The wonders of Lexis Nexis

Over the past few weeks, I have begun to discover the immense potential of Lexis Nexis. Lexis Nexis is a search engine that is dedicated to searching through a database of news articles printed by thousands of news agencies and print media outlets around the world for the past twenty years. Most universities have a subscription to Lexis Nexis, a fact I was unaware of when at UIUC, and so for students it is as accessible as Google. Given my recent fascination with history, particularly U.S history, Lexis Nexis offers up some very insightful documents relating to past incidents. However, the engine does quite a good job of covering other parts of the world too. For instance, I found through it a review in The Hindu of a Marathi movie -- Kairee -- that OASIS was planning on showing as part of the annual international film festival at Caltech, worldwide media coverage of the ghastly Nellie massacre of 1983 which was a shameful and sadly forgotten precursor to the Sikh riots in 1985, the Ayodhya riots in 1992 and Gujarat in 2002. My only grouse with it is the bland interface and presentation of material.

* * * * *

News cycles

I picked up a new phrase, "news cycles". These are periods of time when a single incident completely saturates news coverage. I have observed that in the United States, news cycles are fairly frequent and sometimes even orchestrated out of events that would otherwise have merited no attention at all. America's most favourite sources of news cycles are ones in which the rich and famous turn into criminals as confirmed by the earliest amongst them that I can recall -- the O.J. Simpson trial -- to the latest -- Michael Jackson's and Martha Stewart's trials. While these in themselves manage only to generate print material for a day or at most a daily side-show, events such as Reagan's death provide content for up to a week and have immense potential for recultivation every year and every round-number anniversary. We have been repeatedly pummelled into submission and meek acknowledgement of Reagan's legacy, his sunny disposition and his optimism. His speeches at Berlin and his quips to his wife and the doctors at the operation table after he was wounded by bullets has been relayed on and on to the point of rote. Sadly, the state of affairs with respect to media coverage is no less explicit and redundant in India either. But Reagan's death also brings out some interesting parallels and contrasts in the styles of national mourning. In India, at least in the eighties when television was completely state-owned and there was a single channel (two if you lived in the four metropolises) that carried all the weight of conveying news, government propaganda, entertainment and sports the time of national mourning was the least looked forward to. For four to five days, dour and ponderous nobodies would fill the screen with an insipid background and a sole lamp lit at the side talking mournfully of the deceased. Then came satsangs, readings from the Koran, Bhagavad Gita and the Granth Sahib. Since the era of privatisation began, I have not had the opportunity to go back to Doordarshan at times of national sorrow to mourn the loss of a single insignificant political entity but I do not suspect that things would be any different. The U.S media completely shuns anything that has religious themes in it which I think is more in line with how secularism is defined in the U.S, i.e. the state follows no religion as opposed to how it is defined in India where the state respects all religions. But instead, there is a haemorrhage of repetitive biography capsules, undue hagiographies and encomia, frighteningly minute and cloying coverage of the entire process from death to interment.

Lexis Nexis

Remembering Nellie (from The Milli Gazette)

The rise of mourning

April 2004

January 2004 - March 2004

October 2003 - January 2004

July 2003 - October 2003

May 2003 - June 2003

April 2003

January 2003 - April 2003

2002

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.