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.

Television channels face terrible limitations. They cannot ever show the whole picture, but only a part of it. They cannot debate the pros and cons except in the manner of sophomores, either supporting or opposing a motion in a college debating society. The intellectual disability that the channels display can be overcome, but no one wants to and the commercial motives are not always the only ones for not doing so. Unfortunately, debate, the essence of democracy, can only be carried out in and through the print media.

It is in the traditional print media that we see the present-day distortions much more clearly than even in the television channels. We need to look at the English language newspapers, though they represent a minority section of the reading public in the country, to get the full flavour. Excepting an obdurately left-leaning English language newspaper, all the others are blindly pro-economic liberalisation. It is, of course, no sin to champion the cause of a free market economy. The curious part is that the English newspapers display a herd mentality. There are no individual voices. There is no dissent. They do not even differ among themselves that there can be many kinds of market economy, and that the Manmohan Singh-P Chidambaram version need not be the only one. It is hilarious to hear young and serious editors citing the not-always-reliable planning commission statistics to say that poverty in India has declined.

Not just liberalisation, the English-language papers are gung ho about Bush and his regime. The president and his men would blush at the unstinting support they get from the India's English-language newspapers. While the Americans are having second thoughts about the wisdom of the war in Iraq, foreign policy pundits in these papers speak the language of the US State Department. At the time of the invasion of Iraq, when the Bush team brushed aside the need to obtain a United Nations mandate, India's strategic affairs experts in the media pooh-poohed the spineless UN. When the Bush administration recognised the need for getting the UN backing to legitimise its presence in Iraq, there was silence on the Indian front. It seemed that our school dropout politicians had a better sense of reality than the "erudite" writers on foreign affairs. One of the editors has been described as "pathologically pro-American", which is true of many others in the newspapers as well. And even when something is true about the American view, you suspect it when it is published in these papers. On the other hand, the habitually vocal anti-Americans stance does not enjoy credence even when what it says is true.

It is a good thing that biases hang so openly all round and they are being flaunted proudly. It is better than dull and monotonous objectivity of the past. But the problem with the Indian English newspapers is that there is nothing much more than uninformed biases. In the United States, the Nation and the National Review stand at the opposite ends of the ideological spectrum and they are as loud as anyone in India. But they engage with the opponent, and argue out their positions. That is missing in India.

There is a need to get back to this liberalisation phenomenon, and the starry-eyed gaping of the Indian editors and reporters. The implosion of Enron was nearly a "non-event" in the Indian newspapers despite the fact that the swindling executive team of Enron, many of whom have been punished by the US courts, played their dirty games, going out of their way to woo the politicians in the country when they got the Dabhol project. No one raised questions about the inequitable power-purchase agreements (PPA) made with Enron, which was the main cause of the debt burden of the Dabhol project. But the whole of the Indian media went hammer and tongs about the Volcker report, which had no substantial truth in it. The report was an attempt by the Americans to make the case against the UN as a den of corruption. The Indian journalists were so overwhelmed by their pro-American bias that they went into action over something that does not affect India's interests in a big way.

It is hard to imagine Indian newspapers doing critical and sharp stories against the Reliance group of companies the way many of the American newspapers did over Microsoft. Bill Gates did not enjoy any media immunity being the richest person in the world. Indian corporate honchos will never face the heat in the media. Even with regard to an angel company like the Infosys, the media would not write a critical story about the company. Narayanan Murthy and Nandan Nilekani are fully aware of the limitations of Infosys, and about what little it can do to solve the problems facing the Indian people and the Indian economy. But the media dare not say anything about it.

It is hard not to quote an interesting report that Amy Waldman of the New York Times did for her paper. She travelled to the outskirts of Vishakhapatnam and Bangalore, and described the ironies and contradictions of liberalisation. She showed how many in the Indian middle class are getting into credit card debt trap, like their counterparts in the US. The report revealed the vulgarity of money power. It was published on December 5, 2005. The Hindu was the only paper to have reprinted the report though many other newspapers too subscribe to the NYT Syndicate. It is the kind of story that will not be written or published in the Indian newspapers of today. And thereby hangs a tale of the state of the Indian media.

Can things be better than this in the media? It would not be right to draw up utopian scenarios where everything is right in the business. It will never be so. The alternative to a media chasing the market is not the altruistic dreamland of non-governmental organisations and the myopic idealism of those who lead them. As they say of democracy that the cure of the ills of democracy is more democracy, it is so in the case of media as well. There is need for more voices in the India media. Monopoly in the information sector is not only unhealthy but also dangerous as well. One of the advantages of a market economy is that it is possible for many people to enter the arena, start newspapers and magazines, set up radio and television stations. What is needed then is for social entrepreneurs to enter the media, and contribute to the apparently cacophonous chorus. It is then possible for people to have access to different points of view. There is a need to craft a media policy by discerning individuals, and chart the necessary legislation, to enable people with limited budgets to start radio and television stations. The big houses should not be allowed to swamp the sector. The persistence with which advocates of right to information have been able to get through the necessary legislation should serve as a model to those who want keep the media scene free and vibrant. Private monopoly and governmental controls have to be fought constantly to safeguard media, the effective channel for the inalienable and natural rights to freedom of speech and expression.