Implications of the Herald Tribune entry

BY dasu k| IN Law and Policy | 30/06/2004

Dasu Krishnamoorty

Experts believe that the Government of India can do little to stop the publication of an Indian edition of the International Herald Tribune. ‘The world’s daily newspaper of the New York Times printed in Hyderabad’ is coming out despite government fulminations. Added to this discomfiture of the government is the pressure of Left parties on it to stop its publication. They cited the legal position to show that IHT-H is a violation of the law of the land. We will be making a mistake if we treat this as a matter of law between the Government of India and IHT-H. The real issue is the prospect of globalization rendering the nation-state irrelevant and depriving people of an instrument of self-governance. A hark back to colonial era through the capture of a nation’s consciousness. In this drive, the media are agents of the market. The goal is to subtly downsize the state and thus seize the strings of public mind.

At stake is the right of people, exercised through a democratic state, to determine what to know. Of concern to people are the quality and nature of information that will flow into the country and its role in the construction of social consciousness. In a non-democratic state, the sponsors of IHT-H would meet the same fate as American journalists Nicholas Stroh and Robert Siedle met, investigating reports of massacre in Mbarara army barracks in 1971 under Idi Amin: death. It is evident that since democracy and free press are inter-related, any media attempt to join market forces to abridge the state would amount to an attack on a free press itself. In a democracy people exercise their franchise based on information a free press provides and when this information comes from market-controlled media it generates and strengthens market-friendly consciousness. Another dimension is that a truncated state will hardly be able to discharge its responsibilities to the underclasses. The legal issue is totally marginal.

The deeper implications of media linkages with the market are poorly explored.  John A. Powell and S.P.Udayakumar write in the May/June 2000 issue of the political journal Poverty & Peace, "There is an abiding belief that democracy must be limited because it interferes with the private decisions of market experts, thereby reducing wealth and capital. People are now brought together as consumers but kept apart as citizens. We speak of an expanding global market, but a diminishing public space, and we hardly speak at all of citizen participation." There is already a serious fall in the supply of news and relevant information "because the companies who own and control media want to keep us in our private worlds, cut off from other people’s pain and from too much knowledge about the world."

For two centuries we have lived under the media-created illusion that the threat to public expression can come only from the state. Media are a cartel of unmonitored power-wielders with potential to erode constitutional authority. One example is the manner in which the judiciary is almost intimidated by extra-judicial verdict enshrined in newspaper content. Ishrat Jahan Raza was killed. Clashing versions are in circulation. Neither her innocence nor her guilt has been proved. Undaunted, media have delivered their verdict and it will take some courage for the judiciary to pronounce opinion to the contrary. So much power to an institution that is not accountable to any one! Why don’t we wind up the judiciary and ask the editors to do the job in which they have already earned considerable experience?

These are dangerous trends that will become unmanageable threats to democratic institutions if media get away with membership of international media/market behemoths. The national character of media, mirroring the mind of people, is now in danger of dissipation. News today is a corporate product, especially so in the United States, the home of NYT and IHT. They manufacture "truth." One way to do it is to repeat a lie relentlessly till it becomes a clone of truth. The avenues of expression are patrolled today not by the state but by global media. Government has only a Doordarshan or All India Radio with the stigma that is attached to all state media - they are controlled. Thus corporate media have a monopoly over truth-telling.

Western media have a long history of manipulating information environment in developing countries to popularize the myth that "there is no alternative to capitalism." They prepared the world to accept the legitimacy of US invasion of Iraq. On several occasions, they tried to influence the course of our foreign policy. To join hands with them is to help them in the pursuit of their pro-west objectives. News is a precious domain of people and they have to guard it from distortion at any price, considering the consequences of doctored news for the society. A mere rumor that the Left parties would not join the new Manmohan Singh government sent the sensex tumbling to a record low in a century and wiped out investor wealth to the tune of 40 billion dollars. By bonding with international economy, national economy gains strength in relation to the nation-state. In the same manner, national media acquire extra clout over the national government by forging links with international media.  

IHT-H is all about dissemination of news. The first thing one must know about news is that it is not neutral. It is value-ridden. News, as a statement of facts, stimulates responses that lead to ideation and behavior. Todd Gitlin (Media Unlimited, Henry Holt and Co., New York, 2001) says, "The news is not in any simple way a ‘mirror’ on the world; it is a conduit for ideas and symbols, an industrial product that promotes packages of ideas and ideologies, and serves, consequently, as social ballast, though at times also a harbinger of social change. The news is a cognitive warp. The world is this way; the media make it that way." Media hucksters try to simplify news as merely one form of information. The informational system that shapes a society’s thinking and therefore behavior is neither neutral nor autonomous. It is very much the handmaid of commerce and finance and works to promote their interests.

Midram Publications, IHT-H’s publisher, has indeed talked of people’s need to know -- the right to information.  There is an information overload in the country waiting to be relayed to the people, information that will demystify India Is Shining illusion. People need information that improves the quality of their life, helps them improvise to get over adversity, to restore communal harmony, to expose corruption in media etc. I wonder how neither the Asian Age nor any other Indian newspaper bothered to report the story of the 20-million strong Indian community living in developing countries like Fiji, Surinam, Guyana, Jamaica, Mauritius and Gulf region. The focus is always on the NRIs in the United States or Lakshmi Mittal or Swaraj Paul in the UK. Our media have reporters posted hardly in three or four English-speaking western capitals. London and Washington, and sometimes Paris, dominate news and also media thinking and practices in our newspapers. IHT is an addition to this aberration.

The arrangements Indian newspapers make with foreign media create a very influential, high-level domestic constituency that works to promote the interests of the global principal to the detriment of national concerns. Some people point to the permission given to Reader’s Digest. True, the Digest obtained permission before the 1955 resolution. This resolution perhaps was a response to the manner in which the Digest began conditioning the perceptions of an English-speaking middle class generation of the fifties. Information does not always assume the garb of news. It disguises itself as education too. The fifties saw an influx of American funds in the form of grants, scholarships, and Fulbright grants, visiting assignments etc. into the resource-poor Indian academe. These funds produced the first crop of students and professors that passed on their western orientation to generations succeeding them. The American Reporter and Span, American Culture Centers etc. supplemented these efforts.

I am not suggesting that IHT’s Indian publisher Midram Publications is trying to expose young minds to foreign ideas, harmful or beneficial. In commerce these niceties have no place. Profit is the goal, attainable through the sale of information and images that neutralize audience resistance. The market uses media to achieve this objective. Media use content to win acceptability for a way of life, culture and philosophy that is necessary to remove roadblocks in the path of rapid globalization. If we endorse IHT-H’s argument that media supply information, an activity that is a response to people’s right to know, we enter a controversial territory. If every demand of people is to be matched by supply, blue films ought to be shown to children also because they will prepare them to meet the demands that marriages make on them when they become adults. There is great demand for drugs, evident from the periodic hauls that the narcotics department makes. How about a free sale of drugs? Information itself has narcotic effect anesthetizing audiences into various states of euphoria like the India Is Shining publicity. It also can destroy.  

This is not a dispute between the government and the press. The people are involved in it. Not all countries in the world have the privilege of a culture as ancient as that of India. This is not sentimental outpouring. That heritage is under attack not from governments but from globalization. Culture is not just music or architecture. It is the way people live and think. Media manipulate the economic, political and cultural perceptions of the people. In the name of freedom of expression, films, TV and print media are carving a new autonomous charter for themselves. There are protests against showing films on lesbianism, against the unchecked disclosure of feminine flesh, against exotic political philosophies glamorizing anarchy, against globalization of economies. Already the adult age is sinking day by day. Even a 12-year-old today has all the passions of an adult, thanks to our films, TV channels, and glossy magazines that do not hide anything at all.  

How autonomous are media men and women in taking the decisions they take every day? Referring to the owners of these media, Noam Chomsky says, "Corporations are basically tyrannies, hierarchic, controlled from above. If you don’t like what they are doing, you get out. The major media are just part of the system." Such a system is already in place in India in coalition with family-owned newspapers. Public mind is hostage to these media. Herbert Altschull, author of Agents of Power, too says the same thing: media are sentinels of market interest. We have no quarrel with the market owning media. But if their goal is the annihilation of the state, then it affects all of us. Media space is under the siege of market nominees disguised as autonomous editors but misusing Art. 19 (1) privileges to further the interests of their owners. Has there been a single editor who wrote against its owner challenging one wage board award after another?  

On the other hand instances are where editors have taken out processions, issued statements, written lengthy articles defending the owners against imaginary assaults on freedom of press. Editors are free to nurse pet obsessions like Pakistan, secularism/communalism, and religious groups or for that matter anything that does not tread on the owners’ toes. Let one editor of a newspaper owned by a liquor baron advocate prohibition. They will not do it for fear of losing extraordinary benefits they enjoy by virtue of their position - the power to bully authority to sanction personal benefit, not to speak of junkets, TV appearances and consumer freebies. The owner has no quarrel if the editor helps himself/herself to goodies so long as he/she does his/her duty by the owner.

Globalization brings untold riches to a miniscule section of the global society. By virtue of their economic power the constituents of this exclusive club monopolize the ability to construct and disseminate social, economic and cultural perceptions that ultimately facilitate greater influx of wealth into their treasuries. As part of this privileged axis, media play the crucial role of popularizing and legitimating these perceptions throughout the world. The struggle against colonization was in fact a struggle against globalization. Since armed colonization is no more possible, the former colonists have begun using media to revive colonization through the back door. Global media -- newspapers, news agencies, films, books, radio etc.-- have crystallized this cultural meltdown into an irreversible process.

Contact: dasukrishnamoorty@hotmail.com