India's free and irresponsible media

by Shashi Tharoor

I am, in a sense, a child of the Indian newspaper. My late father, Chandran Tharoor, started in the newspaper business when barely out of college, representing a pair of Indian papers in post-war London, and spent his working life as a senior advertising executive for some of our country’s better-known mastheads. His world fascinated me. My childhood in the 1960s and early 1970s was replete with stories of editorial meetings and battles between the editorial and the advertisement departments, for my father injected newspaper ink into my veins at a young age. I grew up literally with newspapers: from about six or seven years of age, I can remember sitting with my father at 6.30 every morning with chai and multiple newspapers. In addition to the news, he always read the ads, counting the column inches of advertising in his own and the rival newspapers—usually (since he was very good at his job) with a grunt of satisfaction.

My father used to work for the Statesman, then a superb newspaper (and again trying to be one). I remember going to the press as a young boy and seeing the linotype machine men at work with their little fonts that had been carved out of very hot metal, putting together words whose idiosyncratic spellings often revealed that they had not had an English language education. (That’s why copy editors were indispensable)! I recall handling flongs, the exotic papier-mâché stereotype moulds used in the days before offset printing. Those were the days when you could turn up in some small town and find yesterday’s news with today’s date on it, in what the newspaper called a ‘dak edition’.

Growing up in Bombay and Calcutta, I enjoyed three or four newspapers in the morning; then during the day, the papers from the rest of the country would be flown in, and my father brought them home after work, when I would have a second round of newsprint to digest. So I grew up reading a minimum of seven or eight newspapers a day. (This was not as onerous a task as it might seem, since in those days the big newspapers were just twelve pages long, and some, in bad times of newsprint shortages, carried only eight.) When, at the age of 10, I first published a short story, it was not in a fiction magazine, but in a newspaper, the Bharat Jyoti—the Sunday edition of Bombay’s venerable Free Press Journal. That daily ritual of tea and newspapers gave me an early and abiding passion for the Indian press, one which I have sustained during three decades abroad, when I would have Indian newspapers sent to me in places like Geneva, Singapore and New York.

Those were more innocent times, when no one expected to find sex scandals in the daily news, and editors always knew far more than they shared with their readers. But those were also days when the papers were filled with dull accounts of worthy events, and the front pages regurgitated ministers’ speeches with little context, explanation or analysis. There was no real engagement with the substance of what politics means to the Indian people. Investigative journalism was unknown and revelations about errant conduct on the part of our elected officials would only appear if they had first been unearthed by the government.

Obviously newspapers have come a very long way since the days in which I grew up with them. Technology is the most obvious change: today, almost everything is done on computers. No one knows what compositors are any more. Journalists do their own proofreading. Presentation and layout have also dramatically improved. With colour, with newspapers so attractively designed and presented, with lifestyle supplements and multiple sections, anyone who remembers those days knows we are looking at a different product being sold in a different environment.

The economics have also changed: newsprint is more affordable. A twelve-page paper would be considered a joke; multiple sections are now de rigeur. Circulations have shot up along with literacy and disposable incomes, so that the Times of India today can call itself the world’s most widely-read English-language broadsheet, and Hindi newspapers boast readership numbers that would exceed the wildest fantasies of any editor in the world outside Japan. This is happening when newspapers in the developed West are falling by the wayside, unable to resist the challenge of the internet. Our Times is read by some 7.6 million people daily, while the best-selling American paper, USA Today, has 2.5 million readers. According to the Indian Readership survey 2014, Dainik Jagran, in Hindi, had 16.37 million readers.

But along with this have come other, more substantive, changes, both good and bad. On the positive side, our newspapers are more readable, better edited, better laid out and usually better-written than they were. Investigative stories are frequent and occasionally expose wrongdoing before any official institution does so. The role of newspapers in rousing the social conscience of the Indian public about apparent miscarriages of justice, most notably in the Jessica Lall, Ruchika Girhotra and ‘Nirbhaya’ cases, has been remarkable.

On the negative side, every newspaper looks at the news less objectively, with a clearly visible slant on the events it is reporting. Newspapers seem more conscious than ever that they have to compete in a tight media environment where it is not they, but TV, that sets the pace. Television news in India, with far too many channels competing 24/7 for the same sets of eyeballs, has long since given up any pretence of providing a public service, with the ‘breaking news’ story privileging sensation over substance. (Indian TV epitomises the old saw about why television is called a ‘medium’: ‘Because it is neither rare nor well done.’)

So newspapers find themselves led by the nose by TV’s perennial ratings war. They too feel the need to ‘break’ news in order to be read, to outdo their TV competitors. They seem to perceive a need to reach readers each day with a banner headline that stimulates outrage rather than increases awareness.

The result has been, to put it mildly, disturbing. Our media, in its rush to air the story, has fallen prey to the inevitable rush to judgement: it has too often become a willing accomplice of the motivated leak and the malicious allegation, which journalists today have neither the time nor the inclination to check or verify. The damage is done in a blaze of lurid headlines—and rectification, if it comes at all, comes too feebly and too late to undo the irreparable damage to innocent people’s reputations. The distinctions amongst fact, opinion and speculation that are drummed into journalism students’ heads the world over has blurred into irrelevance in today’s Indian media.

The cavalier attitude to facts is compounded by a reluctance to issue corrections; my own attempts at correcting blatant falsehoods relating to me in print have been ignored to the point that I have stopped trying. So in 2010 the Indian Express, for instance, reported a wholly fictitious ‘protocol problem’ involving my supposedly having attended the Padma Awards at Rashtrapati Bhavan with a woman who was not (yet) my wife—when the plain, verifiable, fact is that I have never attended a Padma Award ceremony in my life, accompanied or alone! My attempts to point this out, both privately and publicly, got nowhere with the Express, which combines excellence in some kinds of investigative journalism (the Dubey murder over national highway funds is a fine example) with a talent for creating blazing stories out of trivia (as with their the banner headlines in 2009 ‘revealing’ that External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna and I were staying, at our own expense, in five-star hotels, a fact neither of us had hidden and which could have been ascertained from our officially-listed temporary addresses on various government websites).

Part of the problem is a genuine disinclination to take the trouble to research a story, and a disregard for the need to verify it. To take a few examples from 2010, when I was a particularly favoured victim of the practice: Outlook ran an appalling piece on my then wife-to-be, Sunanda, in which every second statement was provably false or inaccurate, without consulting either her or her friends about their veracity. (To the magazine’s credit, it also ran a flood of letters pillorying it for the piece.) The Times of India got taken in by one of the many fake Facebook accounts purporting to be Sunanda’s (she was not on any social-networking site at the time) and ran an entire article quoting her supposed views, without ever checking as to whether the accounts was genuine. Mid-Day placed words and sentiments in the mouth of one of my sons at my wedding that he would never have thought and did not utter. It also encouraged a doctor to break his Hippocratic oath by revealing not just details but photographs of surgery he had performed on Sunanda after an accident years earlier. Perhaps it is our country’s weak libel protections that lead publications to feel they can print anything with complete disregard for character assassination. But it is a sad commentary on how low our print standards have fallen that the very notion of what is ‘fit to print’ has ceased to have any meaning in India today (and in India Today as well, but that’s another matter). I have had to endure worse in 2014, after the tragic death of my wife, but will restrain myself from commenting on an ongoing situation.

A friend summarized the problem succinctly for me: ‘When I was young, my father wouldn’t believe anything unless it was printed in the Times of India. Now, he doesn’t believe anything if it is printed in the Times of India.’

As one who has been treated to repeated doses of speculation, gossip, accusation and worse in the course of 2014, I have been made intimately conscious of these limitations of the Indian media. Instead of the restraint and caution one might expect from a responsible press where matters of life and death are involved (and accusations of murder and suicide are flung around with abandon), we have had the spectacle of an unnaturally long-drawn-out media trial, punctuated by frequent eruptions based on motivated leaks, with a meddling politician trying to orchestrate conspiracy theories that are eagerly lapped up by the voyeuristic Indian TV channels, and almost zero probing or even elementary research behind any of the statements aired. Manipulated and malicious leaks were reported uncritically by the media, especially television, without asking even the most basic questions about their plausibility. Sadly, it was not much better in the print media, which—with its ability to provide context, depth and analysis that television cannot—could have compensated for the limitations of television as a medium.

This should be a matter of serious concern to all right-thinking Indians, because free media are the lifeblood of our democracy. They provide the information that enables a free citizenry to make the choices of who governs them and how, and ensures that those who govern will remain accountable to those who put them there. It is the media’s job to look critically at elected officials’ actions (or inaction), rather than at marginalia that have no impact on the public welfare. Instead, the media’s obsession with the superficial and the sensational trivializes public discourse, abdicates the watchdog responsibility that must be exercised by free media in a democracy, and distracts the public from the real questions of accountability with which the governed must confront the government.

The free press is both the mortar that binds together the bricks of our country’s freedom, and the open window embedded in those bricks. No Indian leader would go as far as Thomas Jefferson, who said that given a choice between government without newspapers and newspapers without government, he would choose the latter. But government needs newspapers to keep it honest and efficient, to serve as both mirror and scalpel. If instead all we have is a blunt axe, society is not well served.

If India wishes to be taken seriously by the rest of the world as a responsible global player and a model 21st-century democracy, we will have to take ourselves seriously and responsibly as well. Our media would be a good place to start.

This is an excerpt from the book India Shashtra: Reflections on the nation in our time by Shashi Tharoor. It appears courtesy Aleph.