Dasu Krishnamoorty
For fifty-seven years, governments in this country functioned under the watchful eye of legislatures, opposition parties, NGOs, rights activists and more importantly media. This vigil is necessary because the success or failure of democracy is closely linked to how efficiently and responsibly governments empowered by an electorate work. But considering that we, as an electorate, take important decisions relying on the information media circulate, we also need to know how media work and who work them.
A four-day interactive session on "Development and Communication`` the Press Institute of India organized early this month in Shimla reached a consensus that people should become the center of all news reporting in media and that journalists were first and foremost human beings and therefore had a social responsibility, making themselves accountable to people and not to anyone else. But we may ask, ‘have people mattered at any time other than election time?’ The accountability scores of Indian media do not encourage the optimism evident at the Shimla seminar.
Take a look at these figures: the world’s largest terrestrial TV network Doordarshan with 1400 transmitters broadcasting 1500 hours of programs every week reaching 900 million viewers; All India Radio with 350 transmitters beaming news and current affairs programs in 27 languages to at least 600 million, and 6000 daily newspapers and 45,000 magazines in 100 languages reaching 72 million readers constituting the most informed section of the electorate. A quarter of
Yet no editor has ever asked political parties why media issues do not figure in electoral debate. Neither alternative media nor mainstream media made any serious reference to this failure. On the rare occasion they opened their mouth, earlier editors who graced the Rajya Sabha raised always the question of freedom of the press, as though it is in immediate peril. Audience, who are to media what voters are to political parties, never figured in their speeches. Election campaigns dodged discussing media as center of power and the need to make them accountable to a public agency. On the other hand, political leaders and columnists, irrespective of party affiliation, fell over each other to utter inanities about freedom of the press when the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly ordered the arrest of senior editorial employees of The Hindu.
Danny Schechter, executive editor of MediaChannel, a nonprofit, public interest website dedicated to global media issues, makes a significant point in this context: "I joined the media to expose the problems of the world. Now I see the media as one of those problems." Media, however, is not an issue in US presidential elections. The American public are so exercised over this serious omission that three million of them wrote letters to
Since electoral decisions are taken on the basis of information media provide, it is pertinent to ask: do media tell readers the whole truth? Hear the answer from Arundhati Roy who said at the launch of a Malayalam magazine Free Press (2 July) in New Delhi: "We need to question what comes on media as it is parroting lies dictated by the powerful. When we see a story in the media, we also need to follow the money and check out who owns how much in those big media houses." Do we in
In an earlier article (Readers and Media), I had discussed how owners misappropriate news space/time for private purpose. When news is defined by the ownership of media, information about who owns what newspaper, and owns what else besides newspapers, becomes critical in evaluating news. Some of our newspaper firms own TV channels, some own advertising companies and some collectively own our news agencies. In turn, beedi barons, pickle barons, liquor barons and the pioneering tribe of realtors own our newspapers and other media. The Registrar of Newspapers report is hardly of any help. It says that some X company owns Y newspaper, but who owns X company?
The Columbia Journalism Review has an online facility that tells Americans who owns what media in the
It is not just ownership that the Indian press is silent about. For example, the Antulay cement scandal has a media story behind it involving cement allocations to a newspaper. It has never come out, nor will it ever, for reasons of self-censorship. Newspapers probing scandals is no great shakes. There is something sick about a press that swoons over a single Tehelka probe, done employing debatable methods. As the term of Zail Singh was coming to a close there were reports about the President contemplating the dismissal of Rajiv Gandhi. Inder Malhotra writes (The Hindu 30 June 02): "Rajiv lived in constant dread of a Presidential proclamation dismissing him and dissolving the House. He heaved a sigh of relief only when Zail Singh`s term was over on
The Indian press enjoys absolute freedom from scrutiny, not found elsewhere. The American press had a watchdog called the National News Council, similar to our Press Council. The first knife stuck in the council was the refusal of The New York Times to co-operate with it. Our Press Council manages to breathe with the oxygen supplied by an Act of Parliament. Some eminent men in the press see the Council as a standing attack on freedom of the press and a curb on enterprising journalism. The bigger newspapers, with some honorable exceptions, treat its censure with contempt.
Apart from institutional watch, there are high-profile media critics in the
The performance of the press has repeatedly been questioned before the Press Council, the courts and in the letters columns. The complaints referred to attacks on privacy, trial by the press, bias in reporting, misuse of news space etc. More important than all these failings is the failure of the press to discuss the problems of the most voiceless sections of the people. The press loses its credibility when its most senior members shed moderation in praising political leaders. Naturally, they are instantly linked to the politics of those personalities. I do not protest if newspapermen openly associate themselves with movements or political parties. But it is difficult to accept switch of loyalties by the editor of a Congress-friendly paper to a BJP-friendly newspaper or vice versa as has happened at least three times in recent memory. Such editors have no right to talk of principles, so essential to journalism and for credibility.
With each advance in technology there is a temptation to use it for unethical ends. On
It is legitimate for readers to assume that editors are hiding something crucial from them as long as they resist outside scrutiny. What they are hiding could be non-newspaper interests of their owners, absence of internal democracy, violation of labor laws, diversion of newspaper revenues to other areas, blackout of stories at the instance of owners and rejecting stories or viewpoints because of bias/prejudice. N.Ram, writing on the occasion of The Hindu’s 125th anniversary (13 Sept. 03) says, "In the name of the omnipotent market, a new kind of demand is made for manipulating news, analysis, and opinion to suit the owners` financial and political interests — and for tailoring the editorial product to subserve marketing goals. Murdoch-style price wars and other aggressive practices tremendously strengthen these pressures."
Public or private, media bring power to the owners, the power to suppress truth. That is why they need to be watched.
Contact: dasukrishnamoorty@hotmail.com