 "Dear Lutyens' reporters, welcome to the club")
There is a widespread lament by the reporting community that intensely covered the four-five square miles of Lutyens’ Delhi. Their sources have ditched them or have stopped talking. In some cases, the sources themselves have been ditched by the new government. New sources are hard to come by, especially if you cannot speak Gujarati. It is a National crisis.
Numerous blogs and columns have been written about the loss of access to the government and even TV programmes have discussed it. Allegations of the prime minister’s office tightly controlling the flow of information have surfaced, so have those of journalists falling over one another to please the scarce and diminishing sources with goody-goody stories.For people who have been covering corporate sector in India, all of this is a bit amusing. This is what the so-called corporate reporters have been subjected to for years now. And, it has only been getting progressively worse as more and more corporations adapt the public relations 'best practices'.
Unfortunately, the corporate tendency to hide problems and window dress by stifling the media is not somehow seen as threat to ‘freedom of press’. There is a widespread belief that threat to free press is only from the government. But in a world where businessmen and politicians are increasingly getting closer and it is often becoming difficult to differentiate between the two, who is a bigger menace – the politician with business interests or the business man with political connections? Does privacy of oligarchs and corporations that mint bulk of their fortunes from national resources and government projects take precedence over public interest?
Also Read
Let me recall a few instances of corporate attitude and behaviour to the media, which I have been witness to over the past few years. Like prime minister Modi, most companies want to centrally control information flow about their projects and activities. Every now and then, the company has to deal with outsiders. In one such instance, a fellow reporter had found out certain information about the company’s plans from one of its external partners. Incidentally, the reporter happened to use the mobile of a sister concern of this main company. The day on which the story appeared, the external partner who spoke to the reporter was sacked without assigning reasons. If this is the fate of an external person, imagine what can happen to employees. Often even the insider version one gets to read around big corporate events is also the “official” insider version.
I was the target of another belligerent attack by a chief executive. Sitting in the conference room of a top Mumbai hotel, this CEO then riding high, issued us veiled and unveiled threats to me and my colleague about ending our writing careers, if we were adamant on publishing a certain story. He referred to another person who they had made an example out of.
In another instance, a company threatened to sue for sending it a questionnaire which it called ‘defamatory’ and was posed with an intention to defame etc. There have been anticipatory defamatory notices, which say “if you publish this, we will sue.”
While these are extreme cases, there is tremendous friction and pressure created by the public relations army on each news article which are investigative in nature. Often former editors and senior journalists, who have crossed over are the ones reporters are left to deal with. These people have an inside knowledge of working of the news organization and the work flow, which they at times attempt to manipulate.
There are also attempts to nitpick on published articles and come up with a loose sentence and seek correction and apology from the publication. The time consuming correspondence and legalese one has to deal with is often a great discouragement for reporters with initiative. My own experience working with five large newsrooms and conversations with peers from other organizations suggest that the phenomenon is widespread.
I am not sure how many Lutyens’ reporters have encountered such beasts in their beats in all these years. Not all corporate reporters survive these beasts either.
Some fall in line and are reduced to writing flowery CEO profiles, some cross over to the opposite side and some carry on to fight another day. When an entire group gives up probing on a certain company altogether, that results in blow ups such as Satyam and NSEL scam.
The government has probably done a fraction of what is euphemistically called ‘media management’, corporate affairs, media intelligence etc, so far. It is good that even this has created so much of furore. But, you asked for a prime minister who worked like a corporate CEO. Didn’t you? And, you got what you asked for.
The Lutyens’ reporters have a ready case study in the plight of corporate counterparts if they want to predict the future course of a government that wants to control information flow. The corporate reporters should then take a leaf out of their Lutyen’s counterparts and make a hue and cry about lack of access for independent reporting in the corporate world.