Journalists tend to focus more on the content of their reports rather than meditate on the craft of journalism. Experience in the profession sharpens one’s skills, helps to quickly separate the wheat from the chaff, and enables one to intuitively compress the developments of the day in a report, with a sense of what is important for the public. However, this experience also lulls one into a world of certitude. It is not an everyday occurrence to have this certitude scrutinised by conscientious objection.
Cancer as a metaphor
A front page report, “We will remove this cancer, says bank head Sunil Mehta” (Feb. 16, 2018), was read widely as the response of the MD and CEO of the Punjab National Bank to the ₹11,500 crore fraud that took place in one of the bank’s Mumbai branches. Neither the bank official nor the journalists who reported and processed the copy saw any problem with the use of cancer as a metaphor to explain the crime. As a reporter, I have been guilty of using cancer as a metaphor to denote various ills: corruption, hatred, bad governance, inequality and social discrimination. It seemed to be an evocative metaphor.
A powerful letter from the legendary cancer specialist and Chair of the Cancer Institute (WIA), Chennai, V. Shanta, blew this certitude to smithereens. She was disturbed to read that “cancer” was being used in the context of a scam. She wrote: “Corruption is a crime and something to be ashamed of; cancer is not. Thousands of patients with cancer cross the portals of our hospital every year; we are proud and happy to say that many of them are leading productive lives today. We do not want the word ‘cancer’ to be associated with guilt, hopelessness or dread. And definitely not with shame.”
The unintended harm caused by the use of cancer as metaphor was troubling. I wanted to understand the world of empathy represented by physicians and oncologists and met Dr. Shanta at her spartan living quarters at the Cancer Institute. She explained the long journey of the institute to treat this illness that knows no barriers — caste, class, gender, or nationality. She said: “There are too many myths and stereotypes about cancer. These add to the confusion and dilemmas of a cancer patient. It extends to the family and friends of the patient. The mindless use of the word cancer to denote a wilful act of crime is unfair to the patients because it tends to induce guilt where none is required. The irrelevant use of the term perpetuates myths about this illness. Isn’t it the media’s job to dispel myths?”
What is the remedial measure for journalists for our use of cancer as a metaphor? I spent the next three days reading Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor. While the former is a Pulitzer Prize-winning work written by a physician-researcher who was moved by his patients, the latter is a reflection by a fine essayist who was a cancer patient.
Journalistic lessons
Mukherjee’s book not only explains the various facets of cancer but also the multiple metaphors associated with it, and their inherent limitations. He writes: “We tend to think of cancer as a “modern” illness because its metaphors are so modern. It is a disease of overproduction, of fulminant growths — growth unstoppable, growth tipped into the abyss of no control. Modern biology encourages us to imagine the cell as a molecular machine.” According to him, cancer lives “desperately, inventively, fiercely, territorially, cannily, and defensively — at times, as if teaching us how to survive.”
Sontag’s searing introduction is also a journalistic lesson: “My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness — and the healthiest way of being ill — is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. Yet it is hardly possible to take up one’s residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped.” Her inquiry was aimed towards “an elucidation of those metaphors, and a liberation from them.”
Sensitive journalism demands the wisdom of constant inquiry and not the comfort of certitude.
readerseditor@thehindu.co.in