Can Indian media do a fact check?
Soundbite journalism allows those making the charges to get onto a soapbox and have their say without any accountability.
But the reader is the ultimate loser as s/he only knows of the charges but not how much of it is really true, says AJITHA MENON. Pix of Robert Vadra: NDTV.com
When India Against Corruption (IAC) activists Prashant Bhushan and Arvind Kejriwal allege that real estate giant DLF sold expensive properties cheaply to Robert Vadra for favours from the Congress, the readers don’t just want to know which properties are registered in Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law’s name. After all, the fact that the properties are actually registered in his name and are not ‘benaami’ can put a different spin on the matter - as the Congress (I) is pointing out right now.
What the readers want to know in detail is the financial standing of Vadra and his family (not from Kejriwal who is making the allegation in the first place but through some solid research) – vis-à-vis individual and business tax returns perhaps – before and after he married Priyanka Gandhi. The readers also want to know what exact favours, if any, did the Congress President Sonia Gandhi, the Manmohan Singh government or the State governments of Haryana, Rajasthan and Delhi, extend to DLF? Can the Indian media do a fact check on this? Preferably before they put the allegations out?
Was Rs 1880 crore spent by the Govt. of India for the foreign trips and treatment of UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, as alleged by Gujarat Chief Minister NarendraModi? Yes or No? Does the media have an answer. Or even how much was spent by the Government of India on Sonia Gandhi? No answers, except for a denial from a RTI activist and another from the Congress spokesperson. Where is the investigation in journalism? It has been reduced to reporters running from one “source” to another, first for an allegation and then for a “denial”, ‘’reaction” or “comment”. The news reports run along the lines of - ”so and so said that, which so and so denied. So and so on the other hand said it was an effort to de-stabilize or blackmail something or someone, meanwhile another so and so said they will hold a demonstration…”.
But what about the veracity of the allegation or charge made by politicians, political parties, partisan organizations, civil society, institutions or even individuals in different capacities? While media excels in carrying these verbatim and getting “reactions”, it has shed the core journalistic requirement of investigation totally.
It is not as though the factuality of the statements cannot be verified. Take for example the ongoing campaign for the U.S. Presidential elections. At least three media or media-related organizations are running “fact checks” on the statements made by the candidates and their running mates, by the campaign ads, by the candidates’ spokespersons and on anything which remotely arouses questions on veracity.
FactCheck.org - as their website explains, is a project run by the Annenberg Public Policy Centre (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania. It describes itself as a “non-partisan, non profit, ‘consumer advocate’ for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in US politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding”.
Some of their assessments of the first Presidential debate between President Barack Obama and challenger Mitt Romney held Wednesday is as follows –
§ Obama said 5 million private-sector jobs had been created in the past 30 months. Perhaps so, but that counts jobs that the Bureau of Labor Statistics won’t add to the official monthly tallies until next year. For now, the official tally is a bit over 4.6 million.
§ Romney accused Obama of doubling the federal deficit. Not true. The annual deficit was already running at $1.2 trillion when Obama took office.
The list goes on and the website also offers detailed explanation of the conclusions on the veracity of the statements which have been checked by researching different surveys, reports and interviewing experts – with proper qualification to answer questions which are connected to their field of expertise. (Not the same experts expounding theories on everything under the sun and moon and beyond as we see on Indian television).
So is FactCheck.org neutral, objective? Well, the website also details the funding for the project, which prior to fiscal 2010 came from “APPC’s own resources (specifically an endowment created in 1993 by the Annenberg Foundation at the direction of the late Walter Annenberg, a 1995 grant by the Annendberg Foundation to fund APPC’s Washington base), additional funds from the Annenberg Foundation and grants from the Flora Family Foundation”.
There is a clear declaration – “we do not seek and have never accepted, directly or indirectly any funds from corporations, unions, partisan organizations or advocacy groups”. When they started accepting individual donations in 2010, they decided disclose their finances in detail, “so that our readers may judge for themselves whether or not any of those individual donations can influence us”. This is what makes factcheck.org acceptable.
As Rem Rieder , Editor and Senior Vice- President of the American Journalism Review wrote in its Fall, 2012 edition – “one of the positive developments in journalism has been the rise of the fact-checking movement. For too many years, too much political reportage consisted of Candidate A alleges whatever, Candidate B says there’s nothing to it – and then full stop. No sorting it out, no conclusion”.
Well, while American journalism is seemingly redeeming itself with FactCheck.org, PolitiFact.com – by the Tampa Bay Times - and Washington Post’s Glen Kessler’s blog ‘The Fact Checker’, which runs with a tag line “The truth behind the rhetoric”, Indian journalism is still hooked to “quotes” and “counter-quotes” from vested parties to fill their news pages or airtime, and consequently doing a great disservice to the public and the right of media as one of the keystones of democracy.
It may be mentioned here that even though PolitiFact.com and Glen Kessler’s blog are both sponsored by newspapers, the findings of the three fact-checking initiatives invariably match. The truth meter or Pinocchio points as awarded by these for the first Presidential debate were almost same for every statement of the two main contenders. That’s why its felt that the research is excellent and the findings impartial and objective. All three are also extremely interactive with major presence on social media like Twitter and Facebook and also open to questions from the readers. Queries from the public are researched and then answered by the websites.
And this is journalism. The FactCheck.org has Brooks Jackson as Director, formerly of the Associated Press, Wall Street Journal and CNN. PolitiFact.com has Bill Adam as its Editor, who is the Washington Bureau Chief of Tampa Bay Times and an adjunct faculty member at the Poynter Institute and Glen Kessler is a former diplomatic correspondent. The team members are also journalists who are doing what they are supposed to do – check and cross check before printing or broadcasting, not just quote and leave it at that.
Media’s responsibility to carry out a fact check can operate at different levels. Anything that is put in the public domain by the media – by way of quotes and allegations – can be checked for truthfulness. Say for example, when the industry minister in West Bengal says at a press conference that there has been proposals for investments to the tune of Rs 1 lakh crore from 176 companies in the state in the last one year – should the media merely carry it as a statement or actually do a fact check to see whether the claim is justified? The natural questions to which the public would want answers to include - Which are the companies? What are the proposals about? How much has each company proposed to invest and where exactly in the state where the land policy says clearly that the government will not participate in land acquisition?
Then there is investigation into information which the media gets, but verifies before publishing. This is within the ambit of investigative journalism where the onus of not just bringing the matter to light but also providing evidence absolutely depends on the journalist publishing the expose.
In India today, allegations of corruption and scams by one party or other, one politician or other, one corporate house or civil society group has become commonplace. Newspapers or channels publishing or broadcasting these allegations should ideally accept the added work of verifying these charges and the extent of their veracity. This is to ensure that they don’t fall into the pitfalls of meaningless “soundbite” journalism which allows those making the charges to get onto a soapbox and have their say without any accountability. In such a scenario, it’s the reader who is the ultimate loser as s/he only know of the charges but has no way to knowing how much of it is really true.
The Hindu has announced the setting up of ‘The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy’. One hopes they will open avenues for research and investigation into statements and allegations – check facts – to help the Indian public separate the chaff from the wheat.
Ajitha Menon is a Fulbright Research Fellow at the University of Maryland, USA.
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