INDIAN NEWS MEDIA
From Observer to Participant
Usha M Rodrigues and Maya Ranganathan
Sage Publications;
240 pages; Rs 895
The trouble with this book begins with its title - Indian News Media: From Observer to Participant.
I asked myself, has Indian news media ever been an "observer"? The first newspapers in India were born to aid, abet, participate and exhort others to participate in the fight for freedom from Britain. Their whole purpose was to needle, rile and irritate our British rulers. That is why newspapers set shop and shut down with such speed. Ram Mohan Roy started the first Indian-owned English daily Bengal Gazette in 1816. When that shut down, he launched Sambad Kaumudi, which shut shop in 1823. Before that, in 1822, he started the Persian weekly Mirut-Ul-Akhbar (Mirror of News). This, too, closed eventually. Many of the top publications today, Malayala Manorama, The Times of India (TOI), Mumbai Samachar, Ananda Bazar Patrika (ABP) and The Hindu, among others, are all survivors of the Indian freedom struggle.
And that is where my disagreement with this book begins. Usha M Rodrigues's and Maya Ranganathan's tome is noble in intention - "to examine the role and performance of Indian news media at macro and micro levels". It looks largely at television news media only. That is not surprising considering that India has a world-beating 135 news channels. This has helped spread access to information far and wide, but it has also led to a downward spiral in quality. This trend has triggered a huge amount of largely ill-informed debate on the role, ownership, nature and content of television news media in India. So a book like this is welcome.
But its fundamental argument that news media is now an active participant, thanks to sting operations, political ownership and all the other issues is the one that is flawed. That legacy of righteous, judgemental, hyper-involved reporting was encouraged when news media was born in India. It reduced a little after independence, but re-surfaced after the Emergency. And it has been encouraged by successive governments and their failings, a Press Council of India that had no control over its members, editors who failed to institutionalise systems and processes to protect the freedom of its journalists, and, most of all, by media owners who, till the media was making losses, didn't care. Once the economy opened up, many owners decided that the brands they owned were wonderful tools of influence.
If we wanted to have a news media that knew what good journalism and processes were, we should have insisted that it be neutral even when the English were ruling us. As things stand, Indian news media is genetically coded to fight, argue and question. This is a good thing in general. But a large part of the media does this without enough knowledge, training or resources. That explains why the quality of public debate is so abysmal in India.
This brings me to the second flaw with the book. It completely ignores the industry structure within which news broadcasting operates, in India or globally. In India, too much news television has meant a loss-making industry. Only four news broadcasters manage to keep their heads above water. Across the world, unless it is bundled with entertainment, news is a difficult area in which to make money. What, then, can finance an array of reporters and editors, marketing and ad sales staff that can keep a healthy, good-quality news organisation going? All the blah-blah on liberalisation in the book makes no sense till you know that the financial heart and muscle of the news business is weak. And however much left-liberals may say that "news cannot be a business", the fact is it takes money to gather news. And someone has to fund it. And whoever does that will demand his pound of flesh.
There is a way out, though. The best quality news it seems usually comes from a not-for-profit body, like the BBC, which is funded by the licence fees paid by British taxpayers, or The Guardian, which is run by The Scott Trust. The trust was formed in 1936 in order to "protect the liberal editorial line of the Guardian from interference by future proprietors". There are very few news brands that have this luxury - Al Jazeera, funded by the ruling family of Qatar, is the only other brand one can think of.
A couple of strong not-for-profit news brands, like the BBC, are great benchmarks to keep the entire private news industry in line. In India, unfortunately, the state has played a negative role in the development of an independent news industry by keeping Prasar Bharati, which runs All India Radio and Doordarshan, beholden to the central government. Much of the taxpayer subsidy that goes into running Prasar Bharati is simply wasted in bridging losses and not in creating a world-class news organisation. Globally, evolving democracies with insufficient experience of media freedom need a strong state-brand that is not ruled by favour or fear, to set the tone. That is the big lesson that one can learn from the good news brands.
The third reason the book is a difficult read is unwieldy material. The book has some nice examples, like the one on Sun TV down south or on the Indian and Tamil media's coverage of the Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka. But almost every paragraph has a citation or reference making for a laborious read. Some deft editing and better writing would certainly have helped.
Twitter: @vanitakohlik
