One vs a hundred, one vs a thousand or even one vs a million. Let me fill in the blanks, the murder of Jessica Lall in Delhi, moves people from around India compared to the hundreds that die in road accidents every week on our city roads.
The retrial in the case of Priyadarshini Mattoo, a young law student from Delhi causes NRI students in America to begin a campaign not the thousands of farmers that have killed themselves across India and the new entrants into India's Millionaires Club will find space on the front page not the over one million children under five who die of preventable diseases every year.
So, what has happened to news priorities or even viewer choices? Is it the People Like Us syndrome- justice denied to a young Delhi woman in a case involving a powerful politican's son, strikes home for a Mumbai resident, in a way the death of a Nagpur farmer can't, despite the geographical proximity.
The mental distance, means one could well be from Venus, the other from Mars. Is it that the new avatar of news is inspirational, viewers want good news and so media houses brush the bad under the carpet of government and public indifference? Or does the truth lie somewhere in between the assumptions on both sides?
The assumption that news must be local, focus on what is happening in your neighborhood, not your country or the world. That urban audiences do not want to know about events that do not touch their lives directly. And on the other hand the assumption that caring about the travesty of justice in the Jessica case is too 'middle class' an issue to be of national importance.
Herein lies the challenge. Those who criticize our Campaign for Justice in the Jessica Lall, Priyadarshini Mattoo and NItish Katara case often forget what we tried to do in our coverage of the Japanese Encephalitis issue in Uttar Pradesh.
After a point, the tally of death had become meaningless. The story that needed to be told was not just about the death of hundreds of children, who could have been saved with proper medical intervention, it needed also to become the story of one child, the story of five-year-old Asif, carried into hospital in his fathers arms, a boy, who could after all have been anyone's child, yours or mine.
Imagine watching your child suffer because you are too poor to afford medicine, die in your arms, because the government failed to give him urgent medical intervention. And yes, it was only after we humanised the story that government help started coming in.
Now, a year later when little has changed, it is now our responsibility to return as watchdog and we will.
It is the need to make another's story our own, that is the challenge for us today. The news business has come a long way from its obsession with political minutiae and tracking every bill in Parliament, to becoming a voice of the people. What needs to be done is to make sure that an obsession with 'people' issues is representative of people from around India.
After all, the stories we tell are universal, the emotions they narrate, hope, despair, success and failure is something we all identify with.
The universality of the story must be told through its individuality. So, yes a dengue death in rural Madhya Pradesh should be reported in the same way as a dengue death in the heart of Delhi, but the murder of Jessica Lall also demands national attention, not just for the person, but for the principle.
In the end, after all, the news is about the power of one, the power to spark off a movement, that changes the lives of thousands.