Under fire: "While We Watched"

Vinay Shukla's profile of the Indian telejournalist Ravish Kumar introduces its subject paying his respects to a blackened news studio. This is some indication of the incendiary territory While We Watched is heading into, but it also serves as a crystallising image of what the media has become in the age of Internet-spread populism: vulnerable, even expendable - a sitting target - but also hollowed out, cowed into submission, perhaps never to be the same again. Kumar, who's been fighting the good fight in his role as host of NDTV's nightly current affairs digest Prime Time, faces a predicament. As one of the few Indian anchormen left reporting proven facts in a post-truth world, he's resisted the substantial paydays that follow from circulating hogwash, refusing to maintain the status quo and divide the world into true believers and enemies of the state. Yet that leaves him isolated, and open to attack. There are ready echoes with developments in Brexit Britain and the America of Donald Trump, but a lot of Kumar's grief is inextricable from the politically weaponised tribalism of Modi's India, and to an ever-hotter climate that has apparently boiled his ratings rivals' blood to a degree that would seem comical if it wasn't so dangerously irresponsible. "All stories become personal sooner or later," Kumar is heard to remark early on, a philosophy borne of decades of public service; it shines through in his sober, victim-focused reporting on a suicide case that highlights those societal failings the flagwavers would rather journalists distract their viewers from. Shukla's story gets personal, too, as Kumar finds himself being shouted down and drowned out, targeted by crank phone calls and viral videos, and added to a widely disseminated list of so-called "anti-nationals". At one point, his foes succeed in blocking NDTV's signal in Mumbai, forcing his show off the air. What While We Watched reveals is just how hard it is to report any story when you find yourself at the centre of a firestorm.

Part of Shukla's project here is to show who Kumar really is, which is to say neither the coolly unflappable newsman he presents to India from behind a desk most weeknights, nor the demon-slash-traitor those on the Hindutva right would prefer to paint him as. The film does this in a broadly observational, undemonstrative, fly-on-the-wall style that is the antithesis of the fractious debate being stoked across other channels. We watch Kumar at home with his wife and young daughter, and consulting calmly but authoritatively with colleagues; we see him driving between functions with a security officer positioned in the backseat. This Kumar is an ever so slightly stolid presence - a John Oliver without the team of writers - observed frowningly, unfussily getting on with the job. (As he tells an auditorium crammed with journalism students: "There is nothing special about me, I'm not the Chosen One".) It's just that job, when done correctly, requires him to be quietly analytical, critical in the traditional sense, which only further enrages those touting abject nonsense at ultra-loud volume. In a production meeting, Kumar grimly notes how nationalism in India now serves to accommodate religious fundamentalism (among those most commonly shouted at: Muslims, and Pakistan more generally), and to encourage the country's youth to "choose hatred over jobs". It's a sorry picture, suggesting our leaders can tank the economy and still retain the support of those most affected by it, in large part by recruiting lost souls with discontent in their hearts to serve as a private army of trolls and terrorise anybody seeking to question or change the narrative. "My job," Kumar tells his viewers, "is to arm you against lies and deceit." One further complication is that journalism itself is changing (arguably falling apart) around him, a consequence of managerial costcutting, rampant insecurity in the workforce, a new or renewed pressure to get ratings, clicks and hits, and the efforts of populist politicos to paint the few good newsmen as devils for telling the mob what they no longer care to hear.

It possibly all sounds a little inside-baseball - the kind of film to which concerned and conscientious media types are almost always bound to award four or five stars. Yet Kumar's plight has the inbuilt tension of a procedural thriller, and the roiling turbulence of 21st century India tosses up one setpiece after another: a live broadcast where hackers seize control of Kumar's autocue and activate an alarm, causing widespread consternation; a 2019 election night special that decides the fate of a nation (heading into, as we now know, the Coronavirus crisis) while determining Kumar's place, as what's effectively a journalistic minority, within the Indian media landscape. Throughout, Shukla keeps his eyes open for the telling detail. The colour of his subject's hair, rapidly transitioning from Oliver black to Jon Stewart grey, tells its own story, as do an initially baffling series of cutaways to cakes being wheeled into the Prime Time offices: at first you assume these must be for birthday celebrations, a spoonful or six of sugar to help take away the sour tang of populist poison, but it gradually dawns that these sweetmeats have been catered in for an apparently never-ending run of leaving parties. Unseen management, it transpires, is doing as much as any splenetic blowhard or their Molotov cocktail-lobbing proxies to hollow out our few fully functioning newsrooms; showing good journalists the door extends an open invitation to the barbarians at the gates. The news, as Shukla's film reports it, is bleak - but far better our mediators give it to us straight than deflect, distract or equivocate.

While We Watched screens at the Curzon Camden at noon this Thursday; it is also available to rent via Curzon Home Cinema and YouTube.