As an Accountable Press - (Hamarashehar.Com, 13/04/2001)

-- By Dasu Krishnamoorty

The Indian public's eternal quest for an accountable press evokes sporadic responses from non-media quarters. Occasionally, they get support from the seminar industry, which holds road shows all over India and recruits a star performer or two to gain respectability and credibility. A few days ago, the seminarists persuaded Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen as content providers for a pow-vow organised by the International Press Institute at New Delhi. Last Saturday, the Press Academy of Andhra Pradesh and Friedric Ebert Stiftung threw up at Hyderabad another talk show featuring among others the chairman of the Press Council of India, justice P.B. Sawant to discuss (for the umpteenth time) the problem of press accountability. Sawant lamented that the press turned a blind eye to the Press Council guideline that results of an exit poll should not be published until voting was completed.

At the IPI seminar, Vajpayee excavated the two ancient and forgotten press concepts of accountability and pluralism of content from their resting-places and presented them to the world press wondering if they could be cloned somehow. If that feat is possible it is never so desirable as it is today. These two values perished in the media stampede for more and more profits doled out by the advertising industry at the expense of news which is the most important input in the development consciousness of any community. Two press commissions appointed after the country became free tried unsuccessfully to recruit press loyalty to these two concepts.

In the quarter-century after the report of the second Press Commission, the press scene has changed beyond recognition,taking a toll of both accountability and pluralism. The induction of advanced communication technologies and the advent of a new and younger generation of publishers incarnating corporate culture mainly generated the changes. The first has made the gathering, processing and packaging of news easier and faster. The second ushered in a change of attitudes towards content. The new generation of publishers shifted the focus of the print media, particularly the metro-centric English press, from disseminating information crucial to the lives of the lakhs of the underclass to serving the interests of the industry, which now owns all the leading newspapers in the country and a lion’s share of their circulation. News, as a result, does not respond to the needs of the underclass. It responds more readily to the demands of the advertiser, who is now the darling of the press. As T.N. Ninan of the Business Standard has said "newspapers are deeply involved in the battles of the advertising rupee." The accent on ad revenue is evident from the escalated status of the ad manager and the decline of the editor.

As a consequence, accountability of the press to readers today ends with publishing their letters,space for which is ridiculously meagre though the reader is the mainstay of circulation, which in turn determines the quantum of ad revenue. The Press Council, which is a watchdog body, cannot do anything beyond censure or admonition. Not a single major English language newspaper headquartered in Delhi printed a line of the Press Council’s verdict pillorying the Times of India for trying to misuse the services of such a senior journalist as H.K. Dua, now press advisor to the Prime Minister. Somewhat unconvincing is Press Academy Chairman Venkateswara Rao's assessment of the press scene. He says that though the Constitution has guaranteed freedom of expression, newspapers play safe for fear of defamation, privilege issues being raised in legislatures and contempt proceedings by courts. This reading is not substantiated by statistics regarding defamation cases against the press and actual convictions. The legislatures and the judiciary may catch small fish but the whales of the Indian press slip through the net by offering an apology they do not mean.

Even law has failed to make the media accountable because the judges are too readily overawed by the power of the press. This is how we can explain the tradition of the judiciary accepting the 'sincere, written, unconditional apologies’ of newsmen even when members of the judiciary themselves are the victims of brash reporting.

	The Sunday Tribune carried sometime ago a story alleging allotment of petrol outlets from the discretionary quota of the Petroleum and Natural Gas Ministry to two sons of a Supreme Court judge and two sons of the Chief Justice of India. Surprisingly, the APEX court was satisfied with an apology and an acknowledgement by the newspaper that the story was false and incorrect.
	The Indian Express got away 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 High Court, was present when a matter in which her husband was a respondent was being heard before the Maharashtra Disputes Redress Commission.
	Chandan Mitra of Pioneer of Delhi was not so fortunate. The Supreme Court let him off but with a stern warning for contempt of court.

Contrast this with how American courts deal with the press. A state court jury in Chicago awarded nearly $ 22.5 lakh 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 the very next day. A judge of a city court in the state of New York refused to lift the bar on three news organisations 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. More interesting is the case of Amartya Sen being the victim of mis-reporting.

He told the IPI seminar, "No less importantly, there is also the more common problem of being misreported. Indeed, when we are wrongly reported in a newspaper, as happens from time to time, it can be extremely upsetting since the false attributions typically communicate a lot faster and much more prominently than any subsequent corrections can. I have had the experience, for example, of saying that the world civilisations are not in conflict with each other, and being reported in a prominent newspaper that I believed that the world civilisations are in tremendous conflict."

The most charitable interpretation we can put on unverified reporting is that the print media are under great pressure from the increasing ubiquity and popularity of electronic media. This is 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% 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, especially 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 (fact or fiction) that sell, very much in the manner of police stations requiring cops to register a minimum number of cases. 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. Reporters do not 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 legislatures, 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 to publish pictures of even 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.

Two Press Commission reports and scores of reports by the Press Council have failed to persuade the press to accept the concept of accountability. Recently, the Press Council began a survey of the Indian press and there is no guarantee that it does not go the same way as its predecessors. Perhaps, it may set off another vacuous seminar on ruling news values and on the need to redefine news to be socially relevant. The proposed replacement of the Press Council by a Media Council makes little sense unless press is willing to submit its performance for oversight by non-media organisations. If newspapers plead for the right of self-regulation, they will have to show how they deserve that privilege.