Government media Control
TEHELKA,  June 25 - July1, 2005 

The government maintains an elaborate machinery called the ministry of information and broadcasting whose essential business it is to restrict in­formation the government does not want published. Its business is to circulate the Establishment view. There also exists in India today a flourishing public relations and promotions complex that is for anyone to hire for a price - politicians, political parties, corporate businesses, indi­vidual entrepreneurs and, increasingly, by the government itself. The media is under a dual barrage of advertisement masquerading as information. India likes to send out big-picture images of itself as an exemplar among post-colonial democracies - a flourishing diversity of peoples, a stable of the best IT thorough­breds, a defiant nuclear power knocking hard at the doors of the UN Security Council.

We are a nation still ravaged by tribal and communal wars, daily caste feuding, recurrent bloodletting between Hindus and Muslims.. Most Indians are poor if not destitute, poorly nourished and, often, no clothing or housing. For all our ambassadors of excellence in universities across the world, we remain a hugely illiterate people. We may be nuclear but we do not have enough electricity to power even showpiece metros like New Delhi and Bombay. What is true of five percent of India and Indians is not true of the rest of India.

India is many people. Reporting India requires complex approaches and methods. The concerns of the Indian media cannot be the concerns of the big city alone. They cannot be the concerns of the playing fields of the newly arrived market. For the journalist to turn a cosy lapdog in India is not merely anachronistic, it is derelict and deeply alarming. A car launch or a fashion parade cannot make front page news when a raging drought in some corner of the coun­try is relegated to inner columns.

Perhaps the most blunt example in recent times of how deeply divorced mainstream Indian media has become from reality is the general election of 2004. The government of the day, led by the rightwing chauvinist BJP ran a multi-million, multi-media cam­paign it called ‘India Shining’. In six years, the campaign claimed, India had been transformed - farmers were wielding cellphones, milkmen were driving pickups, the underclasses were slurping cream, the middleclass was bathing in honey, rural India was a pastoral symphony, urban India was a leap of affluence. the people saw through it and the BJP was defeated.

The means to curtail and contain media freedom have become far more subtle in our world and my case as an Indian journalist is that the media itself has become a major party to this insidious process. I have been listening to some of my colleagues from South Asia on this forum with sense of con­cern and, indeed, trepidation. I am happy to report that despite what happened to TEHELKA a few years ago, de jure and de facto arrangements to squash or subvert media freedoms, such as exist elsewhere on this continent, do not operate in India.

But what does concern me is a sense that more and more the Indian media is not using the freedoms it has won for itself. More and more, it is ready to abdicate its mandated role in a free society in the inter­ests of a buzzing cash till. Unfortunately, television, like print, remains largely obsessed with concerns of the metro and the good life, perhaps because that ensures profits most easily. Feudal, even imperial, mores are a genetic flaw with our governments; they work on a system of rewards, dropping crumbs from the table - junkets abroad, wine and cheese parties, a harmless little exclusive story, an appointment that your peers will not get. All these on the con­dition that the story the government does not want told shall not be told.

We have bartered away the essence of our calling for the seductions of an exaggerated, if altogether false, sense of power. We know the inside story but we have become so much the Insiders ourselves that we will not tell the story. We revel in carrying secret messages from this politician to that, not in revealing those messages. We are no longer content being reporters reporting on games people play; we want to become play­ers ourselves. We do not want to be in the press gallery of Parliament, we aspire to sit in the House of Parliament. There was a time a journalist’s worth was measured by how much awe he inspired in the Establishment. Today, journalistic stature is about how much part of the Establishment you are.

A lot is heard of devot­ing space to good news, product launches, galas, glamour, the lives of the rich and beautiful people. It’s a consumptive profit exercise between the media and the market. Feel-good advertising does not sit nicely with bad news on the front pages. To insulate 10 percent of the nation - and that is roughly what the main­line newspaper reading public in India would constitute - from how 90 percent of the population lives is an invitation to problems.

Dumbing down is often justified in Indian newsrooms in the name of what the reader wants. I am yet to come across a good enough barometer on reader likes and dislikes. I think it safe to assume, interests vary hugely. And I am cer­tainly not convinced today’s reader has be­come a moronic entertainment junky who needs a daily fix of good news and glamour. Besides, reader interest and that alone cannot be the arbiter of what we as journalists engage in, especially in semi­literate, developing societies. The burden of disseminating information and creating bridges of communication between the rulers and the ruled, between the classes and the underclasses, between one region and another, is a burden the media must bear.

Courtesy: Tehelka. Excerpted from a presentation made at the World Editors’ Forum in Seoul, June 2005