One can hardly be satisfied with the way Bangladeshi media report and analyze events. In many cases, the realities of ordinary people's lives remain untouched and their voices unheard.
We have hundreds of online newspapers and news portals, as well as dozens of television channels. Journalists are present in every corner of society, armed with cameras, while hundreds of so-called mobile journalists continuously produce content.
Yet when something significant happens, we almost always receive only the most surface-level version of events.
Renowned political communication scholar Professor Shanto Iyengar of Stanford University describes this tendency as episodic framing.
Simply put, it is a journalistic approach that focuses on individual incidents, personal narratives, or specific events rather than examining the deeper, multidimensional contexts that shape them.
Journalism around the world suffers from this tendency to some degree, but in Bangladesh it has become almost standard practice.
One might even say that many reporters practise a form of domestic parachute journalism -- dropping into an incident, collecting a few quotes from readily available sources, and publishing or broadcasting a story before giving the underlying contexts of realities any chance to unfold.
Three recent incidents in Bangladesh highlight these shortcomings of journalism. Each was widely covered, yet, in my view, the broader societal context was largely ignored.
Mirpur mazar and the nearby road
When mazars across Bangladesh began to be attacked and demolished, most media outlets framed the story primarily as a theological conflict: Salafi ideology versus traditional Sunni practice. Civil society members appeared on talk shows, while religious and political persons exchanged accusations.
To some extent, the ideological and political dimensions are real and deserve examination. However, this now-familiar framing obscured something equally important: Every demolished mazar exists within a specific locality, a specific community, and a specific set of unresolved local tensions.
Consider the incident involving the mazar of Hazrat Shah Ali Baghdadi (RA) near Mirpur-1, close to where I live. I have lived in the area since childhood. Any reporter who spent time there -- not merely collecting quotes but observing the surroundings -- would have noticed that the mazar is located immediately beside a girls' college.
Had any reporter stood there for a few hours and paid attention to what happens on the road between the mazar and the college?
Over time, the space between the mazar and the main road of Mirpur-1 has become densely occupied by hawkers. It is regularly crowded, and, for many people, uncomfortable to pass through.
The City Corporation constructed a market building for vegetable vendors. However, the building is now being used for other purposes, while the vegetable sellers occupy nearly three-fourths of the road leading to the mazar.
As a result, traffic congestion has increased and the overall environment of the area has deteriorated.
What happened on the day when hundreds of people attacked the Mirpur mazar cannot and should not be accepted. Those responsible must be brought to justice. However, media reporting largely failed to capture the frustrations of local residents.
In this particular locality, those frustrations are not purely theological or political, although that may be the case elsewhere. Here, the media overlooked the gradual deterioration of a public space that has become difficult to manage, dominated by vendors, marked by regular antisocial activities, and a source of daily discomfort and embarrassment for many women and girls.
I found virtually no reporting on these issues.
The Mirpur mazar story was covered through a single narrative reproduced across dozens of media outlets because journalists relied on an established religious-political frame.
The human geography of Mirpur-1 -- the activities on the road between the mazar and the girls' college, the hawkers, the vendors, the students, the narrow roadway, and the nature of the public space itself -- never received their due coverage.
As a result, the people living with the actual conditions of that area remained invisible in a story that was primarily about them.
Barking at midnight
For the past several weeks, residents of our locality have been experiencing sleep disturbances caused by the barking of numerous stray dogs near my residence well past midnight.
Residents of Mirpur do not need statistics to understand the street-dog problem. They live with it every day. It appears in the form of an elderly pedestrian walking in fear, a child avoiding a pack of dogs, or a garment worker passing through the streets early in the morning.
These are not hypothetical concerns. I myself had to receive a series of injections after being bitten by a stray dog in Mirpur several years ago. Such experiences are part of the daily reality of Mirpur and many other neighbourhoods across Dhaka.
When this issue occasionally surfaces in the media or on social media, the debate is often reduced to a simple binary: Animal-rights activists on one side and residents on the other.
The activists are ostensibly articulate, organized, and media-savvy. The residents of Mirpur are dispersed, exhausted, and largely voiceless. Journalism, predictably, tends to revolve around those who are organized and vocal.
Coverage rarely attempts to identify the position held by the majority. Most residents are not demanding that dogs be killed. Nor are they advocating cruelty. They are asking -- quietly, persistently, and often desperately -- for an effective response from Dhaka City Corporation.
Measures such as capture, neutering, vaccination, and managed relocation have been attempted in cities across South Asia and elsewhere, with varying degrees of success.
We often fail to assume why the dogs bark so intensely at night. Perhaps they are hungry, thirsty, or reacting to other environmental conditions. Yet the question of why Dhaka City Corporation has never developed a serious urban animal-management program has rarely been the subject of regular journalistic inquiry that leads to any policy interventions.
Ramisa's killing and apartment culture
The killing of Ramisa should have prompted Bangladeshi journalists to investigate a broader question: What is actually happening inside the apartment buildings that have replaced traditional neighbourhoods across Dhaka over the last few decades?
As the city expanded vertically, joint families fragmented and people moved into separate apartments.
In the process, something fundamental changed in the structure of social accountability. Neighbours do not know one another. Building management systems remained informal, at times controversial and frequently male-dominated in ways that receive little monitoring.
Disputes, harassment, and violence that once occurred within open social networks now take place behind closed doors, hidden within concrete walls, corridors, and elevators where few witnesses exist.
Women and girls, in particular, often inhabit these buildings in a form of enforced social invisibility. No media organization systematically collects data on this issue.
No media outlet asks the residents about safety in apartment complexes, examine the flat management structures of residential buildings, or investigate what protections -- formal or informal -- exist for the residents.
Journalism we are not getting
What connects all these stories is not their subject matter but their way of seeing -- or failing to see. Bangladeshi journalism has become highly skilled at identifying that something has happened. But it is far less effective at asking why it happened. It fails to uncover the uncomfortable local realities to allow the deeper story to surface.
The alternative is not difficult to imagine, though it is challenging to practise. It requires reporters willing to investigate the story from multiple angles.
For the above case studies, reporters are required to talk with the college students near the mazar, walk alongside city residents to understand the street-dog problem, and stand in the stairwells of apartment buildings asking who lives there and what their lives are like.
It also requires editors and chief reporters who value depth over the race to be first. Only by examining and highlighting a story from different socio-political, economic, and cultural perspectives can journalists help the audience understand the real context of an incident or event.
Md. Shamsul Islam is a writer and media researcher. He can be reached at shamsulbkk@gmail.com.