Media is the message?

Bringing in variety and standard to India's media is a long haul

Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr  Delhi

It is the best of times, and it is the worst of times in India media. There are so many television news channels around which were utterly unimaginable even 10 years ago. Many of them many not be there a few years hence. The "shaking out" process will take care of that. But if you had thought that plenty meant diversity, then you are in for great disappointment. Almost all of the channels want to do the same thing better than the others, outwitting each other in terms of deafening loudness and numbing triviality. It would be dishonest not to say that some of that "trash" is indeed delightful. The dozens of channels do not give dozens of perspectives or views. Plenty does not translate into intelligent choice for the viewer.

Viewers of A and B might feel that C may have miscalculated in choosing news anchors with the élan of models, and that D is too belligerent. But there is no simple polarisation. It is hard to ignore the wimpy liberalism of A, with anchors wanting to convert the tragedy of October 8 earthquake to solve the problem of the two Kashmirs. The channel clearly supports economic liberalisation in the most unintelligent way, that only English-educated, muddled Indian middle class can do. The reporters and anchors of this channel are only too ready to jump at the poor communists every time they raise pertinent objections to the Manmohan Singh government's woolly-headed ideas about privatisation. They perceive the poor and marginalised people of India's cities and villages in the same way that socialite socialists did in the 1960s and 1970s. Forget the countless other inanities of this channel and those of others. They may improve in time. At the moment they are wallowing in their callowness.

A sting of the "Operation Duryodhan" kind comes as a whiff of fresh air in this hothouse atmosphere of news channels. And that is the danger. A sting operation should not be considered journalism as such because of the many ambivalences and ambiguities involved in its modus operandi. It is guerrilla journalism at its worst. And the best is based on naïve assumption contained in the assertion often made by those who carry out a sting like that of "Operation West End" and "Operation Duryodhan" that they are exposing the corruption embedded in the polity. Of course, there is also the "art for art's sake" aspect to it. "We are interested in the story. We are not really concerned about its implications or its fallout" they say. The aestheticism implied in this chimes well with the spirit of guerrilla journalism.

A sting is problematic because it is a curious mixture of fact and fiction. The companies that are floated to entrap the corrupt politicians do not exist. The transactions truly belong to the virtual world because no real transaction is done despite money changing hands. In "Operation West End", no arms were purchased as is the case in corrupt defence deals. Similarly, in "Operation Duryodhan", no real business interests benefited by those few members of parliament raising those questions. Yes, it shows the system is full of holes. But that is not good enough in journalism. As in the case of the 1951 case of HG Mudgal, who was shown to have raised questions on receiving money from the Bullion Merchants Association, where both parties to the transaction are real, what is missing in a sting is a real instance of corruption. Sting is, on the one hand, a prank, a serious one. Like a good joke which has an undeniable element of truth, sting-as-prank does have its element of truth but it does not have a greater status than that. Sting journalism is not an alternative to opiate journalism of the news channels of the moment.