife conservationists worldwide. So it was even this year, given the fact that the situation seems to worsen with every passing year. The current species extinction rate, according to IUCN, is estimated to be anything between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural or ‘background’ rate.

The last few years have seen a number of high-profile cases in Indian courts wherein the rich and mighty have been held guilty and sentenced to prison. The news media, in many cases, has been accused of conducting its own shadow trials. The news media coverage these court cases have derived has been phenomenal. This year saw Delhi courts passing verdicts in the Shivani Bhatnagar murder and BMW hit-and-run cases.

Early October came the news that ethnic clashes had broken out in Assam. The two groups in question were the indigenous Bodos and Bangladeshi migrants. Sectarian violence in Northeast does not always make it to the front page of newspapers. But this one did — coming as it was in the backdrop of the attacks on Christians by Hindu rightwing elements in Karnataka and Orissa, and a palpable sense of Islamophobia that seemed to be all-pervading in the aftermath of the serial blasts in Ahmedabad, Bangalore and New Delhi.