Sardesai's take on Modi: fuzzy and dodgy

BY Vrinda Gopinath| IN Opinion | 18/06/2013

There’s a kind of hush when self-styled media moral crusaders make pronouncements on the media, especially when they are of the “elite, liberal kind”, and also have the added muscle of being leading captains of media networks. CNN-IBN’s Ed-in-Chief Rajdeep Sardesai has also been president of the Editor’s Guild, and so his guidelines on setting the “moral compass” for analysing Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, is all the more crucial. Except that, when it comes to his moral code for media reporting, the morals are fuzzy and dodgy.

In his article “With him or Against him” on the “Modi Phenomenon”, first published in Hindustan Times (June 14, 2013) , and subsequently carried in Firstpost.com, Sardesai begins with the usual Modi razzmatazz of the Hindutva Hriday’s incredible PR machine, his unchallenged command of the cyberworld, and how he is twitterati’s chosen PM. But come to mainstream media’s coverage, and Sardesai is all in a twist on the complexities of the “Modi phenomenon.”

After the when-I-knew-him stories of the past, the article comes to the crux – how the 2002 pogrom against Muslims not only changed Modi’s relationship with the media, “especially the Delhi-based ‘national’ media,” but also how the media changed the perception of Modi.

According to Sardesai, Modi is the monster that he is only because of the prying, inquisitorial television cameras that caught the murderous communal rioting even as a state administration did nothing to quell it. Otherwise, “Mumbai (Sardesai means the 1992 riots which he covered) under the Congress rule was just as terrible as Gujarat, the difference is we didn’t have the camera lens in 1992 to bring the horrors in every drawing room…. It would have been no different if anyone else had been chief minister.”

It’s a warped morality that is used to sanitise the media debate on the Gujarat riots investigations, and the murderous Mumbai riots too. By clubbing all riots as something that simply comes from a “mix of state incompetence and complicity” and that the horrors are magnified by the presence of whirring cameras or lack of it, is spectacularly shallow. 

Sure, no one can deny the power of imagery, but isn’t it the journalist’s job to go beyond the electrifying enterprise of photo play? Since Sardesai is dishing out the moral code, doesn’t accurate and reliable reporting, verifiable at every stage, serve as the foundation upon which everything else is built--context, interpretation, comment, criticism, analysis and debate? Why didn’t the media go like a rottweiler when the exhaustive Sri Krishna report on the Mumbai 1992 riots was thrown into the bin by the Shiv Sena and Congress state governments? It’s not the pictures alone that make a politician a villain or saint.

After holding up the mirror of recognisable images, Sardesai then castigates the dazzled section of media which is now star-struck by Modi’s makeover as development man. “If the Gujarat story was once told through the prism of riots, it is now told through the eyes of corporate media.”  He makes a passing statement that despite “CAG reports questioning the government’s claims and raising valid concerns over cronyism in resource allocation barely get a mention.” 

So, now that his stand has been validated on media malpractices and mischief, he lunges to his main point – “Is it possible to analyse the Modi phenomenon by moving beyond the extremes of glorification or vilification? Can the media find a middle ground where Modi can be assessed in a neutral, dispassionate manner without facing the charge of bias or being a cheerleader?” Middle ground? What does it mean for journalists?

Pulpit journalism tends to cast issues and debates in simple moral terms, of us and them, of victims and aggressors. You can’t miss the emotional appeal and the self-righteousness that demands something must be done. Why should anyone who rightly defends Modi become a cheerleader? Or, vice versa, one who questions him and his actions, a biased inquisitor? Why reduce a debate to either with us or not us? Why cannot debates be based on good, old-fashioned reportage, facts, evidence, authenticity, verification? If prime time television has swapped reportage with screaming opinion-makers, who’s to blame? The print media cannot get away with the kind of discussions on television even on the edit/opinion pages. We would be hauled to court in an instant.

It’s not Modi who is the reason for bias and prejudice; it’s the media that is making the ground rules for a confrontationist debate. Prime time television like Sardesai’s India @ 9 has dished out ludicrous debates like: “If you are not with Modi, does that enhance your secular credentials?” and such like, so who you talking to? If activists who challenge Modi in courts of law (the cases cannot be frivolous if the courts have accepted them) have a right to their point of view, why call them “shrill”? Conversely, a “Modi fan club” is not expected to be impassioned and restrained, it will be excitable, aroused or, “rabid” as the article says, but to equate activists with fan clubs, is a game of smoke and mirrors.
 
So, can we stop this moral coercion and preachy commandments from television studio pulpits? It’s amazing all this moral lynching in and outside prime-time debates is taken seriously, but then, in a celebrity-obsessed world, star editors are treated with admiration and respect. They sell you the intoxicating world of power and privilege, about people they know and who you, the viewer, will never know. They invite you to marvel and wonder at power play and war games, and their own superiority and self-importance. And then sneak in the sermon in the airwaves. Isn't it time you practice what you preach?

(Hindustan Times said it will only carry this story without names because it does not want to get into the never-ending counter-counter response game. Firstpost did not acknowledge the mail. So much for a free & fair press!!)