
L'affaire Mutalik brings us to the issue of how much coverage for incidents like this. Also, is the media willingly or unwittingly turning into a PR wing of such ragtag vigilante groups? Is media's over-enthusiasm proving totally counter-productive? The media, in all sincerity, should come up with a policy prescription for itself to ensure that its coverage does not achieve the exact opposite of what it intends to establish. After all, this year's Valentine's Day was the least colourful in recent times and strangely, the media ensured that it was so. Ironically, the media outdid Mutalik in this endeavour.
There is another deeper media issue involved in the Mangalore pub attack-coverage. Why was the media, the more sedate and supposedly more balanced print media included, utterly disinclined to inform the readers about Ram Sena's antecedents and its running battle with the Sangh Pariwar? Also, the media chose to ignore the fact that there were some local Congressmen among the Ramsena funders. Questions like whether Mutalik was deliberately being modelled into a Hindu Bhindranwale to embarras an unfriendly dispensation at Bengaluru, just as a similar exercise is on to establish Raj Thackeray as the real representative of Maharashtra pride, have never been probed by the media. Ram Sena's run-ins with RSS are only too well-known even to the general public in Mangalore. Why did the media fail to see the obvious? Is there a deeper and hidden agenda?