Are journos too partisan in this election?

When politics gets contentious, we get a vicious election campaign. The campaign for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, which really began in December 2012 after Narendra Modi won his assembly polls in Gujarat, has been one of the most polarised in history. In this charged atmosphere, where no politician gives his rival any quarter, there is a tendency for journalists also to take sides, with many of them also jumping shop and joining political parties. [caption id=“attachment_1436671” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image: Reuters[/caption] Pratap Bhanu Mehta, writing in The Indian Express,  frets about the probability of journalists becoming too committed to a politician’s cause. He also discusses the pros and cons of partisan journalism. While, on the one hand, partisanship helps shine the torch on rival parties and personalities in a way that fully neutral journalists may not always be motivated to do (reason: a partisan journalist will take a hypercritical view of the opponent, which may bring new facts to light that someone else may miss), Mehta focuses on the dangers of taking this too far. He writes: “The danger is slightly different: the enchantment of partisanship may breach all boundaries and engulf any sense of proportion or objectivity. The partisan contagion may corrode professional roles and judgement. This corrosion comes in two forms. In the most egregious cases, it leads to selective reporting, misplaced importance to certain facts, sometimes even falsehoods. In a more subtle form, the worry is not falsehood but a certain monomania: where journalists become more like lawyers for a prosecution or a defence. Their facts may not be wrong in a literal sense, but their vocation is reduced to exactly the same partisan contest in politics: take down the opponent, no matter what.” Mehta’s warning is worth noting for all journalists, partisan or non-partisan, though one does not know if the latter species really exists. In India, it is a rarte journalists who does not have a view - for or against - on Narendra Modi. A must-read for journalists covering the elections.