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Fudging RealityA Study of Indian Media-- By Dasu KrishnamoortyOne of the several assumptions audiences make relating to media content is that it has a close relation to the reality it seeks to represent. There is no doubt a difficulty in mass-communicating objective reality because news is the outcome of the work of several players who intervene between reality and content. It must be admitted that even direct experience of reality cannot be objective because everyone of us realises reality through a welter of screens set up by our earlier experiences. Media performance in the area of reality can be appreciated by assessing how close media reality is to reality society experiences. Since objective reality can neither be relayed nor received in its original form and content, it is only logical to assume that what anyone experiences of reality is only his own version of it, which nevertheless has its orgins, more often than not, in the reality media transmit. Given these constraints, it is unrealistic to expect a media-constructed reality to be fully objective. But this does not entitle media to offer these handicaps as excuses to deliberately tinker with reality and attribute the outcome to the impossibility of recreating objective reality. Audiences legtimately doubt that media persons are merely conveyor belts digorging facts. Millions of common people in this country experience a composite reality different from what media contents project. For them, the world they inhabit is very much different from the one generated by media salience. When audiences make content judgements on the basis of their aspirations and gratifications, they are disappointed to know that very little of media content has any relevance to their lives. Well-known columnist Prem Shankar Jha says: “If one were to go by the front pages of the most widely circulated English dailies, one would believe that the Indians are living in the best of all worlds. Their women are the world’s most beautiful; their men the world’s budding IT geniuses; and their authors are teaching the English how to write English. India has no poor and no unemployed - no one’s bothered to visit the so-called new colonies where Jagmohan (federal minister) is sending Delhi’s poor to find out how they are surviving. Ha, if only wishes were horses, I would retire.” This divorce between media content and reality happens elsewhere too. Herbert Gans says “poor people experience America differently from the middle income people or the rich; as a result their attitude to government also varies. Different perspectives lead to different questions and different answers, thereby requiring different facts and different news.” The scene is not very different in India. Writing in the Deccan Chronicle, Prafulla Bidwai, a noted columnist says“Over the past few years, there has been a conscious ‘dumbing down’ of the media, a deliberate attempt to play down what is relevant and serious, and play up what is trivial but tackily fashionable. Thus, Miss World stories replete with mindless quotes from dumb models are given a higher priority than reports on victims of cyclones. A cruel 40 per cent increase in ration shop food prices merits marginal attention in relation to ‘feel good’ reports on rich millionaires’ exploits abroad. Wars are glamorised and turned into spectacles (witness Kargil) while the struggle of millions for survival is pushed into obscure spaces. Through most of our magazines, you wouldn’t know that more than 60 per cent Indians survive on less than one dollar a day, that our health services are near collapse, or that poverty levels have significantly risen in the past decade despite six per cent growth. Nor would you be able to divine that Information Technology ‘super power’ India commands only 0.7 per cent of the global market in computer software, or that HIV-AIDS is spreading here twice as fast as in the rest of the world. “Even a cursory glance at India’s national newspapers and magazines should convince one that they are in the grip of a new kind of frivolous, garbage-promoting journalism. This paradigm is shockingly insensitive to what is of real concern to flesh-and-blood people, specially the vast majority of our poor and perversely partial to the glitterati and chattering classes. Big newspapers vie with one another not to break stories, investigate and expose what’s wrong with our society and politics, or carry penetrating analyses of our reality, but to glamorise, titillate and trivialise. For some of them, the top priority is not news or analysis, but their tawdry colour supplements which voyeuristically peep into the lives of the super-hedonistic metropolitan elite that constitutes less than one thousandth of our population.”
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| Objectivity | |||
| Factualness | Impartiality | ||
| Truth | Relevance | Balance | Neutrality |
In this scheme, factualness refers to a form of reporting which deals in events and statements which can be checked against sources and are presented free from comment. Impartiality refers, first of all, to the adoption of a neutral attitude by the reporter, in the sense of suspending any personal or subjective preference or judgement for the purpose at hand. Factualness involves several other ‘truth’ criteria: for instance, completeness of report, accuracy as checked against independent accounts, all of which contribute to the quality of information. ‘Relevance’ is more difficult to define or to achieve in an objective way, but ultimately it is as important as truth. It relates to the process of selection rather than to form or presentation and requires that selection take place according to clear and coherent principles of significance for the potential receiver and/or the society (Nordensterng), 1974). In general that which is more likely to affect people in the short or long term and be more useful for them to know should be considered more relevant.
According to the scheme, impartiality has to be achieved through a combination of balance (equal or proportionate time/space/emphasis) as between opposing interpretations or points of view and of neutrality in presentation. This mainly refers to avoidance of emotive language or other devices for indicating a preferred response from the audience.
It may be difficult to ensure objectivity in accordance with Westerstahl’s relevance criterion because value judgements are inevitable in the process of selecting what is significant for the receiver. Also, one tends to partially agree with McQuail when he says that “objectivity remains more a goal than a fully realised ideal of the media and it is not even invariably desirable or sought after. In an externally diverse media system of the kind referred to above, there is a place for partisan presentations of information, although they have to compete with each other, and with information sources which do claim to be objective. In any case, there are few, if any, media, whatever their aims and claims, which have been able to completely escape the charge that they are not fully objective.” However, it is not easy to endorse McQuail’s view that objectivity is not invariably desirable. Impossibility does not affect the desirability of effort to ensure objectivity.
But there are doubts about whether the media are doing what is possible, that is, do they provide a true and objective account of reality when and where it is possible? Aren’t they aware of the several ways in which truth can be engineered : First, by deliberately passing off fiction as fact till the lie is detected as in the case of Janet Cooke or Pritish Nandy; second, by a fusion of fact and comment and third, by wantonly blacking out vast areas of reality. When readers make decisions based on contents, which are a poor projection of reality, the results can be damaging to the interests of the readers. Reporters also commit other minor crimes like not verifying facts or quoting questionable sources which render facts questionable.
The most charitable interpretation we can put on unverified reporting is that the print media are under great pressure from the increasing ubiquity of electronic media. This not a valid explanation. The latest report of the Registrar of Newspapers in India says that the circulation of newspapers in the country had increased by 20 per cent in 1998 over the previous year, despite fall in the number of publications registered during the year. Donald Morrison, Asia editor of Time magazine, who was recently in Delhi, said, “the print news medium is on the threshold of a golden age. When TV came, Hollywood and radio were terrified. But all three prevailed after adjustments.” For many reasons, neither TV nor net will be a threat to newspaper circulations. Each one of the media has its own constituency and each is different in the nature of impact on its constituency.
Another plausible reason, among many others, for the press not addressing the concerns of the common people, may be the market orientation imparted to newspapers by a new generation of owners, who have greater faith in MBAs than in journalists. No amount of market logic can justify irresponsible reporting, specially when it hurts helpless men and women who have neither the means to challenge such attacks in a court of law nor the social eminence to get rejoinders or denials published. One suspects that there is a demand on reporters to file a certain number of stories that sell, very much in the manner of police stations requiring cops to register a minimum number of cases every day. As a response to such compulsions, the inventive faculties of the reporter bloom and fiction substitutes for facts. Remember Janet Cooke’s Pulitzer Prize winning story on a child drug addict. It is time that media realise that facts are always stranger than fiction and sell better.
It is a sad commentary on newspapers if, instead of reporting news, they make news by being admonished by courts, the Press Council and the man in the street who has no means of defending himself against a trial by the press. In these days of investigative journalism, attacks on the privacy of people are on the rise. Pictures and names of men and women are published without their permission. It has now become a practice even to publish pictures of rape victims and juvenile delinquents. A lot of irresponsible reporting is done in the assurance that most people have neither the money nor the time to challenge it. There are laws but laws have no meaning when courts are satisfied with an apology.
The following two cases of unconcern for objectivity illustrate the damage careless and unverified reporting can do to individual reputation. In the third week of September 1996, the Supreme Court of India delivered a judgement which should have caused, but didn’t, fresh introspection in the press. Disposing of two contempt petitions against the Sunday Tribune and Punjab Kesari, the court said that if a newspaper publishes what is improper, mischievously false or illegal and abuses its liberty, it must be punished by a court of law. The contemnors published a false news item early that year alleging that two sons of the Chief Justice of India and two sons of a senior judge of the Supreme Court had been favoured with allotment of petrol pumps (gas stations) from the discretionary quota of the concerned ministry. But the apex court had baulked from punishing the two newspapers, satisfying itself with an apology and with the two newspapers acknowledging that the story was false and incorrect. This kind of judicial charity explains the kite-flying traditions of the Indian print media. The same year, the Indian Express escaped with a mere apology to the Mumbai High Court after it had published a report implying that Ms Ranjana Desai, a sitting judge of that court, was present when a matter in which her husband was a respondent was being heard before the Maharashtra State Consumer Disputes Redress Commission .
Contrast this with how American courts deal with the press. A state court jury in Chicago awarded nearly $ 2.25 million dollars in libel damages to a business executive for an erroneous statement that appeared in a 1976 article in the Wall Street Journal although the paper published a correction next day. A judge of a city court in the state of New York refused to lift the bar on three news organizations from obtaining the transcript of a preliminary hearing. He said, ‘the norm in this day and age seems to be the news media circling like vultures, each hoping to be the first to feast on the gory details of a story such as this.’ In this case an American Indian was accused of raping and murdering a white woman on Mother’s day in a community already struggling with racial tension.
The Hindu reported (11December, 1996 ) a case of inventive journalism. The report
New Delhi, Dec.10: The Press Council of India has directed the Samachar Bureau of the Financial News Weekly to publish an unconditional apology to the general manager of the Punjab National Bank for having published a series of articles that “appeared to have had the sole object of harming the reputation of the bank and its senior officers in violation of the ethics of journalism.”
The complainant’s contention was that the journal’s publisher was provoked into publishing articles of malicious propaganda when the bank refused to issue a full-page advertisement for its inaugural issue, at a cost of Rs. 1.29 lakhs, and earlier refused to sanction a term loan working capital of Rs. 2.12 crores for launching the paper.
Here are excerpts from a report, a unique specimen of unscrupulous mixture of fact and comment, not filed by a staff reporter but by a news agency
Express News ServiceNEW DELHI - Name-calling is the name of the game.Doordarshanhas called the Cricket Association of Bengal “anti-national.” The CAB in turn has called the DD “The Extortionist.”
Nationalism seems to be the last resort of the mediocre.Doordarshan’sdog in the manger attitude (“if we can’t do it, nobody else should”) has even put the World Cup in 1995-6 in some jeopardy. “ The World Cup is in danger ifDoordarshanpersists in this attitude, since we are dependent on the telecast rights (sold to Worldtel for US $10 million) to meet our expenses,” says Jagmohan Dalmiya, president, CAB, and secretary, Board of Control for Cricket in India.
The flexing of muscles by DD is part of its new policy for all sports. (The Indian Express, 7 November 1993
Here is how The Hindu of Madras carried the same story on the same day filed by a special correspondent
CALCUTTA, Nov.6
Mr Jagmohan Dalmiya, the president of the Cricket Aassociation of Bengal, strongly objected to Doordarshan’s accusation that the CAB was “anti-national.” He wondered whether it was anti-national to promote sports and ask for legitimate dues. “It seems the word nationalism has a different meaning in the Doordarshan dictionary,” Mr Dalmiya quipped.
Regarding the charges that telecast by TWI was illegal, he said that Doordarshan was purposely misleading the public. He said that permission required under law had already been acquired.
Referring to the main issue of the telecast of the matches, he said that originally, Doordarshan had offered Rs. One crore to CAB for telecast rights of the Hero Cup, but had radically changed its stand demanding Rs five lakhs per match towards production cost and telecast fees. This would amount to Rs 60 lakhs. Though CAB was against such extortion techniques, in the larger interests of the game it would agree but on condition “if the revenue earned by Doordarshan in the form of advertisements or any other form during the telecast of matches are passed on to the CAB.” -- Our Special Correspondent.
Obviously, either it was a press briefing or a statement issued by Mr Dalmiya. The Hindu attributed everything unambiguously to Mr Dalmiya while the Express News Service owned by the Express group of newspapers editorialised what patently was pure news. Read this excerpt of a news agency report appearing in the New Indian Express on 25 July 2000
Express News ServiceNew Dehi, July 24: Jaya Jaitly sends invitations for her press conference in her capacity as Samata Party chief, but conveniently slips into the role of a ‘ public figure’ to defend her daughter Aditi’s employer and friend Ajay Jadeja. And what a defence it was. In fact, it should be offence….. Even Jadeja could not have defended himself better…. Her reply to a question on the initials ‘A.J.’ in a bookie’s diary was even more amusing.
This is how a news agency reports a straight press conference instead of simply writing a story based on Ms Jaitly’s answers to questions put by the reporters. These two reports are typical of daily reporting in leading English newspapers. Through unchallenged repetition, newspapers have established a tradition of editorialising uncomplicated stories. With the exception of those owned by newspapers, news agencies have, however, stuck to ‘facts’ in their reports.
There are also instances of newspapers creating reality through manipulating pictures. More than half a century ago, the Blitz , a tabloid from Bombay (now Mumbai), pioneered the tradition of tinkering with pictures. It published a picture showing Maharashtra’s (a state in the Indian republic) chief minister Morarji Desai (who later became the country’s prime minister) holding a wine cup in his hand. Desai was the man who introduced prohibition in the state and was a fierce teatotaller. The picture was the result of cut and paste artistry. Two years ago, Pooja Bhat who emulated Demi Moore by covering her body with just paint and nothing else, sued Stardust, a leading film magazine of Bombay for publishing a “digitally remastered” nude shot of hers. It is possible that the journal was inspired by its American counterpart Wired. The caption of a picture appearing in the New York Post (15 August 1995) reads: “ O.J.Simpson - having already had his skin digitally darkened by Time magazine - has been given blond hair and blue eyes for the cover of Wired. The original photo, taken in court, was used, unretouched, on the August cover of American Heritage to illustrate a story on the jury system. Wired playfully credits its coverboy’s eyes and hair to an “anonymous donor,’ but the nose, cheek bones and mouth are unmistakably O.J.’s. “We wanted to see how a (white) O.J. would affect reader’s perception of the trial,” says creative director John Plunkett. Taking it a step further on the inside pages , the mag presents a black-haired, dark-skinned Nicole holding hands with her fair-haired ex.” Thanks to technology.
Media MythsIn the make-believe media world, however, audiences are induced to believe in myths and act upon them. Democracy, for example. Long ago Jawaharlal Nehru wrote: “The conflict between capitalism and democracy is inherent and continuous; it is often hidden by misleading propaganda and by the outward forms of democracy, such as parliaments and the sops that the owning classes throw to the other classes to keep them more or less contented.” It is assumed that a one-man, one-vote electoral system will empower people to form a government of the people, by the people and for the people and that every vote cast in favor of a manifesto is legally an expression of consent for the manifesto. Is this true? Read what Ben Bagdikian says: “The democratic assent of the governed is meaningless unless the consent is informed consent.” Forty per cent of India’s population is illiterate but they constitute 60 per cent of the people who actually exercise their franchise. It may safely be stated that the mandate they give to any party is not informed and therefore a government established on the basis of such poorly-informed consent is anything but democracy. The mandate is more often based on the communal and caste hatreds that political parties whip up at the time of campaigning and on a false euphoria built on populist promises the party leaders make, only to break. Worse still is that a government returned to power by the illiterate and the poor works for the benefit of the 10 per cent upper crust of the people, who have never visited a polling booth. This aspect of Indian democracy is never questioned by the media, which on the other hand unabashedly refer to the country as one of the world’s two largest democracies in the world, the other being the United States of America.
Similar is the myth about freedom of the press. Michael Parenti says “ the idea of a free press is more a myth than a reality, but myths can have an affect on things and can serve as a resource of power. The power of a legitimating myth rests on its ability to be believed and not exposed as a sham.” Newspapers never lose an opportunity to remind their constituents of the traditions of democracy and freedom inside their own precincts. The truth, however, is that neither editors have the freedom to assign nor reporters the freedom to cover stories which clash with the business or personal interests of the publisher. Again, as Parenti says “the anticipation that superiors might disapprove of this or that story is usually enough to discourage a reporter from writing it, or an editor from assigning it.” The editors know that it is in the interest of the public that such stories should be covered but they are helpless. Yet they never give expression publicly to their discontent and thus perpetuate the myth of freedom and internal democracy in newspapers. Indian editors regard freedom of the press as freedom from state interference and not from interference by the publisher. According to the Press Council of India, more cases coming up before the council relate to newspapers denying voice to their constituents than cases of government interfering with the freedom of the press. Yet journalists, brazenly, seek to achieve credibility for what really is a myth by a relentless circulation of this myth in the newspapers they write for, at seminars, and at every forum they have access to.
The target of all these media games is public consciousness. They are for that reason known as consciousness industry. Our consciousness is the product of our experience. Those who have the power to reconstruct reality have also the power to mould public consciousness to their advantage. Market forces acquire, own and operate media to win approval of uncommitted societies to acquisitive values and practices which form the core of market fundamentalism. Though the consumption of media content is individual, its effects embrace millions of individuals whose responses in the long term crystallize into a dormant collective consciousness waiting for a catalyst to assert and act. The most important consequence, in today’s context, of the consumption of media content is to deprive the underclass of their perceptions of class consciousness and commonality which are essential for any struggle for social change. The average reader is so disoriented by media propaganda and advertisement blitz that he considers the ability to buy all goods advertised is synonymous with success in life.
Indian media use a variety of means to build and perpetuate a powerful constituency of the middle classes to serve and defend political and economic policies which hurt in the end the interests of the middle classes and strengthen the corporate stranglehold over both the economy and, through it, the polity. All this is achieved through a misrepresentation or blackout of reality and. through networking with western media to regulate and monopolise information flows which down the road influence the thinking and behaviour of the middle classes. Nearly all Indian language and English dailies buy copy from AP, Reuter, AFP and rarely from IPS. Major English newspapers have arrangements with the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Times, London,Christian Science Monitor,the Economist, London etc. all of which create a mindset that rejects anything that is not a replica of Anglo-American thinking on free press and free market The net result is the crystallisation of a false consciousness among the readers who mistake as their interest what really is not in their interest.
Michael Parenti says“The neutral observer should take people’s identification of their interest as the only actually existing interest. This neutral position denies the incontrovertible fact that people’s awareness of issues and events is often subject to social control. In judging what is in their interest, they are influenced by many factors, including the impact of social forces greater than themselves.
“A limited level of information or a certain amount of misinformation leads people to pursue policy choices that go directly against their self-defined interests.
“What is ruled out apriori is the impossibility of a manipulated consensus, a controlled communication in which certain opinions are given generous display and others are systematically ignored, suppressed or misrepresented.”
“People accept status quo out of lack of awareness that viable alternatives exist and out of ignorance as to how their rulers are violating professed interest or out of ignorance of how they themselves are being harmed by what they think are their interests. The way people define their interests may itself work against their wellbeing. Thus, they may think that supporting the actions of US troops in Vietnam or Panama or Iraq may be furthering their interests in maintaining the United States as the world’s leading super power.”
Parenti makes a distinction between perceptions of interest and what might be called real or objective interest.
“Whatever individuals are motivated to do and believe, or not to do and not to believe, is taken as being in their interest because, by definition, their interest is their motivated condition.
“The definition they give to their interest is shaped in a large measure by the social forces determining the life chances. And their life chances may be limited by all sorts of still larger forces acting well beyond their awareness, especially when so-called impartial information being circulated is actually profoundly biased and manipulated in favour of corporate power and conservative values.
“They support defence budgets that fatten the militarists and their corporate contractors and dislike those who protest the pollution more than they dislike polluters. The effects of the problem are taken as the problem itself.”
Lawrence Grossberg says“The false consciousness position assumes that texts are collections of images that can be extracted from the text and treated as isolated, ideological representations of reality, that is, they are motivated by and function to protect the class interests already structured into the economic relations of the capital. Gitlin (in the Whole World is Watching ) examines how “the routine practices” of news organizations define the structures of , and possibilities for, the production of news messages. He assumes that the media have the power to “orchestrate everyday consciousness” in rather unproblematic ways and that structures of meaning media impose on the audience can simply be read off the surface of the texts themselves. Ideology “is distributed by the media” which “bring a manufactured public world into private life.” Gitlin assumes that the texts are universal. Gitlin also assumes the existence of frames “which are the meaning of the texts, and that they apparently determine the forms within which the audience can respond to the message, either in sympathy or in the opposition. That frames themselves may take on different functions, or an alternative reading of the encoded frames, does not into this enter argument.”
The four hundred million poor and illiterate people in the country are an easy target for the media to create false consciousness. Media content narcoticises the unthinking public into believing interests irrelevant to their existence as benevolent and even crucial to their lives. Advertisements seem to enjoy immunity from the attention audiences shower on news content. While news stoking the fires of communalism attracts legal penalties, advertisements doing the same mischief escape the searchlight. The issue here, however, is how news and advertisements create false consciousness and induce the audience to regard the adversary as the benefactor. They abjure the distinction between ‘our’ interests and ‘their’ interests and begin to accept ‘theirs’ as ‘ours.’ Through relentlessly highlighting inefficiency and corruption in public institutions, the Indian media have managed to convert gullible public to their religion whose main tenets are privatisation, deregulation, divestment and freedom from state supervision.
An example of how the Indian media tricked the people into perceiving the interests of the very rich as their own is the endorsement they won for ‘economic reform’. The reversal of the country’s people’s friendly economic policies, derided as Nehruvian socialism, was engineered by the Indian media by deftly portraying the interests of the domestic and multinational corporate sector as the interests of the nation. Both the government and the media magnified the threat of a manageable foreign exchange crisis to provide the ground to mortgage the country’s economy to the Brettonwoods twins. If the government was secretive about the negotiations with Bank-Fund bureaucracy, the media were no more transparent. P.V. Narasimha Rao, prime minister at that time, discovered a Bank report (1990) on the Indian economy and flourished it before the nation as a magic wand to overcome the crisis. Who were his advisers then? They belonged to a Bank-Fund pantheon headed by Manmohan Singh, finance minister, assisted by Montek Singh Ahluwalia, secretary to the department of economic affairs; Bimal Jalan, chief of economic advisory council to the prime minister; Rakesh Mohan, adviser to the ministry of industry; Jayanto Roy, adviser to the ministry of commerce; Arvind Virmani, economic adviser to the finance minister; S.Venkitaramanan, governor of the Reserve Bank; Parthasarathy Som, economic adviser to the department of revenue and Deepak Nayyar, who later resigned. The media held back from the Indian public alternatives to a Bank-Fund rescue and through relentless projection of privatisation as the remedy for all economic maladies and by concealing all alternative avenues from public view succeeded in making people regard the interest of the rich as their own and in generating a kind of disorientation known to sociologists as false consciousness.
Michel Chossudovsky says“Under the IMF-World Bank tutelage, the Union Finance Minister reports directly to 1818 H Street NW, Washington DC
bypassing parliament and the democratic process. The Union budget text, formally written by Indian bureaucrats in Delhi, has become a repetitious and redundant document. Its main clauses are included in the loan agreements signed with the World Bank and the IMF. The IMF bailout to the minority Congress government of Prime Minister P.V.Narasimha Rao in 1991 did not, at first glance, point towards a major economic breakdown and disintegration of civil society comparable to that which had occurred in many debt-stricken countries in Latin America and Eastern Europe undergoing IMF “shock treatment.” While India did not experience hyperinflation nor the collapse of its foreign exchange market, the social impact in a country of 900 million (now a billion) people was devastating; in India, the IMF programme initiated in July 1991 directly affected the livelihood of several hundred million people.” It changed the direction and objectives of the Indian economy irreversibly.
More often than not, the media played and continue to play the accomplice with the country’s economic establishment which is in the hands of Bank-Fund nominees. The latter continue to draw Bank-Fund dollar pensions unless they have waived that privilege. Members of the Indian parliament have several times pointed out to the hazard of dual loyalty of these officials and how the government’s policy planning in sensitive ministries would be a major casualty as a result of these bureaucrats occupying key positions. Editors, whether out of conviction or compulsion, support the government’s new economic policy at the bidding of their corporate bosses. There are rewards for such compliance. The Bank has a tradition of inviting journalists from third world countries to visit Washington or join one of the house journals of the Bank. Doordarshan and All India Radio, state-owned TV and radio networks with a reach of nearly 900 million of the one billion population, repeatedly invite the same set of journalists as experts who promote what is known as the Washington consensus. All the new foreign and domestic TV channels follow the example of Doordarshan and All India Radio, the same faces and voices asserting ad nauseam the inevitability of a regime of divestment, deregulation and privatisation..
Through framing, narration and structuring of facts, Indian journalists like their counterparts in the west deliberately and sometimes innocently thrust on the reader-public a view of reality that passes off for reality itself in the absence of alternative images of reality. Newsworthiness criteria journalists employ inhere a bias that favours one set of realities to the exclusion of another through the simple means of assigning priorities to some aspects of reality. Consequently, the reporter in the south has a perspective different from that of the reporter in the north. The difference is based on their different geographic locations and different experience of history. Monitoring the nation from the north yields different facts. This perspectival variable exposes the irrelevance of rural coverage by the capital press corps, specially of communal disturbances or natural catastrophes. More often, accounts of communal strife and natural disasters show the reporter’s anxiety to demonstrate a knowledge of the Queen’s English than anguish for the tragedy.
Facts are sacred; comment is free, said C.P.Scott long ago. Today, comment has become so free and powerful it breaks the cordon sanitaire around facts and fractures the images emerging from media content. In reporting reality, the press has space limitations which disable it in reporting everything that happens. Inevitably what appears and does not in newspapers depends on certain news criteria reporters and copy editors employ. Nobody has disputed the need for a set of minimum criteria - timeliness, proximity, personality, consequence, human interest etc. - to determine content in a newspaper. These have now become global news values. But it is paradoxical that while newspapers throughout the world adopt uniform news criteria, some newspapers are different from others circulating in the same geographic area. Even if the news criteria are the same all over the world, it is evident that different desks and bureaus attach different meanings to each of these criteria. This is exemplified by copy editors rejecting some stories filed by reporters of their own newspapers or news agencies.
Ben Bagdikian says“Our picture of reality does not burst upon us in one splendid revelation. It accentuates day-by-day and year-by-year in mostly unspectacular fragments from the world scene produced mainly by the mass media. Our view of the real world is dynamic, cumulative and self-correcting as long as there is a pattern of evenhandedness in deciding which fragments are important. But when one important category of the fragments is filtered out or is included vaguely, our view of the social and political world is deficient. The ultimate human intelligence - discernment of cause and effect - becomes damaged because it depends on the knowledge of events in the order and significance in which they recur. When one part of the linkagebetween cause and effect becomes obscure, the sources of our weakness and strength become uncertain. Errors are repeated decade after decade because something is missing in the perceptions by which we guide our social actions.”
Reality again is the main casualty when investigative journalism becomes a façade for inventive journalism. Prabhu Chawla in a main article entitled “Investigator as Inquisitor” says
“Investigative journalism is being redefined these days. If recent writings on the subject are any indication, it seems that some of the veterans of the genre now want to impose their own definition on the rest of the media. To them the word ‘investigation’ has changed its connotative range. They want to identify the target first and then fish for the damning evidence. If no such evidence exists, then try to create one - eitherthrough media hype or by activating thecapital’sburgeoning rumour mills. The columns of newspapers to which they still have an access are now an open field for them to settle scores with their adversaries in politics and in the media. When facts do not support their objective, they tend to remould them.”
“Indeed, some observers argued that the excesses of investigative journalism along with the experiments in New Journalism had created a disorder in the professional arena that undermined not only the authority of government but the authority of truth itself,” say Theodore L. Glasser and James S. Ettema. What is happening in the Indian press is a complete reversal of the concept of reporting as defined by Mitchell Stephens who says, “Reporting - embarking into the field in search of news - is an act of deference to facts, an acknowledgement of the limitations of one’s own deductive or creative powers.” In fact, in India as well as elsewhere, news at any cost seems to be the goal of reporters. Though news items are called stories in a connotative sense, today they have become stories in the denotative sense also and share not only the narrative and structural but also fictional attributes of stories.
“The roster of complaints against the press is diverse, even contradictory but there is an instructive consistency to the questions that the public asks most often: Are reporters scrupulously accurate, or will they reshape a quote, ignore a fact, even concoct an anonymous ‘source’ in order to make a point? Are they fair and objective? Why are there so many leaks and do reporters care about threats to national security? What purpose is served by the preoccupation with investigative reporting?
The most fundamental of these questions is: Can you believe what you read or see? The credibility of all journalists was damaged in 1981 when Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke was forced to return a Pulitzer prize after admitting that she had invented the title character of ‘Jimmy’s World,’ a portrait of an eight-year old heroin addict. A month later New York Daily News columnist Michael Daly admitted that he had made up the name of a British soldier who, he reported, shot a juvenile in Belfast, Northern Ireland; the story was proved to contain other factual errors. Daly acknowledged that he had changed details in a number of other columns, but contended in classic ‘New Journalism’ fashion, that altering facts had not impaired his rendition of the truth. The rash of fraud infected the New York Times seven months later, when its Sunday magazine published a report from Cambodia by freelancer Christopher Jones. In fact, Jones had written the story while at his home in Spain and for part of it had plagiarised a 1930 novel Andre Malraux’s La Voie Royale.
Indian media bandy words like facts, reality, truth etc. as casually as media persons flaunt their proximity to celebrities. Through mindless and contextless repetition , these words have acquired the magic power to whitewash media content into gospel truth for a majority of unsuspecting and long-narcotised reading public. According to Freedom Forum of America, “ business concerns and not public interest are the driving force behind the Indian media.” As a small group of owners, all driven by mammon, controls the circulation of content to the exclusion of alternative viewpoints, the world sees what they want it to see. In short, the world sees a media-generated reality and not the reality. Some people believe that the media are concerned not with the reality but with what they think the audience believe to be reality. If the audience believe that India is a country of snake charmers and maharajahs, media try to portray that India, with which the western audiences are familiar, through their own media.
Fijian CoupA more serious complaint against the Indian media is that they overlook vast tracts of reality which include not just the continents of Africa and Latin America but several countries where the Indian diaspora constitute nearly 40 per cent of the local population. Reporting of the Fijian coup has highlighted the inadequacies of our news system. Indian media have always relied on reports from western news agencies like Reuters, AFP and AP for world news. Reporters of these agencies see the world through British, French and American lenses and Indian audiences are not their priority. Being agencies, they report for heterogenous media. The 44 per cent ethnic Indian constituent of the Fijian population is not their concern. For them, upheaval is news; particularly every crisis in a third world country helps them to juxtapose it with stability in their own countries. Our media are insensitive to the consequences of just two news agencies, AP and Reuters, reporting the world back to the world. AFP has a much smaller reach and sports a dent in credibility, subsidised as it is by the French government.
Indian newspapers and news agencies have few correspondents abroad, specially in third world countries. Neither PTI nor UNI has a correspondent in Australia, Africa and Latin America. Their fulltime men and stringers are all concentrated in Asia, specially in neighbouring countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. PTI has a full-timer in Beijing and a stringer in Johannesburg. Besides Fiji, there are several countries where people of Indian origin constitute more than 40 per cent of their population. They are Seychelles, Mauritius, Guyana, Jamaica and Surinam. Ethnic Indians there have problems with indigenous people. Neither our news agencies nor newspapers have a correspondent or stringer there. News about these countries comes from western agencies when there is an economic crisis, or there is a coup or a natural disaster.
Somebody must be able to explain these gaps in news reporting by our media. While there is a plethora of success stories of Indian Americans or ethnic Indians in Britain, why is there a famine of news relating to Indian immigrants in other countries? One ready assumption is that the latter are children of Indian indentured labour and the successful Indians in Britain or America are highly educated professionals or industrialists like the Hindujas or Swaraj Pauls or Sabeer Bhatias. Indian media share with our South Block bureaucracy the same indifference to problems of third world countries because their capitals are not glitzy, not flush with consumer goodies and not home to ‘newsworthy’ happenings or personalities. For them nothing has happened in Fiji between the last coup staged by Rabuka and the one staged by George Spieght.
Look at how our foreign Office responded to a crisis with a potential to disenfranchise the entire ethnic Indian population in Fiji. On the day of the coup, the Ministry of External Affairs makes a brief statement. After ten days of slumber defence minister George Fernandes tells newsmen at Hyderabad that the government was in touch with the UN and the Commonwealth. Foreign minister Jaswant Singh instructs on 30 May a senior MoE official to fly to Australia and New Zealand. According to Coomi Kapoor (editor, Indian Express ), MoE officials were unhappy that an inexperienced official was sent to Fiji as high commissioner and thought an experienced hand would certainly have forewarned the government about the impending coup.
Compare this with the speed and dedication with which both the government and the media are handling the Sri Lankan issue. Media have sent their senior sleuths to Colombo, while at home there is a daily monitoring of government thinking and actions. The papers are full of Sri Lanka, news reports, editorials, main articles, analyses by experts, interviews and what have you. Is it because Sri Lanka is geographically close to our mainland or is it because our Tamils have emotional bonds with Sri Lankan Tamils or is it because the DMK is too big a partner of the ruling National Democratic Alliance to offend ? In Fiji and in Sri Lanka, the ethnic Indian people are children of indentured labour. Yet it is difficult to explain the selective attitude of the media and the government in highlighting the Sri Lankan crisis and downplaying the Fijian tragedy.
In the first ten days of the Fijian crisis, reports by western agencies mentioned very little of the damage done to the properties of the ethnic population. No Indian newspaper had sent its correspondent to Suva.Hindu ’s Suryanarayan reported from Bangkok, Singapore and Jakarta. Only on one day a Paul Tait reported for the Times of India from Suva. No Fiji Indian was interviewed. A stray Reuters report referred to the consequences of an Indian exodus based on a casual meeting with a businessman. Well-meaning news agencies like the Inter Press Service do not have a worldwide network nor the resources to fly reporters to where news breaks out without notice. Our own news agencies as well as newspapers scout for state charity to subsidise their foreign reporting. Nobody has an idea of what their priorities are and what the hapless people of Indian origin in third world countries should do to get noticed in the Indian media. As Suhel Seth wrote in the Indian Express (1 June, 2000) “I have not seen these newspaper groups ever pursue national causes with the fervour they devote to beauty parades and concerts.”
Reality is pluralistic in nature and its import can be driven home to readers only when the media content too is pluralistic. Entire classes of people who impart to society its pluralist character find no representation in media because their phenomenal poverty has no visibility that the media can readily recognise. They never seem to have problems which media desks and bureaus could regard as newsworthy. One of India’s leading English newspapers gifted a weekly column to the widow of an industrialist to write drivel about her wardrobe, jewellery, perfumes, her riches and her richer friends. English media are infected by columnists, who, behind a façade of light-hearted banter, openly peddle places, personalities, hotels, limos and irrelevant issues -- as irrelevant as themselves and the personalities they discuss.
Prem Shankar Jha sizes up the Indian press scene in these words: “ I no longer know whether Indian journalism has any direction. The turning point for me was the indictment of Hansie Cronje for match-fixing. Not a day has passed when the story has not been on the front page of every English (and doubtless non-English) daily.” Between April 8 and 14, 2000, the New Indian Express of Hyderabad carried 57 stories on match-fixing, excluding six articles on the edit page and three editorials. It figured on the front page on all these days. Jha adds: “The relentless pursuit of truth on this one issue threw into glaring relief the absence of follow-up on other stories of equal or greater importance. What happened, I began wondering to the Gujarat drought? ”
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Glasser, Theodre . and Ettema James S. (1991) Investigative Journalism and Moral Order (in Critical Perspectives on Media and Society . Editors, Avery Robert K. and Eason David , Guilford Press, New York.) |
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Stephens, Mitchell (1988) A History of News, Viking Penguin, New York. |
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