HOW THE INDIAN PRESS COVERED THE SACKING
OF
ADMIRAL BHAGWAT
Now that arms lobbies in the defence establishment
are back in the news, we feature an unpublished monitoring study on the press
coverage of the sacking of Admiral Bhagwat in December 1998. A Naval Chief was
sacked for the first time in independent India, and the coverage that followed
was a classic case of media manipulation. Diametrically different versions of
the "truth" were published.
Reporting
the Naval Chiefs sacking
A Case of Media Manipulation
1)
Synopsis
2)
Case Studies
4)
Conclusion
Synopsis
The monitoring was conducted from the day the story broke (31st December 1998).
Newspapers were monitored till the 15th January 1999, in the case of magazines
because of different methods of dating issues, two or three issues of each were
taken, and depending on how many stories they carried on this episode.
>The
exercise revealed that most publications tended to project one side of the conflict
at the expense of the other. This was admittedly a difficult and sensitive
story to source. Therefore the sourcing with a few exceptions was inevitably
anonymous. Several instances of biased reporting and headlining were found. And
the journalistic tradition of granting the right to reply to those being
mentioned in a story was not observed. The allegations came first, the other
side of the story later, often two or three days later.
There
was plenty of comment on the news pages. This could be ascribed to new
journalism, where publications, beaten to the news headlines by television or
radio, strive to provide the reader with more interpretation and comment in the
reporting. In the process, however the line between analysis and bias becomes
blurred.
In
the case of both newspapers and magazines, there was not one publication that
gave equally both sides of the story, though the Hindustan Times came the
closest to it. Much of the information used was inspired by leaks, and the
leaking appeared to the selective. Ministry of Defence sources favoured one set
of publications; General Bhagwat`s supporters favoured another. If you wanted a
full picture with regard to what led to the unprecedented sacking of a Naval
chief, you had to follow the story in two or three publications.
With the regard to the details of incidents which were cited by the government in building up the case against Admiral Bhagwat, versions of the same event varied so much in different publications, that it was difficult tell what the truth was. In the case of a senior naval officer whom