Freedom Of Information - (Indolink.Com, 08/09/2002)

-- By Dasu Krishnamoorty

The freedom of information bill cleared by the Union cabinet this week is all glitter and little gold. The standoff in Parliament is bound to frustrate its introduction in this session. The major flaw of the bill is its untenable concern with information available exclusively with the government and public bodies. Few people know that it is a capitulation to the power of the market. The bill reinforces the popular belief that the state is a secretive institution trying to suppress information and thus exempts private institutions whose activities need as much transparency as those of the state. The conclusion is that once the citizen gets the right to ferret information from the government all his information needs are met. The bill amounts to an admission that government alone is the villain with a stake in withholding crucial information from the public. The private sector has successfully marketed this anti-statist mythology to the public, deftly diverting their attention from the skeletons deep-frozen in their cupboards.

The conscience keepers of a poorly informed society have hugged this exclusivist illusion, clouding the substance of the right to know debate. Listen to what they say: "In a democracy, where faith stirs the people’s response, the government cannot afford to have an iota of doubt raised about what it says or does. It has to be transparent." The Indian judiciary too subscribes to this fashionable excursus. P.N.Bhagavati, former Supreme Court judge, says: "The disclosure of information regarding the functioning of the government must be the rule, and secrecy an exception, justified only where the strictest requirement of public interest demands."

The essence of all these sermons is that the state is the sole center of power and public activity inclined as a general rule to deny information likely to alter its power status. Manoj Mitta, an Indian Express columnist demolishes this irrational premise when he says: "It (the bill) imposes an obligation alright on a ´public authority´ to provide information to any citizen. But the public authority is purely defined as a state-created or state-funded body. The proposed legislation is entirely government-centric as though the state machinery were still the only repository of all the information that affects the people at large."

The debate on the bill threw up a new dimension revealing a media-market exercise to popularize the myth of the media seeking information and the government denying it. It enhances the make-believe of media martyrdom and state villainy. There is no doubt the state has so far been the chief storehouse of information and kept it under wraps, though for political reasons. With the stridency in the last decade what of such glamorous theories as minimum state gaining momentum, government has begun to abdicate a lot of its legitimate space in favor of the market.

Nearly every aspect of private sector working has today embraces public life in a hundred ways. The public has a right to know the goings-on in the marketplace. If the public had access to information secreted in the databases of Enron and WorldCom, they would have spared themselves of the misery and suffering the collapse of these two giants caused them. This disaster also betrayed the role of media columnists in keeping the public in a constant state of euphoria. The economy-controlled media won public trust by portraying themselves as adversaries of the government. While it is proper that we should demand accountability from the state, we must also ask who is the market accountable to? The bill thus is incomplete unless it applies to private sector institutions also.

Before we move on to the most striking failure of the bill by omission, it is important to know the manner in which the media turned the focus of the debate on to themselves edging out the public who are the primary beneficiaries of the bill. The entire emphasis was on the media´s right to access information the government is trying to suppress. They enjoy this right as an adjunct to their responsibility to publish all that they know. Do they reveal all that they know? They may not. Market misdemeanor hurting public interest often eludes their scrutiny because market owns most of the media.

Several questions arise from the right of the media to information available with the government. The first question is should the media monopolize the right to inform? Citizens´ groups, obviously. If they fail to do that, who would do it? Citizens´ groups, obviously. The citizen too has a right to use the media as a forum for public expression. At present, the meager space available in the letters column is the only outlet available for the citizenry. Many a time, the citizen feels compelled to reply to or refute what appears in the media. Media do not entertain alternative views unless they come from persons of social eminence. One look at the letters column convinces us that a lot of wisdom generally lies outside the editorial space.

The right to know advocates have sidelined a unique category of the citizenry known as consumers of media products. Mass communication is a composite process of partnership between the senders (media) and the receivers (media users). It is not a one-way traffic where the media disseminate and the audience receive. The right of the media to information ought to be linked to the access they yield to the audience. Article 19 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights says: "Everyone has the right (among other things) to impart information and ideas through any media." How one interprets this article depends on his commitment to the democratization of communication. I am not arguing against media rights but am stressing that media are a part of but not above society and that their rights are aligned to their respect for the rights of others.

The audience are without an agency that oversees the performance of the media in terms of their information needs. Such vigil is beyond the ken of the Press Council of India. Consequently, the media deny space to the audience, using an editorial logic of their own and often without assigning reasons. It boils down to a state where the media solely claim the right to define news. If the editors care to read the letters to the editor, they surely will realize the discontent of the audiences. What do they do? Start newspapers of their own? Newspapers need such high finances today that only the entrenched newspapers can launch a new journal, subsidizing it with profits from the parent company.

Readers, being media´s chief constituency, ought to have a say in deciding what they read and how the space that legitimately belongs to them should be used. This is necessary in view of the media tradition of misusing the space for settling scores with the publisher´s adversaries. The media wars between the Bombay Dyeing and the Reliance group in the columns of newspapers they finance directly and indirectly are ancient history now. To the same category of misuse belongs the media expropriation of space to carry pages after pages of obituary stories about their owners. The Times of India and the Indian Express devote unreasonable space for Filmfare and Screen awards every year. Nearly all newspapers in India print two pages of news every day about the International Film Festival discussing the work and performance of foreign directors and actors the majority of the readers are unfamiliar with.

It is unfortunate that the media refuse to be audience-friendly without the intervention of law. People seek media space when the state does not heed their voice. If the media too fail to respond to the demands of the audience, violence is bound to raise its ugly head. The Kerner Commission appointed by the Kennedy administration squarely put the blame for black violence on media denial of space for their grievances. More than half a century ago, the Hutchins Commission appointed by Henry Luce of Time magazine observed that democracy depended on informed judgements and that the press should help such a process. In the end, listen to what the McBride Commission says: "It must be recognized that communication is a personal right belonging to all individuals, not only journalists and governments, not only those who exercise political and economic power.

The bill hardly answers the needs of the general public. An entire world of information in the custody of the private sector is a holy cow. When the bill becomes an Act, the media will appropriate all its benefits to the exclusion of the public as they did with Article 19 (1) A of our Constitution.