- Sunday, 16 October 2011 11:30
- Udayan Namboodiri
The easiest way to begin a critical article on the media is to reel out the latest bloomers detected on your favourite newspaper or channel. A Google search would easily release a burst of writings on media gaffes, which ultimately do little but entertain, quite conforming to the by-now-set culture of simplification. In the early 1990s, Doordarshan aired for a while a weekly programme on reporting and sub-editing cock-ups in the print medium — the TV explosion was yet to happen. A dowager paper from Bombay (this was pre-Mumbai) reported on one day in its page 12 a certain story which on the following Tuesday was splashed all over page 1 as an “exclusive” without a word changed. Another, with 25 editions all over the country, serially displayed utter ignorance of simple facts of Indian history and geography. The programme did create ripples for its frankness and irreverence. Curiously, the producers chose to remain anonymous. This somewhat diluted their avowed intention of “promoting greater professionalism”. The entire tribe of journalists, far from drawing appropriate lessons from the series, decided to speculate whether it was another Government plot to prepare ground for some new form of defamation Bill. Or, was it the mischief by a certain Australian-origin American media tycoon who was rumoured to be keen on buying up our media houses on the cheap? Whatever, the forum of newspaper moghuls, INS, understandably embarrassed by the revelations of their cavalier attitude to quality — even the redoubtable Hindu was exposed for a ridiculous story on Bhutan — lobbied hard to force the Information & Broadcasting Ministry to withdraw the programme.
There are two morals of that story, which have lingered, and leave me convinced that serious problems about journalism and the media, when discussed in a light-hearted way, produce nothing but infotainment. And, the fourth estate, for all its look-out for the lapses of others, hates the ray of critical inquiry being turned upon itself.
Today, against the backdrop of the raging controversy over the Government’s modification in the policy guidelines allowing it to revoke the licences of TV channels, it is time to ponder once again on the rationale of having a media which undermines the raison d’être of a fourth estate in a democracy. It is now 23 years since the Rajiv Gandhi Government was forced to withdraw, under across-the-board pressure, its plans to introduce a draconian Defamation Act. I distinctly recall many sages in the media returning to business as usual after that struggle with the friendly warning to fellow professionals — reform or perish. In the present context, there is none of that unified action in civil or journalistic society to combat the latest move by the state to tie down the more powerful arm of the media (TV) because, quite frankly, the reservoir of sympathy for a vibrant, even if silly, media establishment has quite diminished over the years.
This antipathy is not uniquely Indian, however. There exists in all democracies the growing feeling that ordinary people are left suffocated by media manipulations. Vance Packard, the author of anti-consumerism bestsellers such as The Hidden Persuaders, The Status Seekers and The Waste Makers, warned about the excesses of advertising, social climbing and planned obsolescence. Though he restricted himself largely to advertising, his writings acquired greater meaning in the post-globalisation era when the thin line between the advertising and editorial departments of our media powerhouses gradually vanished. Over the past 20 years, the Indian media has characteristically dumped-down itself and, therefore, it is no surprise that the new generation of news consumers is increasingly turning towards the Internet for free information.
We have reached the point when the media, at least the media as we have known it so far, is facing its biggest existential threat. In 2009, the National Youth Readership Survey, sponsored by the National Book Trust, came out with findings that should logically have robbed our media moghuls of their sleep: In young India (a country where more than 70 per cent of the people are below 35 years of age), newspapers and magazines are of incidental relevance. The Internet, even with broadband problems, is growing faster than anybody can imagine as a source of news and information, mopping up 70 minutes of attention each day.
TV news, for all its pretensions to supremacy in the news department, commands only a small part of the 97 minutes the idiot box takes away — most of it for soap and song and dance. Even if some argue that Internet time is mostly for social networking (actually this survey was conduced before the explosion of Facebook’s popularity), then the example of the role played by such sites in mobilising action in largely youth-driven mass movements — from Tehrir Square to Ramlila Maidan to Wall Street — should serve as proof enough of the end of the Raj.
Today more and more young people are openly spurning newspapers and TV channels. They say, “These people are arrogant; why should we be tied down to reading and viewing whatever a bunch of people sitting in… decide is good enough for us?” This rings the bell for the era when editors pompously described their papers as containing “all the news that’s fit to print”. It also throws out the baby as well as the bathwater insofar as media and all its internal crises are concerned.
SELF-CORRECTION
It’s not that the media houses are unaware of the roots of their own irrelevance. Their urge to seek answers to their predicament is routinely reflected in the articles, documentaries and editorials they are increasingly producing of late. They are researching the phenomenon — what went wrong? Independent foundations set up with donations from media houses are also active in this area. Sadly, none of this is reflected in the Indian scene.
It’s tragic that there is no homegrown academic tradition insofar as journalism is concerned. The libraries of journalism departments in our universities are filled with foreign publications, mostly of Anglo-Saxon origin, which are full of abstract theories with little or no relation to developing country situations in general and certainly not India. The content of the courses are extremely pragmatic, intended to produce within the shortest possible time sub-editors for newspapers and byte reporters for TV channels. There is no serious attempt to educate journalists, either at the greenhorn or advanced stage, on basic issues affecting life in India. Agriculture, for instance, supports 70 per cent of our rural population. Yet, even our highest-selling ‘economic’ newspaper or ‘business’ channel just takes episodic interest in it. Reason: They have not cared to build capacities to research and report on the issues affecting 800 million Indians.
Scam-chasing is considered a glamorous game, offering instant journalistic repute. Even here there is a huge intellectual vacancy. No media house invests time and resources to prevent scams before they have gobbled up (increasingly) fantastic sums of public money. In the 1990s, any scam made a story. But after the Bihar fodder scam, nothing which carried less than a Rs 900 crore tag was worthy of front page highlighting. Now, after the Commonwealth and 2G scams, the sky seems to have been pierced. The point that I am trying to make is that the Commonwealth Games scam was happening right under the nose of the national media since 2005 and any city reporter, if given the right training and orientation, could easily have cracked the Kalmadi empire well before the national disgrace had ballooned to the size it did.
These days, the CAG seems to be the gold standard in investigative journalism. An institution of the state has snatched the bottom from the independent media’s existence. Yet, there is widespread ignorance about the real role of the CAG. It’s common to see misinformed analysis centred around “indictments” handed out by the CAG. But, for God’s sake, CAG doesn’t indict, it just gives glorified audit objections — an indictment would mean not passing a statement of accounts of a Ministry or department, which, of course, doesn’t happen: The CAG does pass them. Whose job is it to indict? Of course, the Public Account Committee’s. And that’s where CAG reports go to die! That’s because by the time CAG reports go to the PAC, the media moves on to the next CAG report.
A theoretical bedrock is a must for every professional. While engineers have their Institution of Engineers-India, doctors their Indian Medical Association, and even clerks their own guilds, the country’s media lacks an institution which serves up guide lights for young professionals, disseminates new trends, organises training and re-training, engages the powerful combine of Government and business as a collective and, most importantly, serves as an ombudsman. They only have “press clubs” which are nothing but disgraceful liquor dens where babbling reporters collect at all hours for drowning in their own inferiority complexes.
REINFORCING INSTITUTIONS
But in Kolkata, Chennai, Thiruvananthapuram and Agartala, it is possible to discern traces of an original vision gone waste. There are remnants of “libraries” which sadly contain nothing but shelves stacked with old, rotting books and files of newspaper clippings. I remember a club in Calcutta got a “computer centre” in 1992, thanks to the good offices of Pranab Mukherjee, who was then Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission. But it is doubtful if the “centre” was ever put to any use. It was not long before it was dismantled. This enforces one’s conviction that even with their tiny salaries, the journalists of the pre-1977 age did nurture a professional ideal. The press clubs were centres of considerable intellectual pursuit. Theory’s highest purpose is to carve on stone a set of ethics, tale over an art or a craft as an intangible but all pervasive oversight body — a regulator if you like.
Why talk of higher goods, can anybody name even one leading English language daily with a set of thumb rules covering the paper’s chosen idioms? Twenty-six years ago this October, on my first day in The Statesman, Calcutta, a senior colleague handed over to me something which was a cherished institution in that once-proud house which nurtured so many outstanding journalists over the past century — the “style book”. A former chief sub-editor, Jiten Sen, developed it in his free time; such was his love for the English language and his concern that its myriad aspects be utilised to the hilt for effective journalism. Sen’s original purpose was to clear confusion over use of particular verbs; where to use the definite article and where not; how to tone down rhetoric flourish contained even then in reporters’ dispatches; and, where to entertain Americanisms and where not.
“The Second World War is historically correct, but our style is to refer to it as World War II,” was a typical announcement. It had an iron-clad finality about it, which no rookie in the newsroom dared to fool with. Those who followed Sen kept modifying and adding to the style book, but the tradition somehow stopped in the mid-1970s, which was obvious from the cessation of updates on specific personalities. For instance, the edition I had contained a noting, “The up and coming young man’s name is Sunjay Gandhi”. After that, for 10 long years, the style book was allowed to degenerate and it was sad to see, by the early 1990s, editorials in the paper disregarding Sen’s style book.
In 1998, soon after I arrived in Delhi to take up a job with what was then the leading paper of India’s Capital, I decided to check out the ‘library’. Riding the lift up eight floors, all I got was a gap between two stolid almirahs filled with old Manorama Year Books and much sundry paper, mostly Parliament publications thrown away by reporters over five or six decades. There may have been a few books behind the cloud of cobwebs on some sort of a rack on the far corner, but the ancient messenger boy who doubled as ‘librarian’ warned me of a deadly contagion waiting to spring on intruders who came within a mile of that heap. When I remarked on this to a senior colleague, he, ex-Calcutta like me, scoffed at the very idea of a north Indian newspaper house having a library. Somebody else observed: “Oh don’t you know — we are in serious competition with (referring to an equally redoubtable, 160-year-old newspaper house) where journalists are now replacing toilet cleaners.”
IDIOT BOX TO IDIOT CULTURE
The TV boom of the late 1990s happened right before people like me who found themselves on the cusp of two distinct ages in the country’s socio-economic history. TV was the “idiot box” for my generation, but today there’s an axiom that TV rules not by excellence, but by its control over the lowest common denominator. Its passion is dumping down news, celebrating nonsense, dancing with trivia, falsificating, obfuscating, and so on.
Carl Bernstein, who along with Bob Woodward — the pair who investigated Watergate and caused the fall of an American President — was hero to my generation of young journalists, wrote something 30 years ago in the American context which has suddenly assumed new meaning for India and Indians today:
“We are in the process of creating, in sum, what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot subculture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time in our history the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.”
News consumers in India are shortchanged night after night by the celebrity anchors of rolling news networks. Wonder of wonders, next morning there is more of the same when the leading newspapers reproduce the same banality. It’s as if the print medium exists only to provide transcripts of what was read out on the previous evening’s Newshour, Left, Right and Centre or The Buck Stops Here. Way back in the 1960s, when through their superb coverage of the Vietnam war, America’s TV channels put a big question mark over the future of the country’s proud newspapers, the editors of newspapers faced the choice of either competing with the idiot box or changing the terms of the competition. They decided, and rightly too, that the print medium can only flourish through giving depth to coverage, not by out-shallowing and out-shouting the channels.
The respect for the printed word was leveraged for retaining market shares, not esoteric things like “brand image” of their centuries-old houses. This is something newspaper institutions of the world’s largest democracy utterly failed at. Instead of adding muscle to news gathering and analysis through scientific human resource development, they fell back upon distress sale of their heritage. To outdo TV, they played the same game and lost.
The policy prescription for the intelligence alert was way off the mark. Overwhelmed by TV’s power of granting five minutes of fame, they tried in vain to learn new tricks which simply didn’t belong to their medium. In the process, they deprived their consumers of that sweetest something about newspapers — the pure joy of reading. In 2002, the lackey of the owner of a leading Delhi newspaper I then worked for shocked everybody by declaring that the “new management” would like journalists to file stories that were “shorter” and “crisper”. Like potato wafer, some of us commented loudly. Imagine our surprise when the editor of the paper concurred with the view. “Stories”, he said in a matter-of-fact way, “should not exceed 300 words in length.”
TV, or at least significant sectors of the medium, may apparently have won, but the self-congratulation is not justified. The India rendered in the Indian national media is increasingly illusionary and delusionary — disconnected from the true context of people’s lives. The process of correction must begin after accurate diagnosis. In short, return the profession to the wise.
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