The Critical Reader and the Levels of Her Thought

The third day of February, this year, witnessed the vibgyorification of front pages of leading news dailies of India with news concerning the Tuesday referral, by the Supreme court, of a batch of curative petitions against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a colonial­ era provision criminalising consensual sexual acts of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) adults in private, to a five-­judge Constitution Bench for a possible back-­to-­roots, in­-depth hearing.

This piece of news managed to capture the headlines of almost all of the major Indian newspapers on Wednesday. The Times of India, the highest circulated daily, reported, “SC holds out hope, will hear final plea to legalise gay sex”, while The Hindu read “Five-­judge Constitution Bench to take a call on Section 377”. Another newspaper, widely circulated in the Southern states, The New Indian Express, carried a shorter headline: “LGBTs get a chance”. Finally, The Telegraph, published from Calcutta, carried, arguably, the most confrontational headline: “When governments hide in closet, court readies bench on gay rights.”

The observation this short essay analyses is that the content of the medium is different from the content in the medium. This is, of course, somewhat of an extension of McLuhan’s argument that “the medium is the message”.

Now, what I mean by “content of the medium” is the structures of language already embedded in a medium, here, a newspaper. These structures develop over a period of time, and are constantly inflected by the dominant political ideology that animates the newspaper, and the larger journalistic methodology adopted by the content generators and editors. On the other hand, “content in the medium” implies the momentary material that these ever-­present structures contain at and for the given moment. This latter form of content keeps getting changed and recycled, but the former type does not.

To cite an example, The first paragraph in the report of The Telegraph contained the following sentence: [The referral] “re­ignited hope that a long wait for a basic right may end soon.” The words “ignite”, “hope”, “basic”, “right”, “soon”, all serve a purpose that goes beyond merely reporting or disseminating information. They invoke and make seem obvious. This invoking prowess of the newspaper is made possible by the content of the medium. Notwithstanding this, a superficial, and uncritical reading of the news at merely the level of the content in the medium, would leave the reader exposed to the effect of the invocation, and simultaneously the reader might subconsciously consume most of the information as obvious. However, if the reader is aware and conscious (thus, cautious) of the larger ideology that the given newspaper stands for, or is driven by, he or she would be able to read the news contained in it from a second-­thought. The news, in this process, becomes a subject with multiples layers of meaning. The news, then, in the reader’s mind, no longer remains news alone. It becomes news in the world. And the reader no longer remains a reader alone. He or she spontaneously becomes a critic.

The Hyderabad version of The New Indian Express was this critic’s shock, because contrary to expectations created by its recently published opinion (representative of the content of the medium) nearly dismissive of LGBT rights, a leading news piece on the fourth of February (titled “Freedom at midday”) seemed highly supportive of gay rights. One sentence from that piece again caught this critic’s imagination: “Carrying placards with messages to the straight world, many aired their own personal experiences.” This use of the phrase “straight world” here implicitly but clearly affirms the existence of an “LGBT world”, parallel to and as real and legitimate as the so-­called straight world. Here, then, a second-­thought reading suffices the exposition of what the “news” makes seem obvious or invokes. However, for a similar exposition of the ideology of the newspaper, a third-­thought critical reading might be called for, since one can clearly observe a mismatch or contradiction between the opinion and reportage of the same newspaper.

Thus, from one level of thought to another, the critical reader climbs, unboxing and revealing to himself the medium, the news in the world, and the world at large.