Phonegate has highlighted one of the less savoury sides of the media to the general public. But anyone who is in the business of interacting with the media for a living is less likely to be surprised. A brief foray from journalism into the world of public relations a few years ago revealed the depressing truth that, for these professionals at least, the existence of a slanted or corrupt journalist does not provoke even a frisson of revulsion or dismay. On the contrary, it was viewed as an unremarkable fact of life that had to be factored into (or out of) media plans and strategies.
It is true that, collectively, few professions look good from the outside, though the reality from the inside may be different. But my opinion of journalism was somewhat impaired when viewed from the “outside in” as it were (though prejudices about public relations did not abate significantly either). Yet, that perception had less to do with outright corruption as with a general laziness that seems to afflict the media business, print journalism in particular. In the main, this laziness is harmless — it is restricted to verbatim press release reproductions of speeches and product launches, complete with the promotional prose (in training classes we often had a giggle about the newspapers that could be depended on to copy-paste handouts — including, in one hilarious incident, the name and number of the PR contact).
But it is a different issue altogether when corporate white papers and position papers, written to influence policy — and opinion-makers — to a particular viewpoint, appeared in verbatim reproduction without counter-fact checking or acknowledgement, which is what at least one of Phonegate transcripts suggested was done. It is this willful languor that makes the media uniquely vulnerable to the varied blandishments and inducements of corporations via their ambitious communications representatives.
Handout journalism is not a significantly new development. In the eighties, one newspaper proprietor complained that too many of his reporters were mere “porters of words” than journalists capable of providing a rounded story. The polyester controversy of the same vintage involving Reliance and Bombay Dyeing was a case in point. The battle between the two corporations centred on two rival intermediates for polyester production, DMT and PTA, and considerable energy was expended on lobbying the government for duty reductions. Much of the reporting was limited to recording these duty changes and the masala of the rivalry which reproduced one viewpoint or the other. One magazine even produced a whole cover story, boldly supporting the case of one of the intermediates and explaining why it should have been entitled to more duty relief than the rival intermediate. Some journalists even got new, better-paid jobs on the basis of their coverage. Were there neutral experts around who could explain the technicalities of PTA or DMT? Of course there were, and several hard-working journalists discovered them, but they remained outside the mainstream of the general reporting on the issue.
But corporate reporting was an emerging field at the time and for reporters used to working from government handouts, it required a new orientation in thinking. Before that, even the “exclusives” from Raisina Hill were ministry handouts that reporters were obliged to reproduce in the interests of maintaining access to information. This is the way the game is played everywhere in the world and though it was not the happiest of compromises, it was something that readers understood as long as government dominated the economy in India.
The nineties changed the dynamics of business news significantly. First, there was more news to cover because of the surge in private investment. In response, the newspaper business aggressively expanded — more new offerings, coverage, supplements and editions (the business news channel boom in the 2000s was an extension of this). Increasingly, however, transparent disclosure norms by regulators shrank the pot of “exclusives” and added to the pressures of filling pages or airtime on a daily basis in a business in which revenues flow in with a time lag. This irrationally exuberant expansion has, inevitably, taken its toll on journalistic vigilance. One consequence of this can be seen in the paid news trend in which media houses have reduced themselves to being passive mediums for someone else’s message. The other is the emergence of the personality cult in which the news gatherer or analyst metamorphoses into a news maker. Given these developments, Phonegate was probably waiting to happen.
