Neel Madhav and Alishan Jafri won the K P
Narayana Kumar Memorial Award for Social Impact Journalism 2022 for their
work ‘Clicks and Bait: How a constellation
of far-right Hindi YouTubers determine what you see on your TV’ published
in The Caravan magazine. Madhav and Jafri’s in-depth reportage uncovers the
ugly truth behind the manipulation of mainstream media narratives by right-wing
amateur youtubers. Their work is a powerful reminder of the social
responsibility that comes with journalism.The final jury comprising Ruben
Banerjee (Chairperson), Jayalakshmi Shreedhar and V. Krishna Ananth chose the
winners from shortlisted entries.
The award, which comprises a trophy, a citation and INR
100,000/- in prize money, was presented to the winner by the Chief
Guest Chander Uday Singh, Senior Advocate, Supreme Court of India,, at the
Convocation of the ACJ Class of 2023.
The jury’s citation read as follows:
“The first place among the entries shortlisted for social impact
journalism goes to Neel Madhav and Alishan Jafri for their story Clicks and
Bait: How a constellation of far-right YouTubers determine what you see on your
TV. Madav and Jafri illustrate how we live in an age where YouTube news
channels expose a growing number of audiences to online hate speech. Their work
exemplifies studies that show that the more toxic the news content the more
users engage with it and the longer it lives, only to soon leap at you from
your TV screen.
The award is for many things. It is for their lucid unpacking of
the osmosis between click-bait stories on social media and mainstream news
reporting. It is for diligent detailing, evident in the way Madhav and Jafri
interleave their narrative with case study after case study.
Clicks and Bait walks us through alleyways of Palika Bazar,
Shaheen Bhag and Ghaziabad where YouTubers seem to fashion the news as much as
they report it. Madhav and Jafri give us a ringside view of how street corner
exchanges are set up and then ferried across digital media platforms
masquerading as slice-of-life reportage and ending up as breaking news on
television screens. In the course of this journey they show how hateful news
content polarizes and radicalizes consumers of information and is setting
ever-newer lows in public discussions.”
Other stories that were considered as final nominations and have
been awarded special mentions by the jury (in no particular order) are as
follows:
·
Andrew Fidel Fernando | Fiftytwo.in – Hunger | A journey into Sri Lanka’s agricultural
heartlands as the economy nosedives.
· Sarita Santoshini | Fiftytwo.in – Uprooted | Residential schools for indigenous people have
a long and dark history around the world. In this in-depth reported piece,
Sarita Santoshini examines the underreported issue of how residential schools
have changed the lives of young Adivasi people and their communities in
Odisha’s mining-interest regions.
·
K. Sivanandan | Malayala Manorama – ‘Stop doing this to our
children’– A journalist shines the spotlight in a series on the debilitating
difficulties faced by children with learning disabilities, bringing them hope
and recognition from the judiciary and the state.
· Parth Nikhil | People’s Archive of Rural India – This series of
six articles examined healthcare (or the lack of it) and injustice meted out to
some of the most marginalised people in India. The idea behind the series was
to highlight how an already dilapidated public health system was never enough
to deal with a raging pandemic. And when the pandemic struck, it made an
already terrible situation worse.