Media Diversity in India - Antidote to Murdochisation

Editor of The Hoot - a media watchdog website, Sevanti Ninan comments on the differences and similarities between Murdoch's media empire and what exists in India. She is interviewed in the context of the "phone hacking" scandal that has brought media moghul Murdoch in the dock in Britain.

"Indian Media - Politically Free, Prisoners of Profit" - P.Sainath

Eminent commentator and rural affairs editor of The Hindu newspaper, P.Sainath speaks to Newsclick on media discourse and other issues related to the "Fourth Estate".

"Spindian Express"

Vijay Prashad's article in Counterpunch last week about Sonal Shah's participation in Hindu right-wing activity in the United States (she was national co-ordinator of the dreaded Vishwa Hindu Parishad's America wing in 2001), created a furore. The noise generated after the publication of article at Counterpunch and here, was directly proportional to the hype surrounding Shah's nomination into Barack Obama's advisory transition team - a phenomenon that generally sees chest-thumping at any expatriate Indian's coming to prominence in the United States.

Prashad's article drew a few responses among India's own self-styled "liberal" community. Political Scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta along with CII mentor Tarun Das and others came up with a response that went in essence, thus - Sonal Shah has impeccable credentials, she has never espoused Hindu right wing views, and those who are raising questions about her past "associations" are basically committing an act of witch-hunting.

Nowhere in the statement is it mentioned that Shah was the national co-ordinator and an active member of the VHP-A in 2001. Shah, herself in this statement, asserted that she had nothing in common with the VHP or the RSS, but she did not repudiate the fact that she had worked for the VHP-A (for earthquake relief, for which she expressed her pride). She also called the allegations of her associations with the VHP-A, false and baseless in her statement.

Vijay Prashad in turn came up with a further riposte that elucidated clearly that the allegations against Ms Shah were not on the basis of "mere association" but on the sound basis of "guilt by participation".

So much for the context. Interestingly, the decidedly right-wing paper in the country today (someone would ask me which paper is not, in India today), the Indian Express editorialised on the issue thus.

The funny statement in the editorial is this:

Her participation in collecting Gujarat earthquake relief and an organisation’s invitation to her to speak at its event have been transformed into apparently inarguable evidence of her identification with illiberal politics. This is shocking.

To the dudes at Indian Express, the "an organisation" for which Ms Shah collected relief and acted as co-ordinator was the Vishwa Hindu Parishad-America, which co-ordinates activities for its parent organisation in India today for fund-raising -- money which is used to build the hate network that today operates with non-chalant disgrace and monstrosity in Orissa (Kandhamal), Karnataka and elsewhere (Gujarat circa 2002.. do you remember? ). Is this tangential??! And the organisation which invited her to speak was yet another of the RSS' many front organisations - the Ekal Vidyalaya .

Notice the clever use of "an organisation" instead of VHP-A or the Ekal Vidyalaya, by the Spindian Express. Don't you easily fail with a grade of F on accuracy, dudes?

And more:

But in diverse, robust democracies like India and America, judgment calls, especially about potential holders of public office, require a real appreciation of what it means to be a liberal: oppose all witch-hunts.

Oppose all Witch-hunts! That is rich, coming from the Witchhuntian Express! Remember Pratibha Patil's nomination to the post of President? And the daily saga of front page reports claiming her guilt in the failings of the co-operative banks she helped set up in Maharashtra? Here , here , and the best of all, here - Shekhar Gupta makes a case for the application of " due diligence " to vet the process of selection of India's highest constitutional post.

Call it "witch-hunting" or the press' right to explore the past of a public official, depending on where you stand.. there is always going to be questions raised on accountable public officials. If Pratibha Patil (deservedly, in my opinion) can be subjected to this amount of scrutiny for founding co-op banks which later (after 30 years) went bankrupt.. by the newspaper; how can it deny the same due diligence that goes about establishing credentials of a public official in the United States- Ms Shah, who was incontrovertibly, the member of the foreign wing of one of India's most dreaded medieval outfits - the VHP?

Double Standards, anyone? "Illiberalism", no? Well. that comes with the territory of Indian Express, no doubt.

Media Hoax and Gullible Hacks

Three cheers to www.penpricks.blogspot.com for exposing the Indian media through a circulated hoax. Siddharth Varadarajan of The Hindu pointed out the foolishness of sections of the press who went about their hack jobs with elan forgetting the cardinal rule of journalism: VERIFY. This hoax incident (termed Nazi-gate by penpricks) clearly establishes how the hacks of the Indian press (in this case, The Telegraph, The Indian Express, The New Indian Express, The Deccan Herald, The Herald, The Asian Age, and others in the Goan and Maharashtran local media) go about their jobs privileging sensationalism over truth and journalistic principles. Shame on the reporters who did these shoddy jobs and their editors who went about nonchalantly putting up these spurious reports.

Their "regression" test of the Indian media was the need of the hour. A 100% hoax was gleaned up as a major breaking news event and gulped up by unsuspecting hacks of the great Indian press (with honourable exceptions of course) to be put up as main page news (for example in the Indian Express as the above picture highlights).

We always knew that the Indian media thrived on sensationalism and cared two hoots about and tenets. But showing them up in the manner the penpricks folks have done is akin to what is called a "double exposure" in the movie Mahapurush directed by Satyajit Ray. It shows up both the newspapers at their worst as much as us also, the readers of these hack press newspapers.

Siddharth Varadarajan has an even more sombre thing to say: such hack jobs are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Indian media. The hack media picks up even the lousiest of hints thrown up by investigative agencies and puts them up as gospels of information with a devil-may-care attitude.

And this is not the gutter press we are talking about. We are here talking about the self appointed pontificates of public opinion in the country today. These are people like Shekhar Gupta (he of the Walk the Talk and America is India's saviour attitude), Rudrangshu Mukherjee (heck ..he is an academic to boot), Olga Tellis (who replaced MJ Akbar in the Asian Age) and others who are the creme de la creme of the Indian newspaper industry.

Penpricks has this sober forecast and the hope that now verification and checking will be part of every press member's daily routine, now that they have been shown up. This writer believes that it is an optimism that only will probably be realised. Most of the corporate press is worried only about their margins and not what goes in between them. Nazigate or not, gullible hacks are here to stay.

Indian media -- beyond bias

Article written for The Post

More than a week ago, the Indian finance minister released a much talked about annual budget. The budget included a loan waiver of about Rs 65,000 crore for farmers in the country, reeling from a tremendous agrarian crisis. The waiver was made the talking point in the predominantly corporate-owned print and mass media in the country, most of whom were critical of the ‘dole’, calling it a gimmick meant for the upcoming parliamentary elections scheduled for next year.



As such, after the details of the waiver scheme were released, it was established by agrarian experts and rural India watchers to be some form of a breather for the much traumatised farmers in the country. Agrarian India is in the throes of a severe crisis that has forced thousands of farmers across the country to commit suicide owing to a variety of reasons. Agriculture as a profession has virtually become non-viable because of high input costs and a quirky globalised market. Farmers, running out of clear cut financial options, have depended upon credit from unscrupulous money lenders and the debt trap has only made their situation worse. The worst sufferers of the agrarian crisis, farmers who have committed suicide, have an amazing geographical spread: from Punjab in the north to Chattisgarh in central India to Vidharbha in the west to Kerala and Andhra Pradesh in the south of the country. This full-fledged crisis situation has dragged on for nearly a decade now in the country.

Yet the response to the one-time measure of a credit waiver from public sector banks for farmers has been treated with scorn by the media, be it ‘pink paper’ business press or broadsheets or the ubiquitous mass media news channels. No such angst or derision was witnessed when similar waivers were given to large private-owned corporations and debt written off as ‘non-performing assets’. Estimates of such written off bad loans are in the range of staggering number of lakhs and crores, but not even a crocodile tear came out from the press on the burden over financial institutions of the state, which had to bear the waiver loss in these cases. The obvious question one would raise is: if fiscal health is indeed the concern, why is there a selective angst among the so-called ‘fourth estate of Indian democracy’, the media? The answer is very simple, the Indian media as much as any other elsewhere, suffers from class biases. The only trouble is that the coverage of events in the Indian media goes beyond class biases and suffers from an acute form of status quoism, elitism and pro-establishment opinionating. The fact that the agrarian crisis has virtually been given a short shrift with neither the farmer suicides nor the agrarian distress being given any sort of priority coverage is galling.

Ever since substantial economic liberalisation in the country, the media has taken a sharp turn toward uninhibited commercialisation and sensationalism (with honourable exceptions of course). The English press in particular has devised a formulaic way of conducting ‘news business’ making the traditional role of acting as the guardian of the fourth estate of democracy to be a secondary one. The coming to town of the energetic and privately-owned TV news channels has exacerbated this trend. These channels thrive on a business model that is advertiser-driven and hence, relies on a competition that tries as much as possible to pander to the lowest common denominator of tastes to enhance viewership. Coverage of issues that do not quite resonate well with the upper middle classes in the country, who never had this better a life in all the years after Indian independence, is virtually nil. Thus what dominates television and print media (except for some honourable exceptions) is news that is ‘sellable’ and that which has a ‘commercial value’, is sensationalist and opinion that is clearly anti-labour, anti-poor and pro-nouveau/established rich. On every issue, where there has been a direct clash between forces of non-elite (blue collar labour, rural peasantry, unorganised labour, marginalised sections) and the elite (corporate big businessmen, foreign investors, ‘celebrities’), the media has taken the side of the elite.

That the arena of contestation where the poor have hit back (electoral democracy) sits uncomfortably with the elite, for whom ‘politics’ is nothing about merit or ‘class stature’ means that the media rubbishes politics and brands the entire ‘political class’ under the same brush. Of course, there are exceptions – those politicians who sit well with policy-making that favours the elite are given place of pride in coverage and given titles of ‘messiahs’ and ‘visionaries’. One only has to witness the adulation that the current finance minister, P. Chidambaram (a compulsive votary for neo-liberal reforms in the country) enjoys among the media along with other pro-big business and pro-elite politicians, to see this in action.

So cloistered is the media in India today in a territory that is very much cut off from the reality that governs the majority of the third world nation’s population, that it gets its political prognostications serially wrong. In 2004, when Indian voters brought down a right-wing government, which announced that India was ‘shining’ (even as the agrarian crisis was in full flow and the march of inequality was on), the media were gung ho about the existing establishment retaining power. Its coverage of politics is not highlighted by an anti-establishment role, but by a derision for ‘politics’ itself. Witness, for example, the coverage (or the lack of it) of the parliament.

The parliament is only in the news during disruptions and bedlam. Question hours, discussions, policy positions are either given the short shrift or are ignored in toto.

The derision for politics is accentuated especially when it comes to the coverage of the policy positions of the left space in the political spectrum in the country. Instead of analysing and critiquing positions taken by the Left, the tendency is not just to dismiss and disregard, but to subject leftist politicians to unfiltered abuse. A sample of this was available extensively during the Indo-US nuclear deal coverage. From calling the leftists traitors to the national cause, to insinuate extraterritorial loyalties and to excoriate any reasonable opinion that divorced from making a common cause with the Americans on every issue, the media clearly went overboard in maintaining its coloured credentials.

Even the credit waiver issue was given a new spin: the government had embarked upon this waiver as a populist move in lieu of snap polls. For the elitist media sections, the nuclear deal must be signed despite the leftists’ opposition (and even if there was a majority consensus against the deal in parliament), even if it meant that the government would fall in doing so. And the reasoning: some senators from the US had warned of an expedient timetable that had to be adhered to, in the ‘national interest’. As yet, the government is still strained to answer some of the legitimate concerns over the deal that has been signed with full cognisance of its positioning within a strategic partnership with the US. But this was not a problem for the custodians of the media as it sat well with the perceptions of the elite on the necessity of the nuclear deal.

Such a pro-elite shift in the media can only be explained by the fact that the larger part of the media is owned by corporate bodies, in partnership with foreign-based news channels themselves under corporate thrall. The ownership cuts across different segments in the media space from print to mass media and opinionating suffers from the fact that the proprietorship gets precedence over independent editorial control. In the print media for example, because of the predominance of commercialism over objectivity and analysis, the proprietor determines editorial and news content, with the editor (once an all powerful entity in the press) playing a subservient role. As for the TV news channels, the considerations of instantaneous gratification of the viewer requires that opinionating and news reporting are tuned to dubious rating principles that give precedence for quantity over quality. The only way of getting back the normative nature of the fourth estate in the country would be to regulate the content in the media, primarily through self-regulation and by setting a code of conduct. The preponderance of commercial and corporate interests in the media must be curtailed through stringent norms on cross-ownership and foreign control over the media. Freedom of the press must not mean a negative liberty, which misinterprets freedoms that were established in the form of a social contract between the people of the country and the ruling classes and that were instituted in the constitution.

Sainath on the media

Sainath excoriates the media.....