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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Perspectives |
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Politics |
News without Principle
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| Journalism is not the only broken institution in India—but restoring its moral values is an urgently necessary step toward ending a national culture of corruption |
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Published : 1 January 2011 |
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VINOD K. JOSE |
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| The practice of public figures demanding pre-publication
approval will cripple press freedom in India. Above is a slide
run by Karan Thapar before the broadcast of an interview with
P Chidambaram in 2008.
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| T |
HIS-SCAM BLESSED YEAR has become an imperative
to bring back higher moral principles in our
public life—from journalism to politics to corporate
governance. |
“Journalism has not been this much fun for a long time,” a
newspaper vendor named Ashok told me earlier this week.
In this misty, sleepy Delhi winter, more and more people
are stopping by the carpet of periodicals Ashok sells on a
footpath outside one of the city’s nicer residential colonies.
“Outlook, Mail Today and Open have been in demand for the
last couple of weeks. And more people buy Times of India
too,” Ashok said, rubbing a glass of hot tea in his palms.
It’s no wonder Ashok’s business is booming—the shock
and masala on display in the headlines over the last several
months has been unprecedented: CWG officials appropriating
government funds; top army officers and politicians
taking possession of apartments meant for the families of
war martyrs; and a smart policy-pimp facilitating the loss
of billions of rupees from the exchequer in the course of
helping her clients exert influence in Delhi.
Now that it’s over, one thing can be said for certain about
2010: it will provide abundant research material for future
historians seeking to understand how India really functions.
The graduate students of tomorrow will need to pore
through hundreds of articles in newspapers and magazines,
and thousands of posts on blogs, Facebook and Twitter—
not to mention the rapidly expanding collection of leaked
recordings of Niira Radia on Outlook’s website.
At the end of this year of scams, is there anything to be
learned?
If such lessons do exist, they must be larger than the tearing
down of a few outsized personalities: the tarnishing
of reputations is always titillating fare, but it tells us precious
little about how to repair the tattered morals of public
life. The bigger scandal here is not about Vir Sanghvi or
Barkha Dutt, Suresh Kalmadi or Ashok Chavan, Ranjan
Bhattacharjee or Niira Radia, Tarun Das or Mukesh Ambani
or Ratan Tata.
The best way to understand the historical significance
of India’s year of scandals is to forget the individuals
who walk—or wish to walk—through Delhi’s corridors of power: the real story is the rotting foundation of the corridors
themselves. Recall that it took a global economic crisis
and a crippling recession to expose the greed and dishonesty
permeating American financial institutions: our own
crisis of corruption, seen in this light, reveals the fragile
underpinnings of the idea of a ‘new India.’ Many of our
journalists have no allegiance to any higher calling; they
are content to serve as lesser gears in the corrupt machinery
of power. Our government, in the service of its obligation
to facilitate the creation of wealth, is eager to let powerful
friends in the corporate sector bend laws and defraud the
treasury. Our largest corporations, dependent on government
largesse, leave nothing to chance: their vast fortunes
can purchase any decision in Delhi.
The character of a country is written in the values it
professes, even—and perhaps especially—when the real
conduct of its public life falls well short of those lofty ideals.
Hypocrisy, as the saying goes, is the tribute vice pays
to virtue. But when few even bother to pay lip-service to
morality, and the rot of corruption permeates every public
institution, what will be left?
It may be easier, in fact, to explain how we got into this
mess than to find a way out. For the sake of brevity, I will
pass over the degraded state of politics, the judiciary and
business, and focus instead on the institution to which I belong:
journalism.
The corruption in journalism starts small, with the individual
reporter. It’s not necessarily financial—though
the ceaseless gossip about who’s on whose payroll is sufficiently disturbing—but corruption needn’t involve money,
and a journalist with no ethical standards can still sleep
soundly by reassuring himself that at least he’s not taking
bribes. Journalists, like everyone else, enjoy being made
to feel important—and flattery is cheaper than a briefcase
filled with 1000-rupee notes. Politicians have long been
masters at this game: they call out your name in a scrum
of other journalists; they invite you over for a private lunch
or an off-the-record drink; they send you a Diwali gift, or
favour you with an official tour or a juicy bit of information
to buy your loyalties. The new breed of public relations professionals—
better known today as lobbyists—have learned
these tricks well, and deploy them with even greater skill.
When ‘success’ for journalists is defined as access to power
and its brokers, corruption provides a sure route to the top.
Above the level of individual reporters and editors, we
find increasing institutional corruption—though this rarely
sees the light of day, given the unwillingness of most publications
to cast aspersions on their peers. Yet one hears
far too many stories about media houses—even those
who tout their own integrity and independence—bending
ethics to accommodate advertisers or financial backers. The phenomenon of ‘paid news’—in which publications
charge a fee for fawning coverage of the buyer or negative
pieces on his or her rivals—got a thorough airing after the
2009 elections.
And the third kind is even more alarming: Indian journalism
as a system is habituated by an arrangement where
someone very powerful in the public office—a minister, a
businessman, etc—will choose only those journalists who
they think can be influenced easily, and ‘plant’ the stories
they’re comfortable with. In such cases, interviews are
granted to a journalist only after all the questions are furnished
beforehand and approved by the interviewee, or the
final text/tape of the interview is played back to the interviewee
and approved, or both together. A brief look at the
Radia tapes provides ample evidence of this practice:
“I stopped the Business World story and shifted it to
Business Today, because I got the questions I wanted...
and not the questions that they wanted.” [Radia talking to
Noel Tata]
“Between me and you, we had got an edited version” [Nita
Ambani’s staff Srini with Radia discussing the Shoba De
profile of Nita Ambani]
“It has to be fully scripted. I have to come in and do a run
through with him [Mukesh Ambani] before… We have to
rehearse it before the cameras come in.” [Vir Sanghvi telling
Niira Radia how he would do an interview with Mukesh
Ambani]
Editing, in this scenario, is outsourced from the newsroom
to lobbyists, businessmen and even ministers. And as
more journalists and publications consent to this soft corruption,
powerful figures don’t hesitate to insist on such
special treatment. Consider the interview conducted by
Karan Thapar—one of the country’s most respected journalists,
and someone I respect—with the current Home
Minister, P Chidambaram, in 2008. Chidambaram, then
serving as Finance Minister, refused to grant an interview
unless he was given the opportunity to approve the tape
before it aired and retained “the right to clear it [the tape]
or deny clearance without giving any reason.”
Thapar, to his credit, did not attempt to hide the terms
of this arrangement—which were displayed on a slide before
the interview. I am told that Chidambaram did not, in
the end, demand any cuts—but his brazen demand for prebroadcast
approval is a reminder of the audacity of public
figures today, who expect fawning treatment from the
press—and can always, it seems, find someone whose ethical
standards meet their low expectations.
This may have something to do with the explosion in
media outlets over the last decade—nowhere more than on
television, whose glamour and visibility have made it the
standard-bearer for Indian journalism as a whole. A former BBC hand once told me that television was “75 percent logistics
and 25 percent journalism: Your look, performance
on the camera, ability to manage the cameraperson, driver,
video editor, lights, luck with the equipment and technology,
all these take 75 percentage of your thinking, and the time
for research and preparation. What you end up doing in the
name of journalism is more style, and very less substance.”
With television leading the way, style has definitively
vanquished substance—and journalism has acquired the
trappings of a glamourous profession, one that trades in
images, sensationalism and sound bytes instead of analysis
or investigation. Newspapers and magazines now compete
to be as shallow and superficial as their TV counterparts,
while young journalists angle for jobs in front of the camera.
Journalism schools devote more and more time to training
students on the technical business of television production
at the cost of foundational courses in political science and
history. Television’s emergence as the dominant news medium
has transformed print media as well: reporters spent
less time reporting each story, while the stories themselves
get shorter and shorter. All one needs today to be a ‘success’
in print journalism is the basic capacity to write a sentence
in English and a handful of contacts and official sources.
As a result, the best investigative journalist in the country
today is the CAG—the Comptroller and Auditor General
of India. Whoever pays close attention to what the investigative
agencies of the government are doing can ‘break’ a
story by repeating what officials say they’re doing or about
to do—you just have to type up your notes faster than the
competition. Running a close second to the CAG are the
legions of vested interests happy to deliver tapes and documents
that embarrass their rivals to your doorstep. Just
as ministers, businessmen and their lobbyists are happy
to serve as your editor, outside organisations now happily
do the work once performed by reporters. Journalism has
thus moved, gradually, away from the days when reporters
went out and found things on their own: going through files,
analysing connections, and travelling to remote locations have all taken a back seat to the fine art of waiting for juicy
quotes and sensational sound bytes.
It is not too late, however, for journalism to rediscover
its own higher purpose, and the process is a simple one. It
may be comforting for journalists to hear that they are less
corrupt than politicians or businessmen, but the duty of
journalism to hold other institutions to account means an
honest reckoning with our own failings is long past due. We
need to change the way that we train and hire young journalists,
and the way that we esteem and reward their work—
for its style rather than its substance. We need to remember
that while it is the job of officials and CEOs to keep secrets,
it is our job to try to reveal them—and not because it sells
papers or drives ratings higher, but because democracy
cannot function without transparency. We must remember
that the laurels of our profession are not invitations to the
right dinners or drinks in the company of the powerful. We
must cultivate sources, but not let sources cultivate us.
Journalists are not elected by citizens or shareholders,
but we remain accountable to the people whose trust in the
accuracy and integrity that enables our work. Much of this
has now been squandered. But history will mock us if we
don’t act quickly to put it right.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Kabir Arora
11 January 2011
02:08 AM
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Its nice to read the piece but hope some one is reading it and taking it forward. The new class of journalists are not at all good readers.
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AMIT KUMAR SINGH
31 December 2010
09:19 PM
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Good article in the way that it reveals the way media works but really difficult to say what will compel journalists to get their act right because the journalists who have been accused are not guilty of any crime punishable by law.If you are a regular reader it is quite easy to see where the loyalties of leading journalists are.People like Veer Sanghavi and Barkha Dutt are pro-congress and almost every journalist is biased in his political opinions but then it is quite likely for any person even if he is a journalist to be biased in favour of his ideology.But it was appalling to see that leading journalists of the country take lessons from a lobbyist and telecast scripted interviews.One cannot say how many more are involved than those who have been caught.the onus is really on the reader to be intelligent enough not to be fooled by such people.The whole episode has been the biggest tragedy for aspiring young journalists who idolise these journalists.
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SREEHARSHA
31 December 2010
09:24 AM
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I'M AMAZED BY THE CANDOR AND CRISPNESS OF THIS WELL RESEARCHED ARTICLE, IT'S AMAZING TO SEE SUCH A COMPLEX SUBJECT BROKEN DOWN INTO USEFUL ANALYSIS. I COMPLETELY ENDORSE THE AUTHOR'S VIEW, SENSATIONALISM HAS BECOME THE WATCH WORD, COMPLETELY REPLACING ANALYSIS AND INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM. I LAMENT AT THE FACT THAT MEDIA HOUSES ARE CHURNING OUT TRASH AND RELEASED ONTO THE PUBLIC. THIS HAS TO STOP.
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