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Justice Venkatesh Calls For Dignified Reporting On The LGBTQIA+ Community

By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2021-12-28 15:29:37

About the Author

Sunil Garodia Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack

Due to increased public awareness and fear of reader backlash as well as improved internal policy, media in India has become much more politically correct than it was even 10 years back. Yet there are several areas where some media organizations, especially some regional language ones, slip and reporting on the LGBTQIA+ community is one such area.

Keeping this fact in mind, the Madras HC come out with a style sheet in the form of a standardized glossary of terms the media should use when writing news articles about the community. Justice N Anand Venkatesh requested the media, particularly Tamil media, to adopt the style sheet. This obviously means that the court has found the articles about the LGBTQIA+ community in Tamil media contained words that could be termed offensive and which lowered the dignity of the community.

The court said that if the words and expressions set out in the style sheet were used regularly by the media, it will make for proper reporting and lead to dignified identity of people belonging to the community. Justice Venkatesh was earlier in the news for seeking help from experts to decide a case about a lesbian couple seeking protection from the court. He had then said that he unlearned many things to shed his bias and in the process learned many new things that gave him an insight into the problems of the marginalized community. He had famously said that "ignorance (was) no justification for discrimination" against the community.  

The LGBTQIA+ community faces too much social abuse everywhere. In some places, they are harassed by miscreants who use grossly offensive words to address them. Hence it is required that the media adopts a line that brings them into the mainstream. Although some in the media are not likely to be kind to the judge for lecturing them on their job, but it is a fact that reporting on the community is not always fair and is sometimes offensive. So there is no harm in listening to him. 

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