Who will bell the cat?

Has corruption in the media reached the stage where it has begun to undermine democracy? Politicians, journalists and the Election Commission are now agreed that it has, but cannot quite decide who will bell the cat with regard to the recurring phenomenon of paid news.  The EC pleads that its hands are tied in the absence of "transactional evidence." Of circumstantial evidence there is plenty but the EC seems to think this will not stand up to legal scrutiny.   

 

The political  class  thinks the media should self regulate. The Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha  trotted out a homespun analogy at a lively meeting  in Delhi on the subject of  paid news. "If a child in the neighbourhood beats another child and the father comes to complain you can slap your kid right there in front of the others and the problem will stop there. Otherwise the day will come when your child will come back badly beaten."

 

Other politicians think the election commission is to blame for making such a fuss about posters and messages on walls that candidates are driven to advertise in the corporate media in an effort to reach the electorate.

 

Some in the media think politicians could also self regulate: simply don’t buy the package media outlets have begun to offer at election time. Do without the ‘coverage’, such as it is. As for themselves, the journalists assembled at a meeting organized by the Editors Guild, the Indian Women’s Press corps an two other media bodies on March 13 thought up plenty of reasons why it wasn’t really in their hands. Proprietors called the shots, what was a mere editor to do? Stringers of far flung editions acted on their own, what could an editor do? Managements did all this, sometimes because they were under pressure to show positive quarterly results if the company was listed. The disappearance of unions and the rise of the contract system of employment in journalism was to blame•journalists cannot refuse to participate in malpractices when they don’t have tenure and can be sacked. Regular employment, they suggested, would  stiffen journalistic spine.

 

The Election Commission meanwhile thought  that what was happening was A Terrible Thing but what could they do? Their writ only ran for 30 days at election time. Politicians had more power, the media even more.    Election Commissioner S Y Qureshi  waxed eloquent: "We feel concerned at the paid news as it is not free speech.. It  can create an undue influence on elections… paid news is like a snake whose hood is down and whose tail has gone underground." But he did not seem to think that mighty Election Commission had the power to defang this snake.

 

The politicians present told him he did. Sushma Swaraj said the coverage package she had been offered during the last election she fought in May 2009 amounted to Rs 1 crore. Her opponent was being offered the same. We are willing to give you names, she told Qureshi. Both she and Manish Tiwari, Congress party spokesperson, marveled at how they were being made fools of. Swaraj said a newspaper in her constituency (in Madhya Pradesh) carried a front page headline saying that she was sure to win. Lower down on the same page it said exactly the same thing about her opponent. Would she name the paper? I will to him, she said, indicating the election commissioner.  

 

A few days before this meeting a former finance minister,  in the course of a private conversation, named exactly the same figure for the package he too had been offered for coverage during last year’s elections: Rs 1 crore.  This was in Jharkhand.

 

Manish Tiwari spoke about the menace in Punjab and added that the  political class was ready to take on paid news because it was the victim of it, its investment was not bringing returns. So would they take on this menace by beginning to name names and nail the culprit newspapers? Don’t trivialize the issue, he said.

 

The circumstantial evidence politicians are willing to offer is many examples of identical news coverage. Take the coverage of a candidate in three different newspapers, said Swaraj. It will be same word for word. Mr Quereshi did not seem convinced that the EC could come down heavily newspapers on the basis of this. Prakash Karat, General Secretary fo the CPIM, also present to discuss paid news,    thought further legislation was needed. The increasing role of money in the electoral system--illegal money•meant that there is a need to amend the Representation of Peoples Act. "I do not agree that only self regulation will solve the problem," he said.

The Election Commission is now waiting to see what the Press Council of India comes up with. The Council had a two member committee investigate the phenomenon across the country. Its labours are over and a Press Council meeting in Indore at the end of  March will take up  the draft report.

 

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and K Sreenivas Reddy, the two members of the Press Council who prepared the report, called or met well over fifty persons in Delhi Mumbai and Hyderabad, including representatives of  media managements, journalists associations, senior journalists, politicians and others. They have collected hundreds of instances of circumstantial evidence of the kind Sushma Swaraj has talked about. The Andhra Pradesh Union of Working Journalists in particular has painstakingly collected evidence. But all the publications’ representatives they met flatly denied having charged for news coverage. All transactions are clandestine.

 

Unlike Swaraj and Tiwari however Press Council  investigator Guha Thakurta is not coy about naming the newspapers that have indulged in paid news and other kinds of media corruption, going by circumstantial evidence. The list includes a local Maharashtra supplement of the  Times of  India,  Hindustan of the HT Media group, Dainik Jagran, Dainik Bhaskar, Eenadu and Sakshi from Andhra Pradesh , Lokmat in Maharastra, Gujarat Samachar, and Punjab Kesri. In other words, several big guns, led by the most profitable media house in the country. Is it then greed or need which defines this practice?

 

From Tamil Nadu and Kerala, however, where the media is also clearly divided along political lines, they did not  get as many complaints as they got  from Andhra Pradesh.

 

Advertising masquerading as news is problematic, according to the report, in three ways. It dupes the reader who does not know that what he is being told has been paid for by the person being reported on. Candidates do not disclose actual expenditure, in violation of the conduct of election rules of 1961, which is part of the Representation of People Act . And third, media companies do not disclose these earnings in their balance sheets.   

 

The Press Council is always described as having no teeth. But if its report is used by agencies which do have teeth to become the basis for further investigation it will have proved that it can get around its lack of punitive powers by at least assembling incriminating documentation. If the Election Commission however decides that is not good enough, we will be back to square one.