Prime Minister Narendra Modi was uncharacteristically guarded last Wednesday evening when he spoke at the Ramnath Goenka awards ceremony hosted by the Indian Express in Delhi. He was, of course, right to re-emphasise something that strikes most people as obvious: the right of the media to criticise Governments in a democracy. In this context he drove home the fact that the Emergency, against which Ramnath Goenka fought bravely and relentlessly, was a blot that must never again be repeated in India.
However, the Prime Minister, despite his witty asides, seems to have been far more guarded when stressing the media’s own obligations. He did stress that the unity of the country must not be jeopardised for the sake of an attractive story. He also stressed the colossal damage a tendentious headline can do to social harmony. However, in stressing that the biggest challenge to any media organisation is its credibility, Modi barely touched upon India’s fractious media environment and the reasons for it. Maybe he didn’t want to trigger a fresh controversy.
The partisanship of the media is not a new phenomenon. The history of the Press in India reveals the remarkable extent to which the Indian-owned publications before 1947 were quite open in their support for the nationalist movement or even individuals associated with the freedom struggle. Conversely, then British-owned papers such as the Statesman, Times of India and The Pioneer were explicitly supporters of the British Raj, although they may have supported different European interests. Post-Independence, and as a consequence of licences governing newsprint import and the over-dependance on Government and public sector advertisements, the Press tended to be rather meek and submissive in their attitude to the Government of the day.
Three developments contributed to important shifts that happened after 1977. Firstly, the Emergency brought home to the media the colossal importance of democratic rights and a tolerant regime. Journalists began safeguarding their rights more aggressively. Secondly, the growth of the Indian economy after 1991 led to a significant reduction of commercial dependence on public funds. Well-managed publications with big readership bases were now in a position to look to the market, rather than the Government, for commercial viability and profit. Finally, the advent of technology and the deregulation of a part of the electronic media (the radio, alas, is still not open for news broadcasts) led to a spectacular media boom. In the process, the domination of what Nehruvian radicals used to denounce as the “jute press” lost its overwhelming dominance. Although the market for media consumers has grown exponentially, media organisations are confronted with intense competition. While success brings windfall profits, failure can lead to staggering losses.
There is a self-image in the media that its role is that of a permanent watchdog and, by implication, a permanent opposition. Consequently, editors often believe that good news is no news and that it is the media’s dharma to show up the underside of a nation, even if that involves a measure of artistic licence. There is also some self-censorship dictated by either security concerns or plain good taste. The boundaries of what is acceptable or unacceptable have never been explicitly stated but always left to the application of old fashioned common sense. In 1991, the Press (with one dishonourable exception) did not publish explicit photographs of the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. And four years ago, the Indian media quite rightly shied away from reprinting the Danish cartoons that many Muslims found gratuitously offensive.
What appears to have vitiated the media environment is not divisions on professional considerations. There may be odd disagreements over according the oxygen of publicity to terror groups (including Maoists) but these are few and far between. The real schism are over domestic politics and quite extraneous to media concerns.
An example of this was evident last Wednesday when websites and social media publicised the case of a journalist who refused to accept an award from Modi because he didn’t want to be in the same frame as the PM. On Thursday, writing in the Indian Express, a prominent TV anchor advocated the pro-active use of the “moral compass” to prevent ‘demagogues’ such as Modi and Donald Trump from benefiting from electronic media coverage.
Both these interventions highlight something that is becoming increasingly apparent: that the so-called hiccups of the media in India are in reality a problem of some journalists with the politics of Modi. What is being advocated by the boycotters and moral compass-wallas is a pro-active use of the media for an explicitly political end. In other words, even the pretence of objectivity has to be shed and biases made more explicit.
It is true, as the success of Arnab Goswami in wiping out his competition shows, that people don’t mind explicit bias. They like views that reinforce their own pre-existing beliefs and prejudices. Goswami’s competitors don’t lack their own biases, presented slyly as objective reporting. The problem seems to be that the viewers don’t seem to care too much for those biases. The complaint of some journalists is that there are less takers for their particular brand of politics than for those they despise as bhakts and fascists. In essence, their problem is with consumers for refusing to accept one version of correctness. Anything else or replying back is ‘troll’ behaviour and the ‘truncation’ of media freedom.
I think it is about time that the dissident media came clean and admitted that their real problem in India is with the choice the electorate made in 2014. Apart from everything else it cut their perquisites and seriously curbed what they used to call “private practice.” On top of that, the PM doesn’t even call them for tea and gossip. To be just a ‘citizen journalist’ is no fun. No wonder the moral compass is suggesting spit and curse.