Questions that lacked focus
Can one safely assume that all correspondents who wrote stories were present at the press conference and had not covered it from the live teleast?
Did the Prime Minister~s press conference serve a purpose at all, asks MAHESH VIJAPURKAR.
During James Reston's days as the chief of Washington Bureau of the venerable New York Times, the bureau went through an exercise to prepare for the press briefings by the US President in the White House. The idea was to second-guess the questions which others would anyhow ask and putting their heads together, work on questions -- their wording, length, the thrust -- to draw out the maximum.
Then the New York Times contingent would seat themselves in such a manner in the hall that any which way the presidential head turned, the eyes would light upon an NYT correspondent. The president would have to identify the raised hand and, hopefully, allow a question to be asked. That is, each well-crafted question.
During the session, which Reston describes in his autobiographical DEADLINE, and also elsewhere, every possible question would be considered. This one? No, the Los Angeles Times correspondent would ask that -- touches that region so skip it. What about this one? No. The Boston Globe correspondent would be interested for it concerned the region where that newspaper circulated. Thus, many questions were eliminated.
Each of the correspondents was asked to bring the full range of issues of interest his beat covered and then colleagues helped each other shape the question. When their turn came, the NYT correspondent did not waste a question and saved the opportunity for maximum gains.
At the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's press conference on May 24, 2010, the hall was full and my guess is quite a few were unable to gain entry. The Hindu the next day reported that journalists from far corners of the country were invited too. The seating was also categorised: editors and bureau chiefs were clustered together in a section; then the English-language media had a part of the seating arranged for their segment; then each language had its own set of seats.
So, the NYT strategy of locating each correspondent from a newspaper was out of the question; Harish Khare, the media advisor to the Prime Minister, had laid out a strict protocol and it was followed. The Hindu carried several stories from the press conference and written by several correspondents; one could count five bylines the next day; but if the Reston Plan had to be executed, if it was intended, it could not be. Because Harish Khare had identified the correspondent who should ask the next question.
I am assuming that all correspondents who wrote stories were present at the press conference and had not covered it from the live teleast. The suspicion lingers because most newspapers missed what was said on a question relating to Muslims. It was missed in most newspapers -- the Doordarshan had lost its link with the private channels to which it provided the feed.
Could the questions have been better? Long winded ones got short answers. Questions were wasted and wrong ones were asked, says Vinod Sharma, political editor of The Hindustan Times. On a TV show analysing the press conference, he said the behaviour of the journalists was rather odd -- they lacked focus.
When Manmohan Singh responded perfunctorily, or did not answer one or two elements of a long-winded, multi-clause question, why did not the next correspondent pin the Prime Minister down with a follow-up? Sharma would have liked the correspondents to have shown greater understanding, one supposes, of the critical issues which needed to be discussed.
I agree with him entirely. Each correspondent was perhaps wanting to glow with a question of his own and one wonders if the long-winded questions were designed to keep the camera focused on the questioner in the live telecast of the press conference? If that were so, it was poor professionalism.
The Prime Minister's performance was discussed at length on television and a few newspapers devoted some space as well to the event.
Was Manmohan Singh the bureaucrat uncomfortable at public questions? Was he averse to saying a whit more than he could? Was he playing it safe? Why was he not throwing one-liner takeaways? Even a small slip like "dollars" for "people" got the media attention.
It is quite in order then to even put the media to test and ask: did it perform its duty well?
The media has not exactly sung praises about the performance of the UPA-2 government. Then, suddenly at the press conference, the political correspondent of CNN-IBN, Bhupendra Choube, congratulates the Prime Minister for his time in office and points out how that channel's viewers had given him high marks. The Prime Minister had to smile, because others had just asked him earlier if he considered his tenure a success.
Obviously, the focus was missing.
Perhaps the size of the media circus in New Delhi, plus those invited from the regions, made it impossible for the press conference to be meaningful. I have heard K.K. Katyal, a veteran of The Statesman and then The Hindu, mention that in Mrs Indira Gandhi's time, he and a few colleagues positioned themselves at a strategic location in Parliament House to be seen by her as she emerged from her room to go to either houses or the Central Hall and managed a few minutes with her.
Those few minutes perhaps produced a lot more good copy of some relevance -- relevance on the strength of its intrinsic value, not because it was uttered by a Prime Minister -- than perhaps the entire May 24, 2010 press conference. If he was watching it on live TV, he would not have been amused. In fact, he would have been dismayed.
Of course, those were the days when the media comprised a small set of journalists who knew their turf well. There was some intimacy and mutual trust.
Did the press conference serve a purpose at all? It was a grand PR exercise indeed, to mark the end of one year of the second term of a Prime Minister. A jamboree had to be held for it -- it had ceremonial intent, not much else.
The Prime Minister too should realise the significance and usefulness of more frequent interaction with the media, even if it is confined to senior journalists who cover the PMO, for it would ensure that the media does not create false images of his government on the strength of speculation and partial information. But if he remains as taciturn and economic with information, then such meetings would be as useful -- or as pointless -- as this press conference.
Officialdom has to realise that an informed set of journalists means an informed media, which in turn leads to informed debate, not speculation. But then, the media also ought to learn to be responsible, not chase headlines driven by the compulsions of the 24x7 news channels.