Getting personal

 

Getting personal

 

 

 

Should columnists have the luxury of using their columns to air personal grievances?

 

By Seetha

 

On the morning of January 12, 2003, readers idly rifling through The Sunday Express were brought up short by a screaming headline: "About my family and some animals". It was a column by Tavleen Singh ("Fifth Column") and was all about the arrest of her brother-in-law a few days earlier for being in possession of a python, some trophy heads, a few elephant tusks as well as liquor in excess of permitted limits (which she airily dismisses as "a couple of cases of wine left over after a party"). Exactly half the article was about the arrest of her relative and how the police and the media played it. Then came the attempt to put it in a context, make it a larger `issue’ - that of fundamental rights and media ethics. All the while playing down what she described as  "an alleged violation" of the law.

 

But let us assume, purely for argument’s sake, that Singh’s brother-in-law was, indeed, completely innocent. Does that still provide a justification for Singh to use the space available to her to vent her personal grievance, even if it involved a transgression of what she terms as fundamental rights?

 

Singh is not the only person to have used the privilege of a column to air personal grievances. On January 5, 2002, economist Omkar Goswami devoted 964 words of his 1,255 word column First Things First in Business Standard to his travails with the Mehrauli exchange of MTNL. Two years back, media personality Madhu Trehan used her column in the Indian Express to hit out at its sister publication Financial Express for carrying a story on the closure of wahindia.com, the website Trehan hosted, and at the Indian Express for carrying the story in a truncated version with her version of events cut out!

 

Media columnist Sevanti Ninan, honorary secretary of the Media Foundation which hosts this website, once brought her frustrations with connecting to the Net through a new computer into her column in The Hindu, naming the computer manufacturer in the process.

 

More recently, Ashok V Desai, used his column Writing on the Wall in Business Standard dated October 1, 2002, to rebut, point by point, a letters to the editor External Affairs minister Yashwant Sinha wrote protesting against Desai’s statements in the previous column of 24 September. In his letter, Sinha had complained that Desai was prejudiced about him and that this personal prejudice was often reflected in his columns.

 

Contrast this with the problem ordinary people with equally, if not more, hard luck stories have in airing their grievances through newspapers, especially through the grievances columns. It would be the rare journalist who has not been approached by at least two or three relatives/neighbours/friends/acquaintances to please use his or her influence to get a letter published or get a very genuine problem written about in some form. Goswami’s and Ninan’s problems really belonged to a grievance column while Singh’s and Trehan’s complaints about the media should best have been taken up with the Press Council, if not in letters to the editor.

Avid readers of columns could cite many, many more of examples of columns being used to sound off on personal matters or running down people. Naming a few columnists in this article or quoting them extensively is not intended to target them or the newspapers they have written for specifically. Indeed, they are all respected professionals and this must have been the first and last time they did write such a piece. It is just a coincidence that four of the examples are from Indian Express and Business Standard. They have been mentioned only to serve as an illustration. To talk about a larger issue, similar to the way many columnists themselves project their personal issues.

 

If Singh talked about fundamental rights, Goswami wrote about public sector inefficiency. He dealt with MTNL’s great financial performance and its listing on the New York Stock Exchange barely two months before he wrote his piece and contrasted this with the complete absence of a consumer culture in the organisation. He argued, and very rightly, that he thinks MTNL "is a gone case — a company that pretends to be global but is blind about the local". And Trehan dealt with `media ethics’.

 

But there are so many sob stories about ordinary people and MTNL (a quick run through of grievance columns of newspapers would itself have yielded enough for 1255 words), so did Goswami have to devote three quarters of his column to his own story? For the record, he at least had the grace to preface his piece (Going Global, Shafting Local) with an apology for getting personal: "It is all too tempting for a regular newspaper or magazine columnist to use the printed medium for airing personal grievances. Being conscious of it, I have assiduously steered away from this lure. Sometimes, however, one’s patience is stretched to the limit and, as our Prime Minister has been recently saying, "Aur bardasht nahin kiya jata hai." This has happened to me regarding Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL)." However, that didn’t stop him from getting personal on another occasion too. He used quite a bit of his column in Business World recently to air his complaints about an Air India flight he took.

 

Singh, in fact, would have liked readers to believe that the Gods had intervened to change the subject of her column. She sat down, she wrote, to write about the Maharashtra government’s properties being attached for non payment of debts when this "family crisis" happened. And that "persuaded" her that "the misuse of taxpayers money was less important (emphasis mine) than the violation of fundamental rights that my family crisis brought into focus." Now surely, it doesn’t need the arrest of a family member for a senior journalist like Singh to focus on fundamental rights!

 

It is quite common for columnists to add little personal anecdotes to their articles. There is nothing wrong with this. In fact, it sometimes helps buttress a point or lighten an otherwise heavy piece. Good economic writers effectively use this to get their point across to laymen. Apart from Goswami, Desai, Bibek Debroy, T C A Srinivasa Raghavan and Sanjay Baru are the names that come readily to mind of people who use this approach. But where does the use of such anecdotes as illustrations end and the airing of personal grievances begin? It is a very thin line and one that often gets blurred.

 

Why do the pieces by Goswami, Desai, Singh and Trehan cross the line, as it were? Because in each case most or all of the  column was taken up with it. The larger issue in each case got very little space. Besides, other examples were given short shrift when several could have been possible with very little effort on the part of each author. Each article read like one long gripe and not as an analysis of an issue. Singh’s column, for example, levels wild allegations against police and wildlife department officials ("wandering about farmhouses . . . in what appears to have been an exercise to salvage the reputation of the Delhi police, damaged . . . because of a police bullet having killed a wild leopard"). She attacks the media for shoddy reporting (carrying only one version of the story and getting her brother-in-law’s name wrong). She questions the objectivity of magistrates ("keep in mind, please, that media coverage cannot but influence magistrates in deciding matters of bail"). Not once does she acknowledge any violation of the law by her brother-in-law. All this makes the column come out like the vengeful outpourings of a hurt relative rather than the informed musings of a senior journalist.

 

Similarly, Desai’s article was devoted to explaining that he had nothing personal against Sinha and quoted examples from earlier columns where he had, in fact, defended Sinha on several occasions when he was finance minister. But surely, a response to a letters to the editor is carried after the letter itself? Does it merit a 1,135-word essay? In fact, his response got more play than Sinha’s letter and I do know of people who came to know about such a letter only after reading Desai’s piece. Is that fair?

 

This also raises the question of editorial supervision/vetting of columns. This is not to argue for some kind of pre-censorship of columnists but surely someone should be looking at the columns for content before they go in? The Indian Express could have spared itself some embarrassment caused when Trehan’s piece appeared one Sunday running down not just Financial Express but Indian Express as well!

 

Also, shouldn’t columnists conform to some code of ethics? Shouldn’t editors get them to agree that they will not write about something that affects them personally even if it is an important issue or a national cause? When judges withdraw from hearing a case because they may have an interest in a matter, when members of Parliament are not supposed to talk on subjects in which they have a special interest, why should columnists not be subject to such self-imposed restraints?

 

It’s time editors and columnists mull over these questions and find answers. Columns have a certain purpose. They should not be hijacked for quite something else.

 

Seetha is a freelance business journalist. Contact:  seetha60@yahoo.com