Till the current downturn in advertising, a common criticism about the Indian press used to be that it had become more of a money machine than a publishing industry. Another criticism still is that publishers are more willing to criticise governments than companies, because more and more see themselves as being more in the advertising business than the news business. There are two problems with these perceptions. First, there aren’t that many publishers who made serious money, even in the boom days. And second, while publishers retain the theology of an adversarial role vis-a-vis governments, you get a different picture when you take a count of how many of them have got Padma awards and Rajya Sabha seats.
Still, it is undeniable that publishers are in increasingly open partnership with companies. Conscious that low-priced titles depend on advertising for 90 per cent of their revenue, advertisers have become bold enough to move from banning critical publications to demanding favourable coverage; and far too many publishers are playing along. So when a Satyam or some other scandal explodes in everyone’s face, the question is whether the press has stopped looking under the carpet, for fear of finding an advertiser there.
One reason is that India’s newspaper tradition is broadsheet—responsible, staid, pro-establishment. A more informal, gutsy and muckracking tabloid press barely exists—there used to be Blitz, and now there is Tehelka (which has switched to magazine format). The Indian Express retains its scandal-hunting instincts, and there is the restrained but promising beginning by Mail Today, which seems to be willing to call a spade a spade (but not, in true tabloid style, a ‘bloody shovel’). Tehelka has caused enough earthquakes already, and Blitz had a good run in its time, but I venture to suggest that Indian Express has less impact now than it used to, which is a pity. What if we had many more such publications, which are not chary of fighting and even losing the odd libel suit in pursuit of the mission of unearthing wrongdoing and scandal? Such publications may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but they can serve a public purpose; remember that the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke on the Drudge Report.
Tabloidisation can go wrong, of course. In Britain, the dominance of the tabloids has meant less coverage of domestic and international politics, and the predominance of column inches on celebrities, crime and sports. In the US, the tabloids’ role has been taken over by supermarket sheets like National Enquirer, which have little to commend themselves. And during the French Revolution, Paris was alive with scandal sheets that had the most scurrilous reports on Marie Antoinette, often accompanied by pornographic images. Without this street press, it is debatable whether a climate conducive for the Revolution could have been created. But our own TV channels, when they want to strike out in a different direction, go looking for ‘haunted house’ stories.
Despite such risks, it is hard to argue that there is no need for a media rainbow in which all publishers do not depend quite so much on ad money for their survival, and at least some of which are fundamentally anti-establishment in orientation. Today, even if Tehelka does a well-documented report on how many cases the government has filed and then dropped (for want of evidence) against members of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India, no one takes notice. It is almost as though no one is interested in the facts, because everyone already has an opinion, or because no one expects better from the government anyway. But that is all the more reason why there should be more such publications.
