Sharing the Best and the Worst: The Indian news media in a global context
N Ram
If
I were to seek pride in India now it would in a tiny way be part of my pride;
if therewere to be disappointment and regret I must now sharethat regret, and
in some oblique way accept its responsibility…Only now, after twenty-five years
of knowing India, can I make the presumption of claiming a small share of its
rare joys and its frequent sorrows.
-- James Cameron, Foreword to An Indian
Summer: A Personal Experience of India,
Macmillan, London, 1974, page 5.
Macmillan, London, 1974, page 5.
James
Cameron, I think, would have got it right – I mean about the Indian news media
as well. I doubt they were part of his pride when he came upon their front
ranks, with their wildly speculative ways, during his first visit to India in
1946, a time whenthe transfer of power and, in the grim background, the
Partition of India were being negotiated. A quarter century later, he was still
not impressed with India’s newspapers, not to mention All India Radio; he found
the tightly controlled broadcast network preoccupied with ‘the machinery of
government as distinct from the realities of democracy’ and, like the
newspapers, not showing ‘the slightest knowledge of nor interest in the affairs
of other places’ (Cameron 1974: 58). Heknewsome ‘thoughtful and intelligent
men, journalists in their own right (as is evident from the work they do
outside)’ – there were few women in Indian journalism at the time – but these
thinking journalists were ‘enmeshed in a dismal machine, which grows worse
every year’ (ibid.: 58). He was shocked by the
reporting of the story of the birth of Bangladesh as an independent nation,
when ‘all newspaper professionalism fell to bits’ and readers were served not
verifiable reports from the actual scene of the happenings, but ‘half-baked Hemingway
in an orgy of wish-fulfilment because, one sadly supposed, this was the Indian
line’ (ibid.:174-175). But Cameron, fair-minded as
ever, entered this caveat: his longstanding friends, ‘the core of serious and
concerned Indian journalists’, were even more depressed than he was by this
‘jejune amateurism’ (ibid.:175).
Cameron
never condescended; he judged from high standards. This self-taught journalist
– reporter, broadcaster, occasional illustrator and cartoonist, foreign
correspondent – took pride in communicating clearly, precisely, and
meaningfully. He wrote like an angel when in flow, with descriptive richness,
shiningly honest value judgments, and what he called attitude embellishing his ‘art of omission’ (to
borrow a phrase from Robert Louis Stevenson).
Cameron,
the generous-spirited foreign correspondent, who saw history being shaped
before his eyes in Vietnam, Korea, India, Cyprus, Kenya, the Congo, and
elsewhere, had many interesting things to say about journalism as it was and as
it should be. For one thing, he understood it to be ‘a trade, or a calling that
can be practised in many ways’; he was clear it was ‘not and never has been a
profession…since its practice has neither standards nor sanctions’ (Cameron
1967: 69).I think the Leveson Inquiry should be interested in that insight from
half a century ago, not much seems to have changed about the essential nature
of the trade or calling since then.
By
the time Cameron was in his middle thirties, a famous writer and broadcaster,
he had formed strikingly original opinions about the craft and art of being a
foreign correspondent. When he started out as a reporter, he had decided that
‘facts must never get in the way of the truth’, as he provocatively put it in An Indian
Summer(Cameron 1974: 147).His reputation as a foreign correspondent was
made by persisting with this approach.
He
was clear that ‘objectivity was of less importance than the truth’ and ‘the
reporter whose technique was informed by no opinion lacked a very serious
dimension’. Journalists therefore were professionally obliged to present their
‘attitude as vigorously and persuasively’ as they could, to be set out for
consideration, criticism, and debate. Being scrupulous and consistent about
this he held to be a vital ingredient of ‘moral independence’; among other
things, this involved an ‘attitude of mind that will challenge and criticize
automatically, thus to destroy or weaken the built-in advantages of all
propaganda and special pleading – including the journalist’s own’ (Cameron 1967:
72-73).
Cameron’s
was an unconventional position. But it was well reasoned, intellectually
honest, philosophically grounded, and nuanced – and professionally not
difficult to grasp for any ‘thinking journalist’ (ibid.:
72), as he pointed out. You will not find this way of thinking about reporting
in The
Elements of Journalism and I
doubt attitude and voice are,or can be, taught in journalism
schools, although they can certainly be recognized,encouraged, and rewarded.
Self-deprecation, which can be mistaken for cynicism, came naturally to the
very Scottish Cameron who, as though this were not enough, had been through a
variant of French school education in Brittany.But to the extent his
positioninvolves theorizing, it is free not just from cant but also from its
polar opposite, the studied cynicism that is an element of journalism in many
countries, including Britain.
It
was this highly original attitudeand voice that he brought to India as a
foreign correspondent in the 1940s and later as a son-in-law of India (as we
say), after he married Moni, my friend, who is here with us today with her
husband, Sir Denis Forman. Cameronloved the country with its enormous diversity
and its ‘warm and generous’ people – and was its most consistent and empathetic
critic among all the foreign correspondents who have covered ‘its rare joys and
frequent sorrows’ over the years. He was a friend of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s
first Prime Minister, whom he rated as ‘incomparably the greatest man I ever
met…and a big influence in my life’ in a 1975 Guardian piece
(Cameron 1981: 309). But there was no question of cronyism for this
journalist,who did not hesitate to criticize Nehru severely for letting
himself, his nation, and his people down.
James
Cameron was incapable of compromising what he believed to be the truth
unfolding before his eyes.He never surrendered his thinking journalist’s
attitude and voice, his capacity for admiration as well as outrage, his moral
independence; and not even Lord Beaverbrook could get one past his apparently
nonchalant guard. You can read Cameron, to learn about his life in journalism,
in Point
of Departure, or about his tough love for India, in An Indian
Summer, written after a terrible, life-changing road accident that probably
shortened his life eventually. For sheer literary pleasure, you can go to The Best of
Cameron, a selection brought out by New English Library in 1981 that should
find a place in the library of every good journalism school in the world but is
unfortunately out of print.
I
believe this great friend of India would have been spot on about the joys and
sorrows of the contemporary Indian news media. I imagine he would have found
his ‘pride’ on the one hand and his ‘disappointment and regret’ on the other to
be in some kind of rough equivalence.
A mixed report
Cut
to 2012. I recently asked Mark Magnier, South Asia Bureau Chief of the Los Angeles
Times, how he viewed India’s print media. Here is his response (Magnier
2012), which I think speaks to that kind of balance:
‘There’s
a real vibrancy (and profitability) in India’s print media that stands in
marked contrast to the often depressive atmosphere we’re seeing in the West.
This can be very uplifting, a reflection of India’s general outlook and stage
of development, its strong economic growth, upward mobility, social possibility
and heady embrace of wealth and bling, i.e. the early days of a growth story
(before aging, economic maturity and other problems set in).
‘That
said, in my view this enthusiasm and energizing sense of possibility is not yet
necessarily matched by the quality of the journalism. Many organizations seem
to rely on inexpensive, young talent that, revolving door fashion, leaves after
a few years, in organizations relatively uninterested in building institutional
experience or the professional standards that come out of the careful nurturing
of promising journalists over many years.
‘[In
an aside, I learned this soon after I moved to India and followed a story on
the front-page of one of the English-language dailies about an angry village
god outside Delhi supposedly killing off residents every 17 days over a
several-month period. When I got to the village, in fact the time gap between
deaths was fairly random, as you would find with any population, and the main
point of the story in error. There was no appreciable fact checking and no
attempt to correct it, however, a valuable lesson.]
‘Of
course these are generalizations, and there are reporters and organizations
that work very hard and do great work, but I believe the industry could benefit
from a bit more focus on fundamentals.’
This
then is the topic I have chosen, in consultation with my hosts, for the James
Cameron Memorial Lecture I am honoured to give at City University London today.
My theme is how India’s newspapers, news television, state-controlled radio,
and nascent digital media share the best and the worst of traits and practices
that we witness round the world – as journalism struggles to come to terms with
profoundly changed and changing circumstances that have destabilized the game,
whatever spin one chooses to put on it.
Key issues and challenges
Let
me flag some of the key issues and challenges, after disclosing that I have
addressed them in papers and essays I have published over the years and
especially in a talk to the contemporary history section of the last Indian
History Congress (Ram 2011), and draw from that bit of research and reflection
here.
The
first issue is the need critically to reflect on, and rethink, the implications
of the buoyant growth story. It is a well-worn narrative that draws heavily on
the differences in the situation of the news media in developed countries
(‘mature media markets’) and some major developing countries (‘emerging media
markets’).I won’t bother you too much with the statistics; they are readily
available elsewhere. What they reveal is that ‘India is one of the few places
on earth where newspapers still thrive’, as Ken Auletta puts it in an article
in The
New Yorker (Auletta 2012),
and plenty of professional opportunities are available for journalists,
especially young journalists.
The
Indian press, especially Indian-language newspapers, and satellite news
television continue to be in growth mode. Some of that story has been
splendidly researched, analyzed, and told by my friend, the political scientist
Robin Jeffrey in his book, India’s Newspaper Revolution, published more than a
decade ago (Jeffrey 2000) and a series of articles in the Economic
& Political Weekly (1987,
1993, 1997).The key factors behind India’s newspaper revolution, Jeffrey points
out, are improved
technology, steadily expanding literacy, better
purchasing power, aggressive publishing, and, last but not least, political
excitement (Jeffrey 1993: 2007).
There is a huge appetite out there for news and what masquerades as news, for
analysis, for comment, and of course for entertainment and also for that hybrid
creature, ‘infotainment’. All this has spawned tens of influential Indian
language daily newspapers, many of them with large circulations and huge
readership. Today half this total readership of about 352 million is in small
towns and rural areas and women account for a third of the readership (IRS
2011, Q2; IRS 2012, Q2).
But
the buoyancy and implications of this print media development, while
‘uplifting’ when viewed against ‘the often depressive atmosphere’ seen in the
West, must not be romanticized. The social reach of the Indian press is not
impressive – about 85 copies of daily newspapers per 1000 in the population, a
statistic that fares dismally in any kind of international comparison. This
means, among other things, vastly uneven dispersion among regions and states,
between urban and rural India, between men and women, and among social classes.
Such poor social reach and the extreme disparities obviously influence and
distort news and editorial coverage of happenings in society.
The
audience for television in India is huge, in the region of 563 million (IRS
2012, Q2), and still growing. However, that is largely for the entertainment
channels. The dozens of 24 x 7 satellite television news channels that compete
with the print media in English and the various Indian languages account for
only about 10 per cent of the total TV market, which means they are decidedly
not the dominant ‘organism’ in the Indian news media ‘ecosystem’ that they
sometimes claim to be. There are also signs that the long-expected shakeout is
beginning to happen in the news television sector.
There
are other reasons why the buoyancy of the Indian news media should not be
exaggerated. For newspapers, the huge circulation numbers ride on the back of
extreme under-pricing of cover prices and the printing and dumping of hundreds
of thousands of copies that go straight to the raddhi or used paper market for recycling.
The latter, a sharp practice to inflate circulation for advertising gain, has
become systemic. As though this were not enough, the Television Audience
Measurement (TAM) system has come under widespread criticism and even frontal
attack. NDTV, a pioneer in news television in India, recently filed a suit in
New York to recover about $ 1 billion from Nielsen and WPP, the world’s largest
communication services group, who jointly own TAM in India. The suit alleges,
among other things, gross negligence, false representations, prima facie tort, and corruption in the ratings
system.
What
is now clear is that the economics of both the print and broadcast sector has
been hardening, gradually. The advertising market has tightened in the last few
years. The catalyst seems to be the global economic slowdown: it has taken its
toll of the Indian media growth story, leading some industry experts to rule
out any return to the pre-crisis situation, especially in the crucial matter of
advertising revenues.
And
how does India fare in the digital age paradox? Let me first try and define
this paradox, which is central to this transformational age. On the one hand,
more and more people are reading newspapers digitally; you have for the first time
in history a live global audience for the best publications; there are
excellent newspaper and news websites offering rich, many-sided, multi-media
content, including long-form features, investigative articles and thoughtful
analysis; there are even success stories, here and there, of journalism
garnering impressive digital revenues; the sky seems to be the limit to what
you can offer in this exciting space. On the other hand, the existential crisis
of the old news media has not been resolved and it continues to take a heavy
toll; the discussions of the ‘future of journalism’ have not ceased; and poor
morale and low spirits continue to haunt the journalistic profession as well as
the news media industry – for the simple reason that all this wonderful development
has not yet yielded a viable revenue and business model for internet or digital
journalism.
The
newspaper industry continues to face ‘a double squeeze’: the print business
continues heavily to subsidize digital journalism, which cannot pay for itself
by attracting enough advertising or subscriptions or a mixture of the two; and
the new digital players put increasing pressure on newspaper circulation,
readership, and the business itself (Ram 2011: 3). Broadcast television faces
the same problem, in somewhat different ways and measure. I rely on the
judgment of John Naughton and other experts that this ‘dominant organism’ in
the ‘media ecosystem’ is in ‘inexorable decline’ (Naughton 2006), with
commercial television, in parallel with printed newspapers, ‘losing its
audience, its advertising revenue, and its reporting resources’ (Downie &
Schudson 2009).
There
can be little doubt that within this digital age paradox, both the print and
broadcast media in India continue to benefit from the country’s relative
backwardness in Internet use and broadband access – and from the digital
divides that stand out. China’s development in this respect has been quite
spectacular: at the end of June 2012, it had an estimated 538 million Internet
users (CNNIC July 2012), most of them served by broadband, minimally defined by
western standards. India, by contrast, has only something like 121 million
Internet users (Internet World Stats 2012), most of them poorly served by
bandwidth. One would think the number would be much higher, given the country’s
fairly advanced capabilities in the software field. But this is typical of India’s
political economy paradox, large swathes of backwardness amidst relatively high
economic growth rates. The most revealing indicator in the comparison is the
Internet’s penetration of the comparable populations: China’s 40 per cent,
which is still only about half the developed country norm, contrasts sharply
with India’s 10 per cent.
What
this means is that the impact of the digital revolution on the print press and
on news television is considerably stronger in China than in India – and that
the tipping point is likely to arrive sooner in the former. It also means that
while virtually every Indian newspaper has a website and some major ones offer
informative and attractive digital content to readers in India and abroad, this
is secondary to print content by a long chalk. My friend Alan Rusbridger,
Editor of The
Guardian, was recently quoted as saying that ‘journalism is changing at the
speed of light’ (that is, nearly 300,000 km per second) and that ‘virtually
every week we are learning new techniques and fresh truths about the way
digital technologies are transforming the media’ (Rusbridger 2012). Within the
Indian newspaper industry, there seems to be a sense that the field is changing
at the speed of sound (which is 342.29 metres per second).
This
situation has bred complacency, so there is no real push to learn these new
techniques and fresh truths that are so vital to the digital age. According to
Jacob Mathew, the first Indian president of WAN-IFRA, ‘some studies predict
that, by 2040, the Indian print industry would meet the fate of the American
print media industry’ but by then Indian media publishers should be in a
position to ‘get a good share of the [advertising] revenue’ (Mathew 2011). ).
It seems to me that such predictions and the assumptions behind them reflect a
widespread attitude of denial of the proximity, if not the immediacy, of the
digital impact. The just-released top line findings of the Indian Readership
Survey (IRS 2012, Q2) show that newspaper readership has remained virtually stagnant
over the past six months compared with a 35 per cent growth of Internet users,
of course from a very low base. It seems highly improbable that India has until
2040 for the tipping point to arrive.
The
critical challenge here is the need to come to terms with the convergences
observed worldwide, make nuanced assessments of the pace of change, and prepare
for the future, including possibly hard times.
A conceptual framework
In
critically assessing performance a clear distinction needs to be drawn and maintained
between the state
or fortunes of the news media and
the state
of journalism. The point seems obvious enough but the two states tend to
get conflated in public as well media marketing discourse. High growth rates,
with animal spirits rampant across the sector, may offer opportunities but they
do not guarantee quality. I would now like to turn our focuson the state of
journalism in India and some relevance and quality issues. To do this, one needs a
conceptual framework to look at and evaluate news media functions in society. I
have written on this subject and will only offer some shorthand observations
here.
The
long-term Indian press experience, set in a broader framework, suggests two
extremely valuable central functions or roles that the country’s best
newspapers have played in modern and contemporary times. These functions may be
termed (a) the credible-informational and (b) the critical-investigative-adversarial.
An accompanying condition – which evolves over time, typically as an outcome of
a democratic or working people's struggle – is that the political system, for
whatever reason, gives newspapers free or relatively free rein, and a public
culture of valuing these functions develops. Performed over time, the two
central functions working together build trust in
the press, or more accurately, in individual newspapers.
There
are also valuable derivatives of the two central, twinned functions. The first
derivative is the agency of the press in public education. A second is serving as a critical forum for analysis, disputation, and
comment, in which different opinions and ideas are discussed, debated, and have
it out. An idealized conception of this is attributed to the American
playwright Arthur Miller: ‘A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to
itself’ (Miller 1961). A third derivative is agenda building. Socially conscious media can trigger
agenda-building processes to help produce democratic and progressive outcomes;
and this they can do best when an authentic public opinion and a congenial
context of attitude, feeling, and critical democratic values and practice
exist.
A
third function of the news media is the pastime or entertainment function. At its worst, it seeks to
purvey escapist entertainment, celebrity worship, vapid talk shows, scandal,
and even voyeurism at the expense of everything else. But it can be something
quite different – engaging, entertaining, delving into life’s small pleasures,
covering hobbies and recreation, pandering to crossword and sudoku addicts,
mixing in humour and satire, lightening solemn, heavy, ponderous journalism,
and in general serving the ‘pleasure principle’ as the French use that term.
Evaluating performance: the good and the bad
What
can we say broadly about the performance of India’s news media within this
evaluative framework?
The
Indian press is more than two centuries old. It has always been a highly
political press. Its strengths have largely been shaped by its historical
experience and, in particular, by its association with the freedom struggle as
well as movements for social emancipation, reform, and amelioration.The long
struggle for independence; the sharp ideological and political divides;
controversies and battles over social reform; radical and revolutionary
aspirations and movements; compromising as well as fighting tendencies; and the
competition between self-serving and public service visions of journalism
–these have all found reflection in the character and performance of the Indian
press over the truly long term(Ram 2000: 242).Even in the pre-Independence
context, the press learned to act like a player in the major league political
and socio-economic arena, despite its well-known limitations in terms of reach
in society, financial viability, professional training, and entrepreneurial and
management capabilities.This rich history accounts for the seriousness,
relevance, and public-spirited orientation of the press at its best (Ibid.: 242-243).
The
tradition of a strong and assertive political press has continued into six
decades of independence. Today satellite television competes with newspapers
aggressively and often breathlessly in trying to influence the political agenda
of states and the nation. With their expanded reach, these news media together
serve as an effective antidote to any trends of de-politicization in society.
Further, there is significant space for the expression of dissent and contrary
political opinions.
Pluralism
in the Indian media can be said to reflect the vast regional, linguistic,
socio-economic, and cultural heterogeneity of the subcontinent.A positive
factor for both the print media and news television is that over the past
quarter-century, their social representativeness has broadened. For one thing,
there has been a rapid feminization of the newsroom. Alongside this, the
composition of the journalistic workforce has become more inclusive in
socio-economic and regional terms. However, the number of Dalit journalists in
the mainstream news media continues to be insignificant.
Tens
of millions of Indians are voracious consumers of news about politics. Daily
newspapers in nearly two dozen Indian languages as well as in English are their
primary source, with news television spicing up the fare. And clearly political
awareness and excitement are good for the media business. Jeffrey speaks of the
‘Crimean War effect’ and makes the connection strongly: while literacy, basic
communications, and adequate technology are a necessary condition for the
development of a daily newspaper culture, it is ‘momentous events’ that provide
‘the link between these developments and politics – the link that seems to send
circulations shooting upwards’ (Jeffrey 1987: 608).
The
progressive south Indian State of Kerala is the classic Indian case of
politicization spreading to large sections of the population, rural as well as
urban, and creating a newspaper-reading culture; and the mass habit, in town
and country, of reading daily and periodical newspapers and tracking major
happenings through them contributing to the creation of an authentic public
opinion (Ramachandran 1996: 206).
The
dramatic expansion of the Hindi daily press over the last quarter-century,
partly in response to the political and social upheaval generated by
Ayodhya-centred communal mobilization by the Hindu Right, is a strikingly
different case. The Hindi press has still not been able to live down the
ignominy of the kar sevak,or militant Hindu chauvinist, role a large
section of it played during the Ayodhya crisis of October-November 1990; this
has been well documented and indicted in a study commissioned by the Press
Council of India (1991). The culpability of influential sections of the Indian
media in adopting a respectful, if not celebratory, attitude towards the Hindu
Right’s Ram Janmabhoomi movement and in creating the impression that the
mobilisation that led up to the demolition of the Babri Masjid was ‘a grand
mobilisation without any dissenting voice’ has been criticised by the Citizens’
Tribunal on Ayodhya (1993).
In
the case of Gujarat’s anti-Muslim pogrom of 2002, there was strikingly
different coverage by the English language and the Gujarati press. While
`national media’ coverage has justly been applauded for truth-telling and
blowing the whistle on a state-sanctioned genocidal pogrom, it was a sobering
fact that the dominant Gujarati print media in the State performed the
manufacture of consent function with a vengeance, attracting censure from
various fact-finding exercises, including a report done for the Editor’s Guild
of India (2002), for ‘wilful incitement to offence, propagation of hate, and
fuelling disorder’.
Some
of the finest work done by the Indian press, historically and in contemporary
times, is its investigation and expose of political corruption, ministerial
misconduct, and government misdeeds. In fact, corruption, in its myriad forms
and tremendous scale, presents limitless investigative opportunities to India’s
independent news media; it also enables them continuously to win strong public
support for the work they do. Here is James Cameron (Cameron 1974: 139) on the
phenomenon, as of 1974 when its scale was perhaps a thousandth of what it is
reckoned to be today:
Corruption in India is almost as leaden a cliche as
hunger. It is sanctified by the oldest of traditions: it is denied by nobody,
indeed the totality and pervasiveness of Indian corruption is almost a matter
of national pride: just as India's droughts are the driest, her famines the most
cruel, her over-population the most uncontrollable, so are all the aspects of
Indian corruption and bribery the most wholly spread and spectacular.
Given
such exciting opportunities to investigate independently, build on
investigations done by official watchdog bodies, and do agenda building on the
theme of corruption, the press has done itself proud. The Bofors howitzer deal
scandal captured the imagination of political India in the late-1980s, so much
so that Bofors became a synonym for sleaze and skulduggery in various Indian
languages. The opening shot in this case was fired by a well-informed broadcast
over Swedish Public Radio, which then, curiously, went silent over the affair.
The prolonged investigation and document-backed expose of the scandal byThe Hindu, in which I played a part, is generally
reckoned to have contributed to the downfall of a corrupt government. Bofors
featured arbitrary and opaque decision-making on a major military acquisition,
and contractual arrangements to pay bribes aggregating more than $200 million
as the quid
pro quo for the Indian
government’s purchase of the 155 mm Swedish howitzers in preference to French
howitzers that the Indian Army brass had repeatedly rated as a better buy.
About $50 million of this amount was paid into secret Swiss bank accounts
before the whistle was blown on the corrupt deal.
In
the years since, there might have been no repeat of Bofors and the way it
unravelled. But in the last few years, the press and news television have
aggressively probed, and agitated on, a series of corruption scandals that have
shaken political India and eroded the credibility of the Manmohan Singh
government.
This
is the Man Booker Prize-giving season and we have quite an exciting shortlist
of contenders. By the way, I haven’t read all the books on the shortlist but I
can’t imagine how Hillary Mantel won’t do it again. Anyway, here is my
shortlist of India’s choicest corruption scandals.
The
2G-spectrum scam is about the government twisting the rules under a ‘first
come, first served’ (rather than an auction-based) allocation regime to favour
mobile telephony companies through undercharging 2-G spectrum allocation
licences in return for huge kickbacks. The presumptive loss to the government
has been estimated by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG), a
constitutionally created financial watchdog, to be in the region of US$32
billion but most of the bribes are yet to be traced by the criminal
investigations.
The
scandal around the 2010 Commonwealth Games held in New Delhi featured massive
irregularities such as the award of work contracts at very high prices, often
to ineligible parties, and pervasive corruption in procurement and the award of
contracts for the construction of the game venues.
The
Adarsh Housing Society scam in Mumbai, India’s financial capital, involved top
politicians, officials, and military officers subverting rules to have a
massive high-rise constructed at a prime location and corner flats for
themselves at hugely deflated prices.
The
mining scandal, spread across several States, has featured the illegal and
corrupt mining of ore, especially iron ore meant for export, defrauding the
state of mining revenues through ministerial and official collusion,
encroachment on forest land, and trampling on the rights of tribal folk.
The
coal block allocation scandal, or Coalgate, promises to be the biggest of them
all – and perhaps one day someone who fictionalizes it will be in contention
for a Booker. The CAG has exposed the fact that by going for a process of
arbitrary allocations, or patronage deals, instead of competitive bidding, the
central government has enabled a ‘windfall gain’ for the allottees worth US$ 35
billion.
In
all these cases, the irregularities and suspicious transactions were exposed by
constitutionally or statutorily created authorities. But the role of the news
media has been crucial in keeping up the heat, contributing new information or
angles, and following up –thus helping to build a democratic public agenda on
the theme of political corruption.
I
must add a caveat here. Critics have noted, correctly, that the energy and
motivation Indian newspapers have shown in going after government and political
corruption have been missing in investigating and exposing corporate
corruption. The reasons for this I will go into a little later.
The
publication in early 2011 of a series of articles based on the U.S. Embassy
cables on India, made available by WikiLeaks, provided the reading public and historians
of contemporary India a wealth of information on foreign and domestic policy
issues, and on corruption, the cover-up of corruption, and ministerial and
official misconduct. One cable supplied explosive information on the 2008
‘cash-for-votes’ scandal, where parliamentary votes were sought to be bought to
help the Manmohan Singh government squeak through a no-confidence motion in the
Lok Sabha, India’s House of Commons. Hearteningly, publication of the story in
the press triggered the launch of a criminal investigation under the watch of
the Supreme Court of India.
I
have given you an idea of the democratic role played by influential sections of
the Indian news media in the sphere of politics. Unfortunately, when it comes
to economic issues and policies, the mainstream media’s contribution turns out
to be anything but democratic. This was not always the case. Amartya Sen has
commended the historical role of Indian newspapers in exposing hunger-related
facts on the ground in extreme cases and, in concert with other democratic
institutions, preventing the government from pursuing disastrous policies and
thus guaranteeing ‘the avoidance of acute starvation and famine’ (Sen 1985a:
77).
Today
a number of factors operating in the Indian media industry have virtually shut
out news, analysis, and comment that challenge the neo-liberal economic
policies that have held sway over the last two decades. Mainstream press and
broadcast media coverage has tended to adopt a laudatory tone, keep out or
underplay the criticisms and objections, censor the negative political and
socio-economic effects, especially among the poor, and provide little space to
the voices of robust criticism and opposition, including those raised from the
ranks of professional economists.
Critics
point out that Indian journalism is facing increasing pressure from advertisers,
marketing personnel, corporate managers, and even senior journalists to present
and prioritize ‘feel good’ factors – rather than highlight the reality of mass
deprivations and what to do about them. In several frank conversations with the
executives of India’s largest newspaper publishing company, Auletta learnt why
poverty, especially rural poverty, was not a fit subject for news and editorial
coverage, why this coverage had to cater to the ‘aspirational’ among young
readers (because poverty was ‘not a condition to which one aspires’), and whya
newspaper’s editorial philosophy, which was derived from its business
philosophy, had to be one of optimism (Auletta 2012).
But
the problem, which is by no means confined to one or a few news organizations,
goes way beyond this. In an original and unusually perceptive meditation on
‘Markets, Morals and the Media’, the economist Prabhat Patnaik (2002) addressed
an interesting conundrum. Despite the growing reach of the media in society,
and despite the talent they have been able to attract, ‘the power of the media
as an institution’ has ‘gone down greatly in India’ in recent times.
The
key question is: why has this decline in the power of the media occurred?
Patnaik’s answer is that ‘internal’ or media-centric explanations are
inadequate and that a better explanation is that‘the moral universe of the
people’ has undergone a change, engendering ‘a degree of confusion,
uncertainty, and fuzziness’ about what is right and wrong and enabling communal
or corrupt forces to ‘get away with their unconcern for media and intellectual
opinion’. Looking deeper for an explanation, the economist finds it in such
factors as the collapse of dreams of building a society that is not based on
private aggrandizement, the ascendancy of a new kind of international finance
capital based on the globalization of finance, the spinelessness of nation
states and political formation in the face of this ascendancy, the intellectual
hegemony attained by ideas and policies imposed by globalized finance, and the
plethora of institutions and instruments that serve this juggernaut (Ibid.).
There
can be little question that the news media ‘have fallen prey to this hegemony’.
From this, we come to what may be called Patnaik’s Law on media power in relation
to economic issues: ‘where the media are on the same side as international
finance capital, they appear powerful; but in fields where they strike out on
their own, upholding humane values and expressing concern for the poor and the
suffering, they appear powerless’. Such powerlessness, he proposes, is the
outcome of a process, ‘the process of ascendancy of international financial
capital over the economy, which the media, paradoxically, with a few honourable
exceptions, have avidly supported’ (Ibid.). George
Monbiot in a recent Guardian column
on the collusion between big business, neo-liberal thinktanks, and the media is
on to much the same trend in the UK – how ‘to free the rich from the
constraints of democracy’ (Monbiot 2012).
Poverty
and mass deprivation, basic livelihood issues, the impact of policies on these
issues, the state of agriculture and the countryside remain massively
undercovered in Indian newpapers and the broadcast media. The good thing is
that the honourable exceptions Patnaik refers to have been significant. P.
Sainath’s investigations of rural distress, farmers’ suicides, and mass
migrations, which won him several honours, including a Magsaysay award, are in
the finest traditions of people-oriented, investigative, agenda-building journalism.
Such influential and iconic work, along with the lively contributions of young
idealistic reporters on these subjects in various Indian languages, suggest a
way out of this bind – provided a public culture of valuing such journalism can
be built up.
The business of journalism
In
several developed countries, media monopoly has developed in a big way, eroding
diversity, pluralism, and the values of serious journalism. The situation in
India is rather different, as is appropriate to a stage of media development
when ageing, economic maturity, and the problems of maturity have not yet set
in (Magnier 2012).But here too monopolistic tendencies and aggressive market
practices aimed at aggrandizing market share and killing competition have
manifested themselves in the press and, to an extent, in the news television
sector. There is clear evidence of hyper-commercialization, which takes a heavy
toll of journalism.
Auletta’s New Yorker piece, Citizens Jain (Auletta 2012), offers an entertaining
glimpse of an exotic world of aggressive and unorthodox publishing and business
strategizing for growing newspapers that throws out of the window most of the
things we have learnt from journalism school or The Elements
of Journalism.
The
issue of ‘paid news’ exploded in the public sphere in the aftermath of the 2009
general election. A section of the press revealed that a large number of
newspapers, small, medium-sized, and big, and also several television channels
had sold promotional news packages of specified size, using an under-the-table
rate card, to candidates in State Assembly and parliamentary elections.
Candidates who could not pay, or refused to pay, were blotted out of news
coverage. There were special rates for negative coverage of the candidates’
opponents. This involved violations of the law, was tantamount to extortion in
several cases, and mocked every rule of ethical journalism. It was every bit of
a rogue practice as the UK’s phone hacking affair was. The scandal of paid news
led to a damning report by a sub-committee of the Press Council and calls for
external regulation of the press and the private television channels.
It
also led to some critical debate on a wider phenomenon – paid news not as a
rogue practice but as a deeper and industry-wide phenomenon that was not
confined to election coverage. Sainath offers this handy definition: ‘Paid news
is run to pass off an advertisement, a piece of propaganda and
advertisement...pass that as news, pretend that it is news, that is “paid
news”. Paid news does not disclose to the reader that this information has been
paid for’ (Sainath 2010).
To
return to the theme of hyper-commercialization and what it means for
journalism. Auletta’s top media interlocutors had no inhibitions in telling him
that ‘we arenot in the newspaper business, we are in the advertising business…a
derived business...of aggregating a quality audience’ for advertisers to
‘facilitate consumption’ (Auletta 2012: 53, 55). And they had a point,
considering that in this top thriving newspaper league, 80 to 90 per cent of
the revenues come from advertising and only small change from circulation. He
learnt about focus-group-led research that put ‘elitist’ editors, ‘pompous
fellows thundering from the pulpit, speaking in eighty-word sentences’ (ibid.:55),in their place. This was research directed
by the marketing people into what readers, and especially ‘aspirational’ young
readers, wanted to read and the consequent restructuring and re-invention of
editorial content.
Auletta
was educated in easy rationalizations of the practice of ‘advertorials’ – an
ad-sales initiative that opened a section of the newspaper to promotional or
puff pieces paid for by celebrities, brands, and well-heeled ego-tripsters, and
written not by ad agencies but by the newspaper’s reporters. There was some
kind of indication that this section was paid for but a reader needed ‘a
magnifying glass to be alerted’ to the disclosure in small print (ibid.: 53).
The New Yorker writer, who has written its Annals of
Communications column since 1993, also learnt about another business innovation
originating from India’s largest newspaper-publishing company but now fairly
common in the media industry –‘private treaties’, a programme under which
newspapers offer ads to smaller and medium-size companies in exchange for
equity (ibid.: 54). The conflict-of-interest
implications of this initiative for editorial coverage of these companies by
the newspapers have been much discussed among journalists and critics of the
Indian media industry. They even attracted the attention of the Securities and
Exchange Board of India (SEBI); in a 2009 letter to the Press Council chairman,
it warned that ‘private treaties may lead to commercialization of news reports
since the same would be based on the subscription and advertising agreement
entered into between the Media group and the company. Biased and imbalanced
reporting may lead to inaccurate perceptions of the companies which are the
beneficiaries of such private treaties’ (Sainath 2010).
This
brings me back to the point that the two states – the fortunes of the news industry
and the state of journalism – ought not to be conflated. Manipulation of news,
analysis, and comment to suit the owners’ financial or political interests; the
downgrading and devaluing of editorial functions and content in some leading
newspaper and news television organizations; systematic dumbing down, led by
the nose by certain types of market research; the growing willingness within
newspapers and news channels to tailor the editorial product to subserve
advertising and marketing goals set by owners and senior management personnel;
hyper-commercialization; price wars and aggressive practices in the home bases
of other newspapers to overwhelm and kill competition; advertorials where the
paid-for aspect of the news-like content is not properly disclosed or disclosed
at all; private treaties; rogue practices like paid election campaign news and
bribe-taking for favourable coverage. If this is what it takes to have thriving
newspapers and other news media, then there is something seriously wrong with
this growth path.
Actually,
some of these tendencies, which have grown qualitatively worse over the past
decade, go back in time. They have caused anxiety to two Press Commissions, to
the Press Council of India from time to time, and to a host of practitioners in
the field. The issue has been sharpened and highlighted recently by trenchant
and tireless public criticism of the ways of the press from the chairman of the
Press Council, Markandey Katju. The retired Supreme Court judge, who came with
strong credentials as a champion of free speech on the bench, began his term in
late-2011 by highlighting ‘three major defects in the Indian media’. He listed
them as frequently diverting attention from serious socio-economic issues to
non-issues and trivializing news, dividing the people by putting out communal
or other divisive messages, and promoting superstition and obscurantism instead
of rational and scientific ideas. He also criticized what he considered to be
the relatively low intellectual level of a majority of journalists, their poor
general and domain knowledge, and their lack of ‘desire to serve the public
interest’. He called on the Indian media, print as well as broadcast, to take
the progressive path the print media charted in Europe’s Age of Enlightenment.
He revealed that he had written to the Prime Minister suggesting that the Press
Council Act be amended to bring the broadcast media under the purview of the
Council and also that it be given ‘more teeth’, including penalizing powers
(Katju 2011a). Not everybody agrees with these bold generalizations and
sweeping assertions but, in my opinion, the Katju critique has been valuable
for keeping the focus on relevance and quality issues.
How free?
An
overarching issue for the news media in India is the state of free speech.
Article
19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and expression
as a fundamental right. This right, hard won in the freedom struggle against a
highly repressive and censorious British Raj, is unamendable. Freedom of the
press is not explicitly mentioned by the Constitution but the Supreme Court of
India has, through judicial interpretation, read it into Article 19. It has
held that freedom of the press is a combination of two freedoms – Article
19(1)(a), ‘the freedom of speech and expression’, and Article 19(1)(g), ‘the
freedom to practice any profession, or to carry on any occupation, trade or
business’. The first is clearly the principal component.
Unfortunately,
freedom of speech and expression is hemmed in, and to a significant extent
undone, by Article 19(2). This provides for restrictions on the fundamental
rightby law – some reasonable, most not. Notable among the unreasonable
restrictions that remain on the statute book or in practice are the law of
criminal defamation, the undefined power of contempt of court, uncodified
legislative privilege, the outrageous law of sedition(124A of the Indian Penal
Code), other illiberal provisions of the IPC (especially 153A), the Unlawful
Activities (Prevention) Act, and other draconian laws enacted in the name of
fighting extremism and terrorism.
Further,
media freedom in India is considered ‘incomplete’ because the print media and
the broadcast media have not been placed on an equal constitutional and legal
footing (Ravi 2007). The higher courts have not judged it necessary to confer
Article 19(1)(a) protection on radio and television.
Newspapers
in independent India have functioned under a legal regime of registration;
since there is no licensing, they cannot be de-licensed. By contrast, private
satellite television channels and FM radio stations function under a licensing
system and can be taken off the air for alleged serious transgressions of the
rules laid down by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Paradoxically,
while newspapers have the Press Council, a statutorily established watchdog,
some would say a watchdog without teeth, there is no legal regulatory framework
for private satellite television channels, which have attracted growing public
complaint that they are a law unto themselves. Add to this the fact that the
huge terrestrial television network remains a state monopoly and the private FM
radio stations are not allowed to do news and current affairs, which remain the
monopoly of All India Radio, and you have an idea of how complicated it gets.
Free
speech has come under serious pressure in India. Consider these examples from
the past quarter-century.
Being
the first country in the world to ban Salman Rushdie’s Satanic
Verses and carrying through
this policy of appeasement of murderous intolerance to the last Jaipur Literary
Festival.
Criminalizing
paintings by India’s greatest painter, M.F. Husain, from 1996 onwards, the
state standing by asan orchestrated Hindu Right campaign intimidated him with
dozens of criminal complaints filed across the country, vandalized his art
works and exhibitions, and eventually forced him into exile in Dubai, to die,
at the age of 95, in London as a Qatari national.
Carrying
out several acts of localized violence and intimidation against journalists,
writers, historians, cartoonists, artists, activists, and others.
Assaulting
journalists and sending toughs to stone, smash, and burn the offices of media
organizations, here and there.
Piling
on criminal defamation cases against journalists, with the lower courts hardly
applying their mind to prima facie admissibility
even under this illiberal law, thus ensuring that the process is the
punishment.
Blocking
text or sms services in the name of law and order or public order. Notifying
under the Information Technology Act, 2000 (as amended in 2008) illiberal
rules, especially the notorious Intermediary Guidelines Rules, which permit
blocking of content on the Internet.
Threatening
to tame the social media, which, among other things, shows a complete inability
to understand the nature and ways of the sharing beast.
Using
the sedition law against the writer Arundhati Roy.
Imprisoning
a cartoonist for sedition, with the result that the Indian criminal justice
system has itself become a cartoon gone viral on the worldwide web.
As
the journalist Salil Tripathi put it earlier this year in a tweet at the
FreeSpeechDebate site: ‘Biggest threat: combination of state passivity,
antiquated laws, and existence of ‘the right to feel offended’’ (Tripathi
2012). The right to be easily offended – genuinely offended or offended for the
sake of an ideological or political cause – he might have added, had Twitter
allowed him more than 140 characters.
This
paradoxical situation demands well-considered, progressive reform. The aim of
such reform must be to expand the scope of media freedom – but also to ensure
professional and social accountability. But it is well to remember that media
freedom cannot survive, let alone thrive, unless free speech can be safeguarded
in society at large.
Regulate? If so, how and by whom?
This
is a period during which, taking the cue from the critique and demands placed
on the national agenda by Press Council chairman Katju, many voices within the
Indian establishment and the large media-consuming public are demanding
accountability, transparency, better standards, an end to paid news and other
rogue practices, and effective governance and regulation. The more discerning
critical voices make the point that ‘self-regulation’ either does not exist
within the Indian media industry or, where it exists, is not effective.
Self-regulation, the Press Council chairman has proclaimed, is an oxymoron and
no profession can be called a profession unless it has an enforceable code of
conduct and sanctions against those who violate it. So what can be the answer?
It
is likely that freedom of the Indian news media will come under increasing
pressure and threat unless they move briskly to set their house in order. They
need to ensure that transparency, accountability, and social responsibility are
more than slogans. With no codes of values or practice binding journalists and
the media industry, and no mechanisms for self-regulation such as internal news
ombudsmen in place within major news organizations other than one or two, the
vulnerability to government and legislative forays in disciplining the news
media through external regulation going beyond the present Press Council is
becoming increasingly evident. Over the years, a substantial international
literature has appeared on templates for socially and ethically accountable
journalism and also on the constitutive ‘elements of journalism’ (Kovach & Rosenstiel
2001). This has yielded codes of practice or professional ethics privileging
the principles and values of journalism. It has emphasized such disciplines as
fact-checking, verification, investigation, rigorous data sourcing and
analysis, providing context and meaning, and maintaining perspective.
Here
a fundamental question arises: what are facts to the journalist? The New York
Times may continue to print
on its front page the claim, ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print’, patented in
1896, but everyone recognizes this is mythologizing about not just one
newspaper but about the field of journalism itself. Some months ago, I proposed
to the Contemporary History section of the Indian History Congress that an
intelligent approach to the journalist and her facts needed to fall back not so
much on C.P. Scott’s much-quoted dictum, ‘Comment is free but facts are sacred’
(Scott 1921), as on E.H. Carr’s classic dissection of ‘The Historian and His
Facts’ (Carr 1961: 7-30). The approach needed to steer between the Scylla of a
‘fetishism’ of undistinguishable facts and documents, the most trivial mixed up
with the really significant, and the Charybdis of the wildest and most extreme
subjective form of ‘disputable interpretation’. As for the discerning public,
the most sensible advice must be, following Carr (1961: 23), ‘When you read, or
tune in to, a work of journalism, always listen out for the buzzing’.This is
more or less what James Cameron prescribed to young journalists.
India
and its news media can learn valuably from the parallel discussion of
media-related issuestaking place in the United Kingdom, which has been provoked
by the rogue practices of an influential section of its media. The Leveson
Inquiry has been a stimulating learning experience for us, allowing for the
considerable differences in the situations. Many of the testimonies have been
first-rate and the Inquiry has gone quite deep into ‘the culture, practices and
ethics of the press’ (Leveson Inquiry 2011).As a former Editor, I am pleased
that the forward-looking Editor of the Guardian has welcomed Leveson as ‘an
opportunity for the industry to have a conversation with itself while also
benefitting from the perspective and advice of others’ (Rusbridger 2011), and
that several other British journalists seem to agree with this. We look forward
to the final report or recommendations of Lord Justice Leveson and to seeing
what legislative or other practical arrangements might follow.
The
Indian situation cries out for such an independent, comprehensive, hard look
into the culture, practices, and ethics of the news media and into questions of
what kind of regulatory and governance mechanisms can be worked out and put in
place. The object must be the same: to support ‘integrity and freedom of the
press while encouraging the highest ethical standards’ (Leveson Inquiry 2011).
Nobody
knows what the long term holds for India’s news media. It should be possible,
through some kind of regulation, to reform the system to put an end to the
major ethical transgressions, not to mention rogue practices like paid news.
But I have no illusions about what it will take to reverse the tendencies that
put enormous pressure on independent, professional journalism. My personal hope
is that feel-good journalism, focus-group-led journalism, ad-dictated
journalism, journalism that sees no need to take account of basic realities –
the mass poverty and the multiple deprivations in a country where two-thirds of
the population subsist on less than two dollars a day– can be discredited by
good, sensitive, progressive journalism that attracts public support. My hope
is that effective incentives, moral and material, can be put in place in
significant sections of the news media for taking up the basic concerns of
hundreds of millions of ordinary Indians – and projecting them, with social
responsibility, into the public sphere.
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Keywords: James Cameron Memorial Lecture 2012, N Ram, journalism, India, paid news, media regulation, censorship,
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