Understanding News

-- By Dasu Krishnamoorty

News is a complex phenomenon involving several players in its production. Each player is a censor, a critic, a filter, a promoter etc. Together, they reconstruct social reality in simple and readable terms inducing a feeling of euphoria and familiarity with the texts. The objective of this exercise is i. To question the legitimacy of a few campus academics or media organisations appropriating the right to prescribe a definition of news which fails to democratise communication, selectively provides voice to a privileged few and bypasses vast sections of the society; ii. To dispel the illusion that news is value free and therefore not a conduit for ideology and iii. To illuminate the cause and effect relationship between education, ideology and media content. It is a critical approach to news and related issues, with minimal empirical support coming from newspaper clippings and works of communication scholars. This effort is a reflexive and even natural response to the media environment in the country and elsewhere and a fervent plea for a peoples-friendly conceptualisation of news. Though news appears to reach a heterogenous and anonymous audience, it subtly homogenises sections of the community on the basis of an ideology and in favour of it.

There is no disagreement about the assumption that the primary task of the press is to inform by transmitting to society an account of itself, which is as close to truth and completeness as possible. One of the most popular and expeditious vehicles of information is news. Freedom of the press is qualified by its duty to inform and this is an obligation which is not negotiable, an axiom embodied in the term 'free and responsible'. To empower, news has to inhere the attributes of improving the quality of life of those who are informed, that is, readers. This interpretation of news is inclusive but accords primacy to the information function of news over other functions such as correlation, surveillance and entertainment, which are really the consequences of the information function. News today divides people instead of achieving social cohesion by the simple act of ignoring the information needs and aspirations of a majority of the people within a community, within a country, within a continent and so on. In all these sectors, there is a north-south divide of information haves and have-nots, of information proletariat and elite. The Hutchins Commissions in the early 40s, the two press commissions in India (1953 and 1978) and the McBride Commission (early 70s) have recommended a society-centered definition of news of which the media can feign ignorance only at the cost of credibility. 

There are some simple and self-evident truths about news, which the media and the mainstream communication research establishment have withheld from the society. One of them is that society generates news about itself and that it trusts a small group of persons to network and gather news, process it and relay it back to society. The other is that the goal of news is to benefit society and empower it by bringing transparency to its activities. That small group of media owners and journalists has breached this trust very early in the history of the press by establishing liaison with market forces. The market now owns the means of production of news, controls its flow and content. By implication and in reality, news today is what the market determines it should be. Head of the Centre for Media Studies N. Bhaskara Rao says,'The media has become marketing media.' Editor of Dainik Jagran says, 'economy is the backbone of any media and therefore it cannot be totally free from commercial interests.' Market sponsored and funded research has succeeded in creating an illusion that news is dedicated to the service of society and informed by absolute objectivity and social responsibility. But society has a stake in news adhering to its original objective of supplying the wherewithal to its members to help them in decision-making , not just at the time of an election, but always. News is to the mind what food is to the body. Those who control news control the mind too.

News as a form of power is a greater persuader than education for many reasons. Consequently, it calls for wariness in its consumption. News is different from education in many innocuous ways. Education is formal and calls for different degrees of higher literacy and greater application and attention than news. Despite its sectionalisation, news is amorphous in its focus and specificity. Unlike a textbook, reading a newspaper is optional. The scholarship and high learning in a textbook, which overawe a student into unquestioning submission, are absent in a newspaper. These advantages of casual and easy readability of news over education delude the reader into an illusion of control over the media. Both education and news create in the student and the reader a conviction that they are value-free. Knowledge per se is neutral but it loses its pristineness when it is mediated. News is mediated knowledge and therefore is no exception. It has the power of reinforcing or displacing earlier perceptions acquired from the family or at the campuses. News is a continuing and all pervasive process and a greater catalyst of conversion than education. Since the forces in a society funding and controlling education, and the production and distribution of news are the same or are united by covert ideology, the messages originating from both are similar in their content and objective. In the absence of alternative media, society becomes a captive market for information disseminated by forces bent on depluralising society. 

It is this truth that never comes up for discussion at the scores of seminars in which our editors participate. Instead, they articulate cliches about freedom of the press and seldom refer to its role in working for social change. However, as Emile G. McAnany says "just what segments of society are to benefit (from this social change) is often left rather vague.' People tend to assign the role of agents of change to newspapers and other media in the belief that they have the potential to induce or persuade the government to take decisions favourable to the common man. Targeting the government is natural because government alone has the monopoly of legislative and monetary resources to bring about social change, which in any context means an improvement in the living conditions of the poor. For this reason, every political party contesting the elections inscribes eradication of poverty at the head of its agenda. The public tend to link a party's response to people's needs to the persuasive power of the media. Food, power and fertilise subsidies and employment schemes are a way of indicating governments' commitment to, to use a populist phrase, the cause of the people. Such acts benefit the government as well as the media. They give the impression that welfare programmes of the government are a response to the demands of a democratic constituency voiced through the media. As a result, both government and media go up in the eyes of the public. 

While the massive information agencies that governments set up at the federal and state levels and the hundreds of public relations departments of both public and private sectors are an acknowledgement of the influence of the media, what influence the latter have on their audiences is under debate. There are two theories, one that asserts the power of the media to change audience attitudes and the other which regards audiences as an autonomous entity capable of taking their own decisions on whether to act upon or merely be indifferent to the content disseminated by the media. Daniel Chandler quotes Gurevitch as saying that audiences are seen as capable of manipulating the media in an infinite variety of ways according to their prior needs and dispositions; and as having access to what Halloran calls 'the plural values of the society' employing them to conform, accommodate, challenge or reject. But the most authoritative spokesman of this 'people first' thesis is Robert A. White of the London Centre for the Study of Culture and Communication. He says, ' scholarship must give more attention to 'authoritarianism' in the media, media linkage with powerful interests, the roles and rights of receivers, the unmasking of the self-serving ideologies of the media; and the power and mechanism of social control in the media.' Newspapers hide from their readers the pressures exerted by owners on editors and by governments both on editors and owners and give the reading public the impression that they are a 'free media' and that the news they print is 'free' from manipulation. 

One of the important findings of the first Press Commission was that the owner or the publisher too frequently tinkered with editorial freedom. The commission said, 'Unless the editor is solely responsible for all that is printed and is also placed in a position to act independently, it would not be possible for him to resist such pressures which generally act contrary to public interest.' A quarter century later, the second Press Commission too reiterated the same sentiment: 'We are of the view that editorial functioning should be insulated from proprietorial pressure irrespective of whether such pressure is exerted on behalf private business interests or on behalf of the governmental authorities.' The 80s saw editors becoming publisher's errand boys content with the freedom to globe-trot and appear on the small screen freely expostulating views, which would hurt anybody, but the system that confers privileges on themselves and the publishing community. Two instances relating to the exit of Vinod Mehta and H. K. Dua from Pioneer and the Times of India respectively prove the vulnerability of the editors. An extract from the Indian Express (19 September 1993): 'While for public consumption the departure of editor Vinod Mehta from the Pioneer in Delhi was amicable, in fact, Mehta's decision to quit is related to the growing editorial interference from the newspaper's owner, industrialist Lalit Thapar. For instance, the Pioneer's decision to withdraw its state correspondent from Orissa is a direct fallout of the fact that Thapar, a family friend of Biju Patnaik, did not take kindly to news reports on the erratic and high-handed behaviour of Orissa's ageing chief minister (Biju Patnaik). Within days of Mehta's departure, two weekly columns unpalatable to the management have been terminated.

The Press council of India censured the country's oldest English language daily in the strongest terms for trying to misuse the services of an editor (H. K. Dua) for the personal benefit of the proprietor of the paper, the Times of India . In a case against the late Ashok Jain, chairman of Bennet Coleman and Co. (owners of the Times) for alleged violation of foreign exchange regulations, the owners asked Dua to lobby with political leaders and to write articles in the paper supporting Ashok Jain. When Dua refused to oblige, he was asked to leave. The Press Council said, 'To require an editor to cater to the personal interests of the proprietor is not only to demean the office of the editor but also to encroach upon his status as a trustee of the society in respect of the contents of the paper. 

Ajit Bhattacharjea, Director of the Press Institute of India, said, ' Mr Dua himself partly went with the diminution of the office by accepting the title of editorial adviser, when there was no editor to advise. The Times of India is not the only paper owned by Bennet Coleman to face erosion of the office of editor. In 1998, the National Union of Journalists complained to the Press Council that the editors of Nav Bharat Times had been instructed to 'take guidance' from brand managers (advertisement executives) in assigning work. The Council 'disapproved of this practice of the executive or administrative branch encroaching upon the freedom of the editor and the journalist.

The academic community and the thinking sections of the press have expressed concern at the erosion of editorial status and its significance for media content which is spreading to other third world countries and, slowly, also to the United States. There are eminent media personalities in India who have voiced support for this concern but most of them were content with stressing the need to protect the interests of the citizens like the right to privacy, the right to reply etc. Hutchins Commission appointed by the publisher of Time magazine was the first evidence of such disquiet in the United States. Recently, a group of 28 American reporters, editors and journalism educators issued a 'statement of concern' at the state of journalism because entertainment or sensationalism were often favoured over more serious news coverage. The statement said, 'Many journalists feel a sense of lost purpose. There is even doubt about the meaning of news, doubt evident when serious journalistic organisations drift towards opinion, infotainment and sensation, out of balance with news.' An Indian example: How can we explain the country's oldest media organisations publishing an article entitled 'meri eyes bhi sexy, mera pout bhi sexy' and including in the article a reference to Sonia Gandhi and her daughter as among the 100 sexiest women of the century? A variety of subsidies newspaper organisations receive from the government and the freebies journalists accept never appear in news lest they should expose the myth of a free and fearless press.

Theories notwithstanding, there is little doubt, especially in developing countries, that news is the dominant constituent of media content, which is deployed by both government and private media to convert audiences to viewpoints, which strengthen their positions. To increase their own credibility, media in the west have thoroughly succeeded in convincing their counterparts in other countries of the need to underrate all information emanating from government sources. Even while discrediting all government information, it does not embarrass the Indian media to publish government press releases with little or no change, attend secretariat briefings and to accredit reporters permanently with ministries and government departments. Most news springs from government information fountains. We are not discussing the merits or demerits of government-distributed information or news for the very reason that the private media have already branded it as unreliable or motivated. But what kind of credibility to attach to the contents distributed by non-governmental "free" media will be clear to us if we know why media barons are in the news business. Marx and Engels explain:

The class, which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. In so far, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they among other things regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.'

The country's leading liquor magnate Vijay Mallya does not mince words in revealing why he is buying up newspapers. He is the owner of Bangalore and Calcutta franchises of the Asian Age and has recently acquired the country's most well known tabloid Blitz. He told Business India (extract reproduced from Indian Express (Delhi) dated 13 December 1998) that the reason he was buying into the media was that" in India, it is an essential part of management of our business -- it's my insurance policy. " Though the main purpose of Mallya in buying newspapers is acquiring a bargaining lever against the government, it does not mean that his newspapers will have no audience policy. What would be the stand of his newspapers on countrywide women's struggles demanding prohibition? Would his newspapers publish statistics of people dying every year from ailments directly related to the consumption of alcohol? What position would his newspapers take if a ban were to be imposed on liquor advertisements? India Inc., a pompous term our media are fond of using to refer to our industry, owns a majority of the country's newspapers and their circulation. 

Beginning with the houses of the Birlas and Jains, the corporate sector had always a finger in the media pie. But the large-scale invasion of the media domain by corporate and para corporate entities soon after independence has little to do with anything resembling the altruistic. The corporate sector, which owns all media of any importance, acts to ensure that the news process is employed to legitimise its supremacy. Media ownership gives them a bargaining ploy with the government; earns revenue like any other product and more importantly helps them win approval for an ideology that seeks to entrench the primacy of the private sector and achieve the goal of minimum government. The turnaround in the country's economic policy at the beginning of the 1990s, paving the way for liberalisation, a euphemism for withdrawal of the state from social commitments, was a direct result of the pressure exerted on the establishment by the elite metropolitan press owned by the corporate sector. The public has really no quarrel with some industrialist making money, which he can make even without owning a media unit. What exercises the public mind is the power media give to their owners to transfer and win acceptance for an ideology that in the long run hurts public interest.

Role of Education

It is interesting to examine the role of education in instilling in the young graduates a value system that distances them from the poor and illiterate masses. Universities, which Louis Althusser regards as one of the 'ideological state apparatuses,' are where the students involuntarily become receptacles of power-endorsed ideologies. Peter Altbach thinks that probably no single 'export' is more crucial in the export of structures, values and outlook of imperialism than education, specifically university structures which are a direct product of western traditions and have little to do with the intellectual or educational traditions of the Third World. The institutional models, the curriculum, the pedagogical techniques and basic ideas covering the role of education in society were all western.

Jayantanuja Bandopadhyaya says, 'western education has been a potent weapon of historical imperialism and contemporary neoimperialism. Through this education imposed on the politically and economically captive native populations of the colonies, imperialism has succeeded in creating a structure of intellectual dominance and dependence, which is unparalleled in the history of the world. Western education undoubtedly brought the colonial peoples in touch with modern knowledge, but this education was heavily loaded and designed to perpetuate the intellectual dependence of the colonial people on the west. Higher education in all the LDCs (least developed countries) is heavily dependent, and in some of them entirely dependent, on the books and journals produced in the west which flood the LDCs more or less in the same manner in which western manufactures flood their markets. Almost all these books, except those on science and technology, are heavily loaded with western values and rationalisations.'

The importance of education as a form of ideological communication derives its power from its ability to determine relations within a society and between societies. Communication is crucial because power resides in it. As some one has said, 'all forms of power are previously developed and accumulated communication.' This generates knowledge and hence power. Bandopadhyaya says, 'In the national as well as international systems, communication is the primary factor and independent variable, whereas power is secondary factor and dependent variable. The primary concern of international relations should therefore be communication rather than power.' The British conquered India with military power but culturally emasculated its population by colonising their minds. British-designed education played a significant role in creating irreversible non-Indian cultural perceptions and lifestyles and in undermining the country's ancient civilisation. Nearly every aspect of the Indian heritage 'music, medicine, astronomy, mathematics, literature, theatre, architecture, and metaphysics ' is millennia-old. It is threatened by cultural invasion, mainly through education and media.

Chin-Chuan Lee says, 'The most inclusive manifestation of cultural invasion is concerned with the changed symbolic meanings of the society. These symbolic meanings are expressed in various structures of tastes, values, preferences, and views about the society, human relations and life. 'Cultural invasion', in effect, refers to the externally forced changes in common thinking, feeling and believing. This macroscopic concept has received the least satisfactory codification. The literature seems to suggest three dimensions: rising frustrations, fostering of a conspicuous consumption culture and creation of a 'false consciousness.

What happened to the Indian people comes close to Herbert Schiller's definition of cultural imperialism, which is the 'sum of the processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system and how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced and sometimes even bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to or even promote the values and structures of the dominating centre of the system.' Annabelle-Sreberny Mohammadi criticises the use of the term 'media imperialism' and says that it is a more narrowly focussed construct than cultural imperialism He asserts that imperialism did not maintain its rule merely through suppression but through the export and institutionalisation of European ways of life, organisational structures, values and interpersonal relations, language and cultural products that often remained and continued to have impact even when the imperialists themselves had gone home.

According to Michael Edwardes, a major attack on the local culture in India began in 1813 when the Charter Act opened up the land to the missionaries in the company's dominions. The Act's aim was the conversion of the upper castes through education. Edwardes says that a strong push in the direction of cultural colonisation of India was the demand for English as a medium of instruction from both reformists of Brahmo Samaj in the voice of Raja Ram Mohun Roy and the colonialists speaking through Macaulay. The infamous Macaulay note said, 'we must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class, we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich these dialects with terms of science borrowed from the western nomenclature and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the mass of population.

Susanta Gunatilaka says, 'A key element in the absorption of neocolonial culture is the middle classes and their relationship to the production base. The bulk of the middle classes, according to B.B.Mishra, consist of intelligentsia, public servants, other salaried employees and members of the learned professions (including journalism). Entry into service positions was largely controlled by access to new western education. The small intellectual stratum and the broad intelligentsia of the middle classes acquired a high degree of learning and knowledge, largely western-oriented. The result is westernisation with its inevitable respect not only for the person who studied abroad but also for the person who was familiar with the contents of Times , London, or Economist or works of Russel, Satre, Graham Greene etc. or with the conflicts within the Labour Party.' Nothing has changed today except that American colonisation of the mind has replaced the British curriculum. One factor often cited for the interest of American MNCs in India is the facility of a large section of the Indian population with the English language.

Herbert Altschull saysIn handing down ideas about the role of the press in public affairs ' ideology, that is ' the importance of schools of journalism cannot be ignored. The wordideologyhas a somewhat sinister connotation in the United States, although it is more acceptable elsewhere. In any case, the education of journalists is obviously an important factor in the building of a framework of ideas about what role the dissemination of news plays in society. In the United States, ideology is transmitted by other names; ' The American school of journalism has by the final years of the twentieth century become a model for schools in all parts of the world.

Al Hester agrees with him. He says, 'Perhaps the majority of 'key gatekeepers' who control much of the flow of news in the world have received their training in western-influenced schools or programmes of journalism training. Thus it is important to determine what concepts of newsworthiness are emphasised in such academic programmes.'

The Indian experience validates Altschull's observation. Before the advent of journalism schools in the early fifties, newspapers recruited their reporters and copy editors on criteria, which would not be acceptable to today's employers. A familiarity with shorthand and typewriting and a bit of dash were all that were needed to get a reporter's job. For copy editors, a flair for English was enough. In Indian language newspapers, they had to have the ability to translate English text into Indian languages.Because most of the copy that came to the desk was from private news agencies and government information departments and was invariably in English. Most of the editors of Indian-owned newspapers were drawn from public life and known for their fierce opposition to British rule. The word mass media, which entered the Oxford English Dictionary only in 1922, was not known to this generation. They were all fired by one ideology ' independence. Every printed word was dedicated to that proposition.

The freedom fighters knew that media were catalysts of change and that their contents had the power and ability to set the agenda for the society, that is, complete independence. That explains why nearly every member of the independence pantheon was either the editor or owner of a newspaper. Mahatma Gandhi edited the Harijan and Young India; Bal Gangadhar Tilakownedand edited Kesari ; Annie Besant edited Swarajya ; Tanguturi Prakasam, Chittaranjan Das, Lala Lajpat Rai were all editors of newspapers while Jawaharlal Nehru owned the National Herald . In the pre-independence days, media were naturally preoccupied with the struggle for freedom. Even before independence gripped the imagination of the Indian National Congress, social reformers like Raja Ram Mohun Roy used print media to fight social evils like Sati and child marriage. Indian media had a history of service to the society and were a major factor in galvanising the masses in the struggle for freedom.

Times are different today. More than 100 universities run courses in journalism and mass communication at all levels, from the diploma to the doctoral. Many students go abroad, mostly to American campuses, to be trained as journalists or to do research. Many of them return with an American media orientation. Today, mostly graduates from our own journalism and mass communication departments man newspaper and news agency desks and bureaus. Still, they bring with them a mindset natural to exposure to western theories and research outputs. University teachers too, having acquired a western media orientation, pass it on to successive generations of students.

The very first department of journalism in independent India was opened at Hislop College in Nagpur. Two years later, Dr. DeForrest O'Dell of the University of Indiana opened the most prestigious department of journalism at that time in Osmania University in 1954. The World Literacy Inc. gifted a few thousand books, all written and published in America, to the department. The scene is not different nearly half a century later. Journalism and mass communication teachers have either studied in American universities or have been sent abroad for further studies if they held degrees from Indian universities. Students are lured by liberal American study and travel grants. The net result is the vindication of Altschull's observation that the American school of journalism has by the final years of the twentieth century become a model for schools in all parts of the world. It is evident that the education system itself is a major player in generating outlooks and beliefs, which support the dominant economic logic and western ideas about nearly everything. The neutrality of schooling is an illusion but nobody has ever doubted its functions. Everybody is so anxious to become a part of the system that he does not question its ideological credentials. School and post-school education perpetuates the class divide in all former colonies of the empire by merely pricing out instruction for the poor and lower middle class people. Inequality of educational opportunities means inequality of incomes. There is a deep divide of the Indian society segregating children into privileged and underprivileged sections of the society. To quote Schiller again: ' the total educational edifice acts as a powerful sorter and grader of each generation. The rich go to institutions marked for them; the rest go to anonymous schools and colleges.'

Place of Ideology

As a result, journalism and mass communication students who join Indian media desks and bureaus bring with them a uniquely pro-west ideological perspective, which invariably conditions the news process. Also, with their background, they do not find it difficult to drop into the ideological slots earmarked for them by the businessman-turned publisher. As Jaap van Ginniken says, 'news produces ideological discourse,' though some journalists regard themselves as neutral and hence not ideological. But Ginniken says, 'It is a widespread misunderstanding that some views are ideological and others are not. Strictly speaking, all views are ideological in the sense that they have a place within a larger system of ideas.' Every person has opinions and ideas and they become an ideology when they acquire collective articulation and practice. Even if journalists insist that they are not ideological, their dress, lifestyles, their reading choices, the friends they keep, their cultural preferences all conspire to betray their ideological leanings. For example, one of the primary ways in which ideology functions is by prioritizing certain kinds of information over others. One can find a constant salience to individualism in the Indian media, which according to Herbert Schiller is one of the most powerful constructs of capitalism. Schiller says that the education and training of foreign students in American schools and universities, expanded greatly after World War II, are now producing their harvest of graduates who assume high office at home. They have imbibed of free market and other doctrines ladled out in American premier schools.

To start with, the publisher has an ideology and a set of objectives, which becomes the policy of the newspaper. It is an unwritten convention that the journalist must vibrate to it to retain his job. As Jack Newfield wrote in 1970 'the men and women who control the technological giants of the mass media are not neutral and unbiased computers. They have a mindset. They have definite lifestyles and political values, which are concealed under the rhetoric of objectivity. Among these unspoken, but organic, values are belief in welfare capitalism, God, the West, Puritanism, the Law, the Family, the two-party system and most crucially, in the notion that violence is only defensible when employed by the state.'This automatically becomes the agenda for journalists too. Pamela Shoemaker too says the same thing.'What is the basis for ideology in the United States,' she asks and answers it herself saying 'fundamental is a belief in the value of capitalist economic system, private ownership, pursuit of profit by self-interested entrepreneurs and free markets.' She asserts that ideology is not an individual belief system but represents a societal phenomenon.

Herbert Gans says, 'In America, conscious ideological thought is mainly left to intellectuals and political activists. Journalists are neither; nor do they have any contact with ideologists and their publications. In the news, ideology is defined as a deliberately thought out, consistent, integrated and inflexible set of explicit political values, which is a determinant of political decisions. As a result, ideology is deemed significant mainly in Communist nations and among parties and adherents of the Left and Right, both overseas and here. Given that definition, most Americans groups are not thought to be ideological; and the news does not accept the possibility that sets of less deliberate or integrated political values are also ideologies. Although the news distinguishes between conservative, liberal and moderate politicians and party wings, these are perceived as shades of opinion; and being flexible they are not ideologies.' We may say that being flexible itself could be an ideology for the benefits of ambivalence it can bring. In fact, many people are not aware that an ideology powers their thinking and behaviour. This is the result of regarding politics and economy alone as vehicles of ideology.

Schiller has a theory on how this ideology is injected into the system. He says that the knowledge and culture industries 'influence our thinking and actions through a review and selection process. How individuals are selected and screened by these organizations and how they in turn determine what is good or bad for the public to know, see or listen. The organizations reserve the right to select or reject persons according to norms not known to candidates and thus crush transparency. This screening process covers the entire human developmental process ' birth, education, income ideological traits etc. These criteria are in application throughout the career of the candidate. There are unwritten dress codes, etiquette, culture etc. Any information offending to these norms would go against the candidate. What applies to individuals applies to institutions also,' says Schiller. Prime ministers or other dignitaries confer a celebrity status on institutions like the St. Stephens and Lady Shriram College in Delhi or La Martiniere School by simply being present at their anniversary gatherings. Their alumni acquire a certification that cannot be easily ignored by their prospective employers. Older schools and colleges in the country are not so fortunate and their alumni join the hoi polloi. The education system, according to Schiller, ensures what persons occupy authority and ensures continuance of perpetration of the system. Bill Clinton had to do a lot to live down his history of condemning the Vietnam War before he became acceptable as a candidate for public office.

Gans cites the opinion of many observers that America's economic and political structures have thus far not created conditions to encourage the plethora of ideological thought and politics found in Europe. He says, 'More important, ideologists are not wanted by the news media, for most journalists believe ideology to be an obstacle to story selection and production. Of course, source and suitability considerations notably importance judgments and the enduring values within them, have already established ideological boundaries, and the perception of ideology as a form of extremism reinforces these. Nevertheless, ideology is primarily associated with extremism.' This line of thinking may be necessary to impart strength to the view that journalists are non-partisan and neutral. Naom Chomsky has different views. He says, 'In the media, as in other major institutions, those who do not display the requisite values and perspectives will be regarded as 'irresponsible,' 'ideological,' or otherwise aberrant, and will tend to fall by the wayside'. There are also real advantages in conformity beyond the rewards and privileges that it yields. If one chooses to denounce Qaddafi, or the Sandinistas, or the PLO or the Soviet Union, no credible evidence is required.'

An ideology exists when knowledge is created to bolster the power of an organization or class, according to Berger and Luckmann. To transmit ideology to audiences, two prerequisites media need are a policy and an editorial team. Policy documents elaborate the intent of the publisher. There is no newspaper without a policy. It sets the agenda for the editorial team that translates it into printed word through mainly reporting and processing news. In nearly every Indian newspaper, as in the American print media, policy never directly or overtly flows from the publisher or the editor to the desk or bureau. Reporters and copy editors realize it through osmosis. Realization of policy is through trial and error, made easy by keen observation of what appears and more particularly of what does not appear but should have appeared. Editorials and editorial comments also help in an understanding of the paper's policy.

According to Charles R.Wright, 'Among the ways by which policy became apparent to staffers were: reading their own paper and thereby discovering its characteristics in news coverage; being the recipient of editorial actions and sanctions, such as criticism and bluepenciling of stories (usually without direct statement about the policy violated); hearing gossip; attending staff conferences; reading house organs; and observing the publisher or other executives and hearing their opinions expressed. Staffers conform to a newspaper's policy for a variety of reasons, among them: responsiveness to the institutional authority of the publisher; potential sanctions for violation of policy; feelings of obligation and esteem for superiors on the paper; aspirations for upward job mobility; lack of conflicting group allegiances; the pleasant nature of the work; and the displacement of goals, whereby such goals as enlightening and informing readers are displaced by the common goal of getting or producing the 'news' every day.'

Presenting the findings of a case study of French newspapers' coverage of a shooting incident, George Gerbner says, 'The analyses tend to support the proposition that there is no fundamentally non-ideological, apolitical, nonpartisan news gathering and reporting system.' This is true of news processing also. At the beginning of the study, Gerbner says, 'the basic editorial function is not performed through 'editorials' but through the selection and treatment of all that is published. An earlier study on 'Press Perspectives in World Communication' indicated how this total process of selection and relative emphasis expresses and cultivates those aspects of national perspectives in world political communication, which serve the industrial and social role of media in their own societies. The subject of the present inquiry is the related proposition that all news are views.'

Gerbner also says 'all editorial patterns in what and what not to make public (and in what proportion and with what emphasis etc.) have an ideological basis and a political dimension rooted in the structural characteristics of the medium; such ideological perspectives and political tendencies will be expressed and cultivated through presumably non-political news as much as, or perhaps even more than through overtly political reporting, and in the commercial press as well as in the party press.' Since news is not value-free, it is important to determine what values should govern news. News values are too important to be left to the care of a set of ideologues. Because, as Martin Ryder says, 'we are what we eat. More precisely, what we eat and appropriate becomes us. We are (also) what we read and what we read and appropriate becomes us.' There is not much doubt that we get a certain kind of information and not other kinds. This selective diet of news gives us a view of only a part of the world. We cannot evaluate this picture unless we have a picture of the rest. News thus sets the focus and direction of public discourse.

The absence of alternative media of any standing in the country guarantees the continuing ideological impact of content not only on the audiences but also on journalists who are entrusted with the job of gathering and processing news. The country mainly depends on just two news agencies, AP and Reuters, for foreign news. A few English dailies have correspondents generally in western capitals like Washington and London. They bypass entire continents like Latin America, Africa, Australia and a major part of Asia is reported unless there is a coup or an assassination or a hijacking or a natural calamity. Indian newspapers do not have correspondents even in countries, where the people of Indian origin constitute nearly 50 per cent of their population, like Fiji, Mauritius, Seychelles, Guyana, Jamaica and Surinam. The reliance on foreign news agencies has redefined news values for post-independence generations, which ignore the information needs of a majority of the population.

The country has more than 2000 daily newspapers, which gives an impression of availability of choices or diversity. With a little difference in the daily fare, newspapers in the country owned by a free market economy claiming also a lion's share of the newspaper circulation, unite to present a common politico-economic viewpoint. Besides, the theory that availability of choices ensures pluralism is valid only when a person is able to buy more than one newspapers. India is not as bad as America, where a single newspaper serves an overwhelming majority of the towns. But the economic status of the average Indian is such that he cannot buy a second newspaper. Several of them do not even know that a second paper exists. People are so poor that many among the literate borrow newspaper from a person who buys it. Newspaper circulations are well below the Unesco ideal of 10:100 ratio of the population. Newspapers seeking to supply alternative views of the society and the world at large cannot even enter the media arena because of the economics of newspaper production. Shunned by advertisers, those few alternative media that survive exist on the verge of mortality. That leaves only the very rich to control media and their content. There is no place for dissident viewpoints that are sometimes permitted as evidence of pluralism and tolerance of alternative viewpoints.

Governments in India have hugged a new hallucination in the form of information technology in the mistaken belief that communications is the same as communication. The west has sold this myth to poor countries in return for an endorsement of the free flow of information doctrine. Technology is the answer for all information needs, the LDCs were told. In the end, they became fertile markets for the information technology giants of the west. Many African countries rushed to set up TV stations without realizing that they had no experience of filmmaking. As a result, they indiscriminately imported Hollywood films pre-empting any serious effort to make films on their own. Information technology has no meaning without information. Literacy is the cradle of content.

Redefinition of News

There is now a clamour both in our country and abroad for a redefinition of news so that it responds to the concerns of the majority of the people and not the elite minority alone that happens to control both economy and the media. Sponsored textbooks have perpetrated wantonly nebulous, fuzzy and even trivial definitions of news. 'Man bites dog' and 'bad news is good news' belong to that category. A more frivolous definition came from Arthur MacEwen, first editor of San Fransisco Examiner : News is anything that makes a reader say, 'Gee whiz.' How can any rational definition of news exclude Prime Minister P.V.Narasimha Rao' address to US Congress? This aberration is not the monopoly of the US press but also an affliction that visits our press. Addressing the diamond jubilee celebrations of the Indian Newspaper Society, President K.R.Narayanan, criticized the tendency of the Indian press to trivialise news and cited the example of a newspaper, which gave greater prominence to a fashion show of cats in New York over the Khajuraho festival. Most leading Indian newspapers devoted one to two pages to the International Film Festival every day in the second week of January 1999 while grudgingly took compulsive but meagre notice of the proceedings of the Indian Science Congress held a week ago.

Enough reason for James Brann of Boston University to say 'we may need a new definition of what constitutes news, for the media have blown or ignored many of the major stories of the past quarter century. Most of the American media ignored or condensed or buried Woodward and Bernstein's investigation (Watergate) until early 1973, months after the 1972 presidential elections. The failure of the editors to recognise major stories is a subject that is not discussed outside of reporters' taverns. The problem lies not only with the yardstick that we use to define news; it is also a conceptual difficulty. If we continue with our present systems of defining news, we risk an increasingly ill-informed electorate.' Thomas Winship of the Boston Globe has the same complaint; he says 'the press half covers some of the biggest stories of all time chiefly because it operates under an outdated definition of what is news. Newspapers can no longer stay hung up on traditional definition of news.'

According to the Times of India, ' part of the problem is the elitist antecedents, class biases and urban orientation of news gatherers and processors. But much of the problem has to do with the definition of news. A slow brewing social phenomenon rarely excites the newsman or the editor or even the reader. For, example, most newspapers highlight as they must any outbreak of communal violence but rarely any attempt is made to keep a tab on building tensions between two communities or which efforts are being made to increase or decrease ill feelings.

There is a demand that society should be the central focus of news and not the individual. The pro-changers are aware that there is no escape from mediation or the imperative of processing or even the impossibility of objectivity criteria. Their barbs are aimed at the arrogance of a clique appropriating the right to define news. There seems to be an open collaboration between a few communication pedagogues and media barons to homogenise the definition of news to manufacture consent for an inequitable world order.

Al Hester says that several recent studies in the United States have shown that there is some agreement in news definitions and reproduces a chart which is a synthesis of work done by him and Dr Wallace B. Eberhard:
 

Most Commonly Mentioned Elements of Newsworthiness In 25 Western Journalism Texts

 

News Attribute	Percentage Mentioning
Timeliness	84
Proximity	68
Prominence (Important Individuals)	60
The Bizarre, Odd, Unusual	44
Human Interest, the Human Condition	44
Consequence, Impact	40
Conflict	36

According to Al Hester, most scholars believed either explicitly or implicitly that news is factual information. Most of them believed that news presentation must make a profit, which means that news must please the customer. Among the attributes of newsworthiness he mentions are 'what is event-oriented' and 'what is a true image of reality.' He found quite a bit of agreement on news being an accounting of an event. News is covered because it happens. He quotes Maxwell McCombs as being critical of event reporting, pointing out frequently that the implications of the event are what have value for the media consumer. McCombs says that generally the event is covered but not it's meaning for the audience. This event-oriented concept of news has come under fire in developing countries because it excludes the imperative of putting the spotlight on issues, which do not have a recognisable beginning or end, two attributes which make event reporting easy. In India. However, speeches of dignitaries dominate news columns more than even events. The advent of news magazines fortunately filled the void by discussing the significance and consequences and the public reaction to an event.Hester rightly says that few scholars of the press seem to have given much consideration to the role of news or the media to help cohesion of the social structure. They seem to be more concerned with the direct individual-media relationship. Most people believe that news presentation must make profit. Inherent in these texts is the idea that news must please the consumer. According to Freedom Forum, a private American Foundation, business concerns and not public interest are the driving force behind the Indian media. Even Stuart Hall thinks that 'news is a product, a human construction; a staple of that system of 'cultural production' we call the mass media. Journalists and editors select, from the mass potential news items, which constitute 'news' for any day. In part, this is done by implicit reference to some unstated and unstatable criteria of the significant. News selection thus rests on inferred knowledge about the audience, inferred assumptions about society, and a professional code or ideology.' Here, the terms news and significant are used as though the former is self-explanatory and the latter means the same thing to every reader. Hall thinks that 'news is not only a cultural product; it is the product of a set of institutional definitions and meanings, which in the professional shorthand, is commonly referred to as news values.'

There is clearly a difference in the news perspectives of western journalists, their ilk in developing countries and journalists in developing countries. The disagreement arises basically from the former defining news in the same manner as they define a natural phenomenon and the latter defining news as an instrument to benefit a majority of the people by providing voice to their grievances and aspirations and basic needs. Western definitions drive the desks and bureaus in our country for historical reasons and also, as one eastern scholar surmises, 'the ability to write the rules of the game' in news concepts is intimately tied up with the ability to write the 'rules of the game' in economic and political spheres as well.' Whether we like it or not, western definition, consciously or unconsciously held, serves as the basis for dissemination of much of world's information. All the battles at the Unesco during the 70s and the early 80s were around the definition of news. There is a demand that society should be the central focus of news and not the individual. The pro-changers are aware that there is no escape from mediation or the imperative of processing or even the impossibility of objectivity criteria. Their barbs are aimed at the arrogance of a clique appropriating the right to define news. There seems to be an open collaboration between a few communication pedagogues and media barons to homogenise the definition of news to manufacture consent for an inequitable social order.

This is not to make a sweeping critique of the Indian press and its news values but it cannot be gainsaid that the general and long-term news focus of Indian newspapers does not favour a change in the balance of social power. An overwhelming majority of our newspapers, whether they are family-owned or company-owned, are in the business of legitimising a politico-economic system that guarantees the prosperity of a miniscule sector of the society at the expense of the rest. A majority of the leading newspapers in the country are owned by the corporate sector, also controlling a major chunk of newspaper circulations. The less financially resourceful groups representing alternative viewpoint have really no chance to project it. In the end, as at the beginning, it is the voice of the most influential and the most powerful that prevails. They decide what voices should be heard. News criteria spring from the need to marshal support and deny opposition to the dominant ideology.

In our country as elsewhere in the developing world, there is crisis of confidence closely related to news values. There is a growing awareness among the readers that even as more newspapers are coming out with more editions from multiple centres, in terms of content and ideological bias, they are all the same with minor differences. A majority of the journalists in the country balk from encouraging a debate on the definition of news values. According to them, it is not negotiable. Rajiv Gandhi expressed his pain at the news values practised by Indian reporters and copy editors in the following terms: 'I am at times troubled by the preoccupation of the press with politics and politicking. There is a whole world beyond the intrigues in the corridors of power. There lies ahead a whole world of people. Their lives and activity are ill served by our commentators. Our newsmen shy away from these topics in the belief perhaps that they are not hard news and that readers will find them boring.'

Since the readers are closely involved in the mass communication process as the audience component, print media cannot argue that they are the exclusive judges of what constitutes news. A study recently commissioned by the Editors' Guild of India found that print media have not deserved the faith readers have in their sense of news values. The study reported, 'The doings of the ruling class are a major concern of news gathering and dissemination. This has resulted in the development of the media by the elite and for the elite.' The study also called for a national debate by journalists and professional organizations to discuss news values. Is it possible to liberate news values and concepts in the print media from their personal and institutional moorings? Unless news values reflect a social consensus, they are bound to keep large sections of the society outside the media spotlight.

Newspapers and newspapermen are chary of acknowledging plurality of news values. It is debatable whether freedom of the press includes the freedom to employ news values detrimental to the society and such freedom can be claimed only on the basis of sanctity of private property. But whoever is in the public arena disseminating ideas and messages is accountable to the recipient society. In our country, freedom of the press has too often been invoked for the benefit of the owner and for reasons strictly business-friendly and extra journalistic. The greatest stumbling block in a redefinition of news is the insistence of the press that such an exercise would infringe on the freedom of the press. As Denis McQuail says, ' In many contexts, press freedom has become identified with private property and has been taken to mean the right to own and use means of publication without restraint or interference from government. The chief justification for this view, apart from the assumption that freedom in general means freedom from the government, has been through the transfer of the analogy of the free market of ideas to the real free market in which communication is a good to be manufactured and sold.'

Eaman launches an elaborate debate on how news has generally been examined on the basis of a 'knowledge paradigm', which treats news as a form of knowledge. 'The knowledge paradigm underlies the classical democratic view of the role of the press. According to this view, the press provides the information by means of which an enlightened public opinion is formed. News helps to create knowledgeable citizenry capable of participating effectively in the democratic process. On the other hand, the knowledge paradigm also serves those who would criticize this view as having little or no foundation in fact. The main argument here is that the press currently provides an extremely biased and distorted picture of reality and is thus a very imperfect form of knowledge. It becomes easier to defend the press if the traditional knowledge paradigm is replaced by a communication paradigm. News can then be seen as something that fosters a 'meeting of the minds' within society and helps create a set of shared meanings,' says Eaman. He hastens to warn, 'Considering news from the perspective of communication does not rule out the possibility that it still functions primarily to help the powerful to manipulate the weak.'

It is doubtful if these two perspectives are a part of the consciousness of an average journalist. These are academic niceties, which hardly figure in their news criteria. A re-examination of news values and concepts practised in the country's print media is essential to ensure that, like every other public activity, journalism too has a public service function on the basis of which alone newspapers can claim and exercise freedom of the press. In the application of news values press alone cannot be the judge of its performance. There must greater transparency about the objectives of the press so that it becomes easier for the society to assess its performance on the basis of its own professions. At various fora, publishers and editors tirelessly proclaim their dedication to the public cause but do not permit any outside agency to put such a claim to test. In our country, newspapers have spread a cordon sanitaire around themselves and any attempt to reach it is regarded as an attack on the press.

Roberto Savio, a former Director-General of the Inter Press Service finds that the conventional (western) definitions of news have been so deeply ingrained in the psyches of journalists all over the world that it is difficult to dissuade them to move away from the old hackneyed concept of spot news. He thinks that a change in the contents of newspapers can come only when the gatekeepers change their definition of news. According to him, 'the conventional criteria have very little to do with the basic questions which concern mankind today, such as hunger, population, resources, environment, social structure or culture.' It is because of the crucial role news media play in agenda-setting that makes news too sensitive to leave its definition in the hands of any individual or group. Most readers unquestioningly believe that newspapers know better, an assumption based on the myth that the media expose what the government seeks to conceal. Media are the beneficiaries of the mock adversary duel they play with the government. The latter is the villain and the former the saviour. In the absence of alternative media, this legend survives.

Roscho thinks that a society's definition of news is dependent upon its social structure. The social structure produces norms, including attitudes that define aspects of social life, which are of either interest or importance to citizens. News supposedly concerns those recognizable items. News presents to the society a mirror of its concerns and interests. For a definition of news to change, it follows logically that the structure of society and its institutions must change first. In his view, definitions of news remain dependent upon social structures and not on the activities of news workers and news organizations. It is difficult to remember if news ever answered to such a description. Exotic news values have so deeply embedded themselves in the psyches of our journalists that there is little space for a socially relevant definition of news.