Many years ago, when model Jessica Lal’s killer was acquitted, The Times of India headline said sarcastically, “No one killed Jessica Lal”. Given how the Press Council of India’s (PCI’s) latest report on “paid news” talks about it becoming “pervasive, structured and highly organised” — including the presence of “rate cards” or “packages” for publication of news — and yet doesn’t name any of the guilty newspapers that are paid for publishing news, the only conclusion is that no one published paid news!
Sure, as the PCI says, it has a limited mandate which does not allow it to penalise those found guilty of malpractices, and that in the case of TV news, even this limited mandate doesn’t apply. But surely, naming and shaming was something it could have done quite easily — all of which tells you that the newspapers in the paid news business are so powerful they prevented the PCI from even naming them. As for admonishing or passing strictures, which the PCI says it has the power to do, you can just forget about it. So, even if its suggestion that Section 15(4) of the Press Council Act of 1978 be amended so as to make its directions binding is acted upon, it’s unlikely anything is going to come out of it.
While talking about newspapers publishing paid news, either for politicians or for corporate entities, is one thing, proving it is quite another. Many have suspected, for instance, that the “private treaties” publishers like the Times of India group have are nothing but paid news — the newspaper gets equity in your company in return for free ad space; but since the value of the newspapers’ investment goes up only when your company does well, the allegation is various newspapers tend to publish only good news about their “private treaty” companies. But how do you prove it?
It’s much the same in the case of politicians. Saying they’re all corrupt is easy, but finding the money trail isn’t. Well, the way you’d do it in the case of politicians is to examine their decisions. So, in the case of the 2G licences, you don’t have to actually trace the flow of funds to those in the ministry (that, presumably, is something the CBI, which is investigating the case along with the CVC and the CAG, will do) — all that you need to do is to point out that a handful of companies got licences in 2008 at the same rate they were sold for in mid-2001. Similarly, in the case of mining licenses or any other concessions, if no bids are called for, this is enough to show complicity.
But this is precisely what the PCI’s sub-committee comprising Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and Kalimekolam Sreenivas Reddy did. To begin with, it got a lot of testimonials from people that, in the normal course, you shouldn’t take lightly.
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Since you can argue that this is just one man’s word against the other’s (all newspapers accused of this have denied their involvement), the sub-committee gives examples of such news items. The Ranchi edition of Dainik Jagran (April 13, 2009), for instance, has a story on how the RJD candidate from the Chatra Lok Sabha constituency “is getting support from every class and section”; another story on the same page had another news item of how the JDU candidate from the same constituency would emerge a “clear winner”! Several other such examples are cited — Andhra Jyothi had a story saying the TDP candidate from Narasapuram would get a “huge victory”; another page had a story talking of “victory, victory” for the Congress party candidate in the same constituency. It’s like publishing a Samsung ad on page 1 and a Nokia one on page 11!
The clincher, of course, is The Hindu’s Rural Affairs Editor P Sainath’s story on how three competing Marathi newspapers — Lokmat, Pudhari and Maharashtra Times — used the same words from the beginning to the end to praise Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan. When quizzed by the PCI, Chavan suggested all newspapers may have used the material distributed in press conferences — believe that if you will — and then said, “According to me, the appropriate forum for challenging such complaints is through an election petition in a court of law.”
Despite the sub-committee report documenting all this, the PCI’s 13-page “detailed report” does not mention even one instance cited in the 71 pages of the sub-committee report which, it says, “may remain on record of the PCI as reference document”, nor does it annex the report — the actual report, though, is not on the PCI’s website (it can be accessed at https://bsmedia.business-standard.comwww.scribd.com/doc/ 35436631/The-Buried-PCI-Report-on-Paid-News).
Given this, doesn’t it seem hypocritical for newspapers to go on loudly about the corruption in the Commonwealth Games or the mining scandal of the Reddy brothers? Perhaps we should stick to headlines like “No one made money in Commonwealth Games” or “No one involved in Karnataka mining scam”. It might not tell you anything, but nor does the PCI report.