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Mainstream, VOL XLIX, No 1, December 25, 2010 (Annual 2010)

Un-journalism

Friday 31 December 2010, by T J S George

#socialtags

The closing months of 2010 saw a cascade of corruption cases as never before witnessed in India. All but one of them had a familiar thread running through them. In the Commonwealth Games swindles, the Adarsh housing fraud, the Allahabad High Court’s “Uncle judge” scandal, the PSU bank managers’ bribe-for-loan trickery and the massive land scams in the BJP’s Karnataka, the driving force was old-fashioned human greed. The exception, the Niira Radia tapes, exposed a systemic rot in the vitals of the Indian state. The first lot made us angry—that the greedy scoundrels could so shamelessly be on the take. The tapes made us scared—that our country and its supporting systems are so vulnerable to manipulation.

Niira Radia evidently has an exceptional ability. She can make the biggest corporate bosses of India as well as a network of Ministers, party chieftains, officials, MPs, socialites, professionals and journalists feel that they need her. They open up to her, share thoughts and information with her and often act according to her advice/instruction. These are qualities that are good for her and her clients. They are bad for the country because she works exclusively for her clients’ interests which are not necessarily in the national interest.

Often they are against the national interest. For example, Radia was actively engaged in the promotion of the DMK leadership and especially in getting the telecom portfolio for A. Raja. The interests of the DMK leadership have come to mean the interests of one family, not the interests of Tamil Nadu as a whole, let alone the interests of India as a whole. Given A. Raja’s track record, getting him installed as the Telecom Minister was decidedly against the interests of India as subsequent events proved.

In other words, lobbying, by definition, is promoting private interests at the expense of public interests. That’s why it is a dicey profession and a powerful profession at the same time. That’s also why the activities of lobbyists should not be given a chance to hide behind pleas of privacy. Telephone conversations may be private in a manner of speaking. But when they become the means by which state policies are determined, the people’s right to know what is being done in their name overrides the individual’s right to privacy.

No doubt lobbying has been recognised as a feature of democracy. It is a big industry in the US where lobbyists are known to look after important Senators and Congressmen. But the American political system is not seriously damaged because of two factors. First, there is a set of checks and balances such as the Lobbying Disclosures Act. Secondly, a handful of widely respected media organisations maintain their watchdog role unsullied.

The latter factor especially helps keep the American and most Western democracies fairly robust. Bearing witness to this is the procedure WikiLeaks has developed to publicise the documents it unearths. It passes the secrets to a select bunch of newspapers: The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, El Pais. What distinguishes these papers is their unquestioned credibility earned over a long period through responsible journalism. We do not have a newspaper that fits into this world class or a channel that compares with the BBC.

CREDIBILITY, the single most precious asset a news organisation can possibly have, has been on the decline in India, slowly since the 1960s and rapidly since the 1980s. In the sixties, with financial dailies coming into existence, corporate houses began distributing expensive sarees and suitlengths to reporters at the end of press conferences. This developed into a successful public company giving its lucrative shares free to a leading editor.

In the 1980s the institution of editor began to be compromised. Today most newspapers are edited in effect by marketing managers or by owner managers. In English only a tiny number of papers—The Telegraph, The Hindu, India Today, The Week, The Indian Express—remain exceptions because they are led by owners who are professional publishers and act as such. Business Standard and Outlook are the only papers that are owned by corporate houses but allow editors to function with freedom. At the other extreme is The Times of India which proclaims that newspapers have no social responsibility other than making profits for their shareholders. It also pioneered the “paid news” concept, the most insidious wickedness to strike Indian journalism and the reading public.

That such patently unethical concepts have commercially succeeded in India says a great deal about the state of our nation. These are times when God himself has become an item of trade in the hands of his presumed devotees. What chance, then, for the gods of print and television to avoid the tricks of traders? Perhaps that is where the problem lies: journalists thinking that they are gods with the power to make and unmake mere mortals.

Media personalities like Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi had become too glamorous for their own good. Published excerpts from their conversations with Niira Radia show them in unmistakably compromising positions—both offering to talk to Congress bosses on behalf of Radia’s clients, both appearing to be happily close to the lobbyist and happy to be doing her bidding. Doing somebody else’s fixing work is of course not journalism. But Dutt and Sanghvi could not—or would not—separate journalism from influence-peddling.

The reactions from these journalists and the news organisations they represent were revealing. Sanghvi, an intelligent person, seemed to sense that he was caught on the wrong foot. He stopped his weekly column—which had “coincidentally” reflected the precise opinions of Niira Radia in a case she was interested in—and made some kind of apology to his readers. He could have made the apology sound a bit more genuine than it did. But something was better than nothing.

His newspaper(s) were less graceful. Hindustan Times, published a “clarification” the gist of which was that Sangvi’s opinions were his own. Fair enough. But the explanation was deferential to him and made references to all the wonderful terms in the textbooks—code of ethics, values, integrity, balanced, authentic. HT adhered to all these steadfastly, the clarification said. How nice!

HT’s sister paper, Mint, apparently obliged to defend the house hero, published a personal note by the Editor as to why his paper was silent about the episode. The laboured exercise was based on just one argument—that the phone transcripts were not authenticated. He took several dozen sentences to say what could have been said in two short sentences or three. That happens when you say something you don’t believe in.

Barkha Dutt’s response was quite different from Vir Sanghvi’s She summarily rejected all charges and suspicions with phrases like “Smear campaign astounding … amazed, angered, saddened...” When she was cornered by fellow journalists who were also, in a different sense, amazed, angered and saddened, she presented herself as one who was incapable of making a mistake. She saw herself aglow with the halo of papal infallibility.

Ms Dutt has been a role model for newcomers into the profession—and deservedly so. But in a moment of professional crisis, she could not concede that probably she was in the wrong. To that extent she is an example of what happens when fame and fortune fall upon people who do not have the intellectual equipment to carry it. There is a difference between the way Amir Khan carries stardom and the way Salman Khan does it. The glamorisation of Ms Dutt went so far that one could not be sure if NDTV was there to serve her or the other way around. So glaring was the over-exposure given to her that both she and the channel began suffering from “Barkha fatigue”. Perhaps the nonchalance with which she seemed to further Niira Radia’s agenda and the dismissive bluster with which she ignored the criticism that followed point to the self-importance that accrued as a result of the channel becoming her personal vehicle. But she should realise now that her profile has taken a hit.

In a general sense, it is not reasonable to expect the media to be clean when everything around it is unclean. The cleanest Prime Minister since Jawaharlal Nehru has flummoxed citizens as well as the Supreme Court with his silences. The most respected corporate chairman has gone to the Supreme Court to protect his privacy, thereby suggesting that he has something to hide. Nothing is sacred any longer. How can the media be an exception when the companies that employ journalists are themselves chasing the fast buck?

The only hope is that this is a passing phase. Decencies have a way of asserting themselves in human affairs. A sense of shame will eventually dawn upon companies and star individuals that will make them pay more attention to public perceptions. No one is a professional, no one is clean, unless the public perceives him/her to be so.

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