Watching the watchdog

BY ninan| IN Media Practice | 21/07/2004

Dasu Krishnamoorty

For fifty-seven years, governments in this country functioned under the watchful eye of legislatures, opposition parties, NGOs, rights activists and more importantly media. This vigil is necessary because the success or failure of democracy is closely linked to how efficiently and responsibly governments empowered by an electorate work.  But considering that we, as an electorate, take important decisions relying on the information media circulate, we also need to know how media work and who work them.

A four-day interactive session on "Development and Communication`` the Press Institute of India organized early this month in Shimla reached a consensus that people should become the center of all news reporting in media and that journalists were first and foremost human beings and therefore had a social responsibility, making themselves accountable to people and not to anyone else. But we may ask, ‘have people mattered at any time other than election time?’ The accountability scores of Indian media do not encourage the optimism evident at the Shimla seminar.

Take a look at these figures: the world’s largest terrestrial TV network Doordarshan with 1400 transmitters broadcasting 1500 hours of programs every week reaching 900 million viewers; All India Radio with 350 transmitters beaming news and current affairs programs in 27 languages to at least 600 million, and 6000 daily newspapers and 45,000 magazines in 100 languages reaching 72 million readers constituting the most informed section of the electorate. A quarter of India’s population is, at any time of the day, either watching TV or listening to radio or reading a newspaper or browsing the Internet. This is the inescapable reach and power of media unleashed on a people who have no means of separating media truth from falsehoods.

Yet no editor has ever asked political parties why media issues do not figure in electoral debate. Neither alternative media nor mainstream media made any serious reference to this failure. On the rare occasion they opened their mouth, earlier editors who graced the Rajya Sabha raised always the question of freedom of the press, as though it is in immediate peril. Audience, who are to media what voters are to political parties, never figured in their speeches. Election campaigns dodged discussing media as center of power and the need to make them accountable to a public agency. On the other hand, political leaders and columnists, irrespective of party affiliation, fell over each other to utter inanities about freedom of the press when the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly ordered the arrest of senior editorial employees of The Hindu.

Danny Schechter, executive editor of MediaChannel, a nonprofit, public interest website dedicated to global media issues, makes a significant point in this context: "I joined the media to expose the problems of the world. Now I see the media as one of those problems." Media, however, is not an issue in US presidential elections. The American public are so exercised over this serious omission that three million of them wrote letters to Washington protesting a rule that would have allowed big media companies to control more local outlets across the nation. Media today is the story, a story that those who own them will never come out with.

Since electoral decisions are taken on the basis of information media provide, it is pertinent to ask: do media tell readers the whole truth? Hear the answer from Arundhati Roy who said at the launch of a Malayalam magazine Free Press (2 July) in New Delhi: "We need to question what comes on media as it is parroting lies dictated by the powerful. When we see a story in the media, we also need to follow the money and check out who owns how much in those big media houses." Do we in India know what money flows into media and from where and how that money obliges media to play the donors’ tune? Our editors write spiritedly about transparency in public life but are tightlipped about transparency in media. In short, media are a closed book. Any attempt to open it will attract the charge of attack on freedom of expression. 

In an earlier article (Readers and Media), I had discussed how owners misappropriate news space/time for private purpose. When news is defined by the ownership of media, information about who owns what newspaper, and owns what else besides newspapers, becomes critical in evaluating news. Some of our newspaper firms own TV channels, some own advertising companies and some collectively own our news agencies. In turn, beedi barons, pickle barons, liquor barons and the pioneering tribe of realtors own our newspapers and other media. The Registrar of Newspapers report is hardly of any help. It says that some X company owns Y newspaper, but who owns X company?

The Columbia Journalism Review has an online facility that tells Americans who owns what media in the US. Mediachannel.Org. has a media ownership monitor. FAIR (Fairness And Accuracy In Reporting) in its Fear & Favor Report tells its constituents that The New York Times does a friendly article on Starbucks because the Times happens to have a promotional agreement with Starbucks, requiring the chain to sell only the Times in its stores, excluding all other national newspapers. In return, the paper promotes Starbucks in national ad campaigns. Big newspapers in India forbid their agents from selling other newspapers. Freedom of the press!

It is not just ownership that the Indian press is silent about. For example, the Antulay cement scandal has a media story behind it involving cement allocations to a newspaper.  It has never come out, nor will it ever, for reasons of self-censorship.  Newspapers probing scandals is no great shakes. There is something sick about a press that swoons over a single Tehelka probe, done employing debatable methods. As the term of Zail Singh was coming to a close there were reports about the President contemplating the dismissal of Rajiv Gandhi. Inder Malhotra writes (The Hindu 30 June 02): "Rajiv lived in constant dread of a Presidential proclamation dismissing him and dissolving the House. He heaved a sigh of relief only when Zail Singh`s term was over on July 24, 1987." But a Delhi editor is reported to have helped Zail Singh write the letter of dismissal. Did any newspaper tell us the truth about it? Senior newspapermen, I don’t want to name them for fear of litigation, in Delhi and in other capitals know a lot about how their owners misused press power for private profit. In the US, you have Project Censored that tells the Americans about important stories that mainstream media withheld from the American public.

The Indian press enjoys absolute freedom from scrutiny, not found elsewhere. The American press had a watchdog called the National News Council, similar to our Press Council. The first knife stuck in the council was the refusal of The New York Times to co-operate with it. Our Press Council manages to breathe with the oxygen supplied by an Act of Parliament. Some eminent men in the press see the Council as a standing attack on freedom of the press and a curb on enterprising journalism. The bigger newspapers, with some honorable exceptions, treat its censure with contempt.

Britain has a Press Complaints Commission the press itself has set up after government had threatened to appoint a statutory watchdog body. We, in India too, can dispense with the Press Council provided we have, just as the American and British publics have, alternative sentinels of the press. But we do not, so the result is our press and its performance is hardly under vigil. Alternative media in our country are more focused on development issues, issues relating to the status of women and children, minorities etc. There is hardly any NGO that keeps a sharp eye on the working of the press. On the other hand, every influential person and public organization rushes to defend media. This is symbolic of the anxiety of every sector of public life to ensure favorable press coverage. In the end, we have a press that delivers top-down communication. 

Apart from institutional watch, there are high-profile media critics in the US like Noam Chomsky (Manufacturing Consent), Herbert Schiller (Culture.Inc.), Michael Parenti (Inventing Reality), Ben Bagdikian (Media Monopoly), Tom Goldstein (News At Any Cost) and Herbert Altschull (Agents of Power).  Europe and Britain have their own galaxy of media critics who analyze both liberal and conservative media with equal ardor. Jack Shafer’s Slate magazine has a column devoted to daily contents of newspapers. There are several thousand titles in the US on media issues. You can count on fingers Indian journalists who examined media as a system. Yes, we have media columnists who act more as ombudsmen than critics of media as a system and institution.

The performance of the press has repeatedly been questioned before the Press Council, the courts and in the letters columns.  The complaints referred to attacks on privacy, trial by the press, bias in reporting, misuse of news space etc. More important than all these failings is the failure of the press to discuss the problems of the most voiceless sections of the people. The press loses its credibility when its most senior members shed moderation in praising political leaders. Naturally, they are instantly linked to the politics of those personalities. I do not protest if newspapermen openly associate themselves with movements or political parties. But it is difficult to accept switch of loyalties by the editor of a Congress-friendly paper to a BJP-friendly newspaper or vice versa as has happened at least three times in recent memory. Such editors have no right to talk of principles, so essential to journalism and for credibility.

With each advance in technology there is a temptation to use it for unethical ends. On 9 April 2003, the front page of the London Evening Standard contained a blurry image supposedly showing a throng of Iraqis in Baghdad celebrating the toppling of Saddam Hussein. In reality, it was a ham-fisted attempt at photo manipulation. Long ago, the Blitz published a similar picture of Morarji Desai with a wine cup in his hand. More than a decade ago, Pooja Bhat, who emulated Demi Moore by covering her body with just paint and nothing else, sued Stardust, a leading film magazine of Bombay for publishing a "digitally remastered" nude shot of hers. Readers knew about it because Pooja went to court.  Have newspapers ever invited official or unofficial probe into their working or examined how democratic are their internal structures or done an audit of reliability of stories that appear in their columns? The tyranny of newspapers has gone on for too long for tolerance.

It is legitimate for readers to assume that editors are hiding something crucial from them as long as they resist outside scrutiny. What they are hiding could be non-newspaper interests of their owners, absence of internal democracy, violation of labor laws, diversion of newspaper revenues to other areas, blackout of stories at the instance of owners and rejecting stories or viewpoints because of bias/prejudice. N.Ram, writing on the occasion of The Hindu’s 125^th anniversary (13 Sept. 03) says, "In the name of the omnipotent market, a new kind of demand is made for manipulating news, analysis, and opinion to suit the owners` financial and political interests — and for tailoring the editorial product to subserve marketing goals. Murdoch-style price wars and other aggressive practices tremendously strengthen these pressures."

Public or private, media bring power to the owners, the power to suppress truth. That is why they need to be watched.

Contact: dasukrishnamoorty@hotmail.com