The Rashomon war, clash of news genres

Almost a fortnight into it, the war in West Asia is no longer just geographic, but epistemic - relating to how we perceive things. Opinion is polarised to the point of caricature. But more striking is how information - news - itself has become 'genre-specific'. News consumers no longer merely agree or disagree on interpretation, but as war-junkies, they select their preferred narrative architecture, occasionally stepping out to encounter the 'other' narrative, if at all. For some, the war is a heroic defence of civilisation, reported in the register of epic (fury) drama. For others, it's a grim tale of imperial overreach, narrated in tragic or defiant tones. Each side produces and consumes not facts but 'stories' as reportage, tailored to taste.

Western outlets - from which most of Indian media imports international news owing to a relative absence of 'boots on the ground' - long accustomed to setting the global frame, now find their monopoly challenged. This has as much to do with the plethora of unsubstantiated social media content, as it has to do with fragmentation of trust giving renewed visibility to non-Western mainstream media pipelines like Al Jazeera. Earlier dismissed as 'regional perspectives', or 'propaganda', in the era of Fox, etc, they now elicit audiences eager for alternatives to the familiar Anglo-American script.

This 'war of genres' has consequences. Policy debates shaped not by shared baselines of fact but by competing dramaturgies. A ceasefire proposal is framed as magnanimity in one outlet, capitulation in another. Civilian casualties are tragic inevitabilities, or deliberate atrocities, depending on the channel/social media feed. If the First Iraq War gave us the first near-real-time 'Television war', and made CNN a household name for us, the current crisis is the first 'Rashomon war' - after the 1950 Kurosawa film in which the same events are described in contradictory, self-serving ways by different people - which is consumed depending on which side in the 'audio-video game' you prefer to be on.