FDI in News Agencies - (The Hoot.Org, 05/08/2002)

-- By Dasu Krishnamoorty

In permitting 26 per cent FDI in print media the government has excluded news agencies, which will continue to be 100 per cent Indian owned. Our news agencies, PTI and UNI, and their language divisions, have managed to escape the notice of the pro-FDI lobby, but their turn may come sooner than later. My main objective in writing this article is to alert the public on the scenario that would open up once our government extends the 'reform' regime to news agencies also. News agencies played, acting globally and as a cartel, a major role in the globalization of western ideology and markets. They imparted us a consciousness that has strengthened our implicit faith in every word and image that originates in the west. The debate on the entry of FDI into print media overlooked crucial issues connected with the production and distribution of news.

Every country takes care to see that its communications structures are not encroached upon or eroded. It is a way of keeping at bay influences that are likely to harm the peoples' democratic and social perceptions. See what ten years of MTV have done in changing our urban and metro scene. A veteran media person like B.G. Verghese thinks that nothing has been subverted and makes light of the need to be ourselves. He ought to take a look at how a decade of cable TV has changed consumer preferences in favour of foreign goods and hurt the domestic economy. This is only a preview of what foreign media can do.

It is important to remember that images and content foreign TV and print media relay become the basis for American foreign policy decisions. They trigger U.S. actions overseas. A survey shows that TV networks in the US covered 16 of 21 countries between 1988-92 because there was serious civil strife in these countries. Stephen Hess says, "In terms of what gets covered, a distinguishing characteristic of American news operations, especially television news, is that they are so prominently concerned with violence." Violence and conflict are often cited as pretexts for US intervention.

"Amrita Shah, a correspondent at Imprint magazine in Bombay who strings for Time-Life News Service commented: Stories from Asia that do not directly affect the United States tend to be one of two kinds: stories that confirm stereotypes -- for example, stories of widow burning or stampeding elephants that confirm the western notion of India as a wild and exotic land are sure sellers, even if they are in actuality extremely rare occurrences. Or stories that indicate conformity to a familiar western way of life. Stories about India's privatisation program or of a newly prosperous middle class investing in home appliances fall in this category," says Hess.

Before the UNESCO debates of the seventies opened our eyes to the communication conspiracies of the west, Indian newspapers used to reproduce the Reuters and AP canonisation of such oppressive rulers like King Farouq of Egypt, the Shah of Iran and dictators like Fulgencio Batista of Cuba, Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, Ngo Din Diem of Vietnam, Syngman Rhee of Korea. This unthinking endorsement showed a layoff of editorial discretion. The editors were all carried away by a conviction that there is no room for opinion in wire copy. News agencies can and do, and did in reality, set our agenda by circulating facts, denying which needed effort and expense.

Globalization is an invisible and unmanageable process beyond the control of any national government. It is like the toothpaste that refuses to go back into the tube. Our newspapers have not escaped the overrun of globalization. With Reuters and AP entering the Indian media scene, they began depending heavily on these news agencies for their foreign news needs, even after they had achieved an identity of their own. Therefore, globalization, whether in the area of economy or news, is not a new phenomenon. From the very beginning, news agencies like Reuters played the role of globalisers.

Let us see what would happen if the global news agencies acquire an equity stake in our news agencies. So far we have been receiving and reproducing distorted pictures of the outside world. Hereafter, the pictures of the domestic scene reaching the outside world also would be doctored. There is ample evidence to justify these fears.

Read what Herbert Altschull says, "The news agencies established in the nineteenth century Europe were frankly commercial enterprises. In order to prevent cut-throat competition Britain, France and Germany carved up the world into spheres of influence under the 1869 Agency Alliance Treaty. (America joined this cartel in 1893). Running about as emissaries of 'the civilised world,' they discovered wars and pitched battles, exotic religions, and strange customs, jungles and mountains, savages and heathens, disease and revolution. Their impact on the perceptions of the native citizens about the outside world remains a major influence today and is indeed one of the factors in the complaints lodged against media imperialism."

What the western agencies continue to do is report massacres, bride burning, subversion, insurgency and everything negative. The outside world does not know that, despite these challenges, India is making progress in population control, holding elections, protecting the economy from meltdowns elsewhere, attaining self-reliance in several areas of defence etc. And ironically, this is what onetime general manager of the Associated Press Kent Cooper complained against Reuters. He said it was Reuters that decided what news was sent from America, and it told nothing but news 'about the Indians on the warpath in the West, lynching in the South and bizarre crimes in the North.'

Reuters, Agence France Press and the Associated Press are today's news powers. Because these three news agencies monopolise the distribution of foreign news, the number of voices heard is woefully small and the voices for most of the time sound North American or West European. They also successfully block all alternative projections of the world. These three news agencies became the models for national news agencies in countries, including India, colonised by European powers at one time.

The Big 3 have also popularised western ethnocentrism, imposing a western view on the rest of the world. As Jaap van Ginniken says, "Most of the time, they look at the world through a Eurocentric grid: from a Christian or Judaeo-Christian point of view, from a white point of view, from an Anglo-American point of view." Unfortunately, copy editors in our media reproduce these perspectives thus legitimising a western worldview dismissive of the peoples and countries of the third world (a term I loathe to use). This is not an outdated non-aligned rhetoric but a living truth.

For long, our news agencies used the same terminology as the Big 3 employed. Reds for communists, blacks for people of African origin, Red Indians for American natives, Dark Continent for Africa etc. Our news agencies not only do not protest but also positively co-operate with the Big 3 by using terms like Middle East, Far East, South East or Near East? East of what? Did our media ever consider the political comment they were making by using words like East and West? Did we ever probe how free are 'free societies and free press?' We simply accept classifications the Big 3 make at the behest of the governments of their countries. Our news agencies popularise an Anglo-American view of the world by endorsing such terminology in their reports.

Western mediation leads to a selective articulation of reality. For historical reasons, we have inherited the western media model and inevitably replicate their small sins of lack of objectivity and irrelevant news values. Even our news priorities are the same as those of the Big 3. Fiji for example. It is a country where 44 per cent of the population is of Indian origin. The crisis in which a prime minister who is an ethnic Indian was ousted was reported by western news agencies in their own fashion. The focus was more on George Speight, the rebel leader, than on the Indian population whose life and properties were under attack.

The Indians cannot complain if the western media were not concerned about the ethnic Indian population. India's foreign office too did not show much interest. Even less interest was shown by Indian news agencies which simply supplied to our newspapers the version that came to them from the Big 3. The Hindu reported from the periphery of the scene of action -- from Bangkok, Jakarta and Singapore. The Times of India asked a foreign media person to cover it for the paper. He did not speak to a single Indian there.

Fiji, Mauritius, Seychelles, Guyana, Jamaica and Surinam where Indians constitute more than 40 per cent of these countries' populations have no correspondents from either UNI or PTI. This is in accordance with western estimates of importance of world capitals for coverage. London, bereft of its political clout, continues to be important for Indian news agencies, which have no correspondents and stringers in either Africa or Latin America or Australia. What is important for the Big 3 for political reasons is important for Indian agencies though there are no political reasons for such imitation.

But buying news from the Big 3 is cheaper than posting our own correspondents abroad. Therefore, UNI has arrangements with Reuters and DPA, and PTI with AP and AFP. We now arrive at the truth that these two news agencies transfer to Indian readers and listeners pictures of the world manufactured by the western news agencies, one we have seen is Eurocentric and not free from ideology. Though these arrangements with foreign news agencies are called exchanges, Indian agencies make heavy use of the material supplied by the Big 3, while there is a total blackout of UNI and PTI messages in foreign newspapers.

Read carefully the reports of western news agencies on the Indo-Pak standoff. You will find a pro-Pak tilt and very often a tendency to put India on the same plane as Pakistan in the context of aggression. A content analysis will show the meager coverage of good (positive) news and a faith in the dictum 'bad news is good news.' Indians were told that the Soviets had brought down a Korean civilian plane but never that it strayed into sensitive Soviet territory before it was shot down and also that the Americans knew that the plane violated Soviet airspace and never alerted the Korean crew. Indians have heard about Soviet killings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia but never about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968 or massacre of civilians by American soldiers in No Gun Ri in South Korea and the 1951 mayhem of 1800 political prisoners by South Korean soldiers under American command. The list can go on. Shall we be content that our two news agencies cover a population of a billion? So what? The western media do not use their reports. They rely on accounts of India western news agencies send home. There is still a consolation that it is Indian news agencies that supply news about India. If we throw open this sector for foreign equity we will have the humiliation of reading what the foreign news agencies choose to tell us about ourselves. Let us heed Kuldip Nayyar's warning: "The argument that 26 per cent of foreign equity will not change the character of the Indian print media does not hold water. We have companies where 10 per cent ownership spells control. With 26 per cent, a foreign investor can play havoc; stall special resolutions required for important decisions of the company."