Seeing Rajdeep Sardesai’s (CNN-IBN) tweets few weeks back has in a way prompted me to write about the media and today’s brand of journalism.
Almost anything worthwhile that has happened in Journalism has come from dissent, almost anything worthwhile. There are very few great established journalists. A lot of us we call journalism is stenography to the powerful. Its not because of the readers and they want want something. Journalists saying that we are actually very good guys just that the readers are so crude. That could be an argument any drug-peddler could make – I am actually a very decent guy, but these are actually the people on the street who want this stuff.
If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. what the reader wants is the last refuge of every intellectually bankrupt editor. When you know damn well that none of this is happening for the reader or the viewer, it is happening for the corporate’s that own this place, Its happening because you need to invent an audience that buys your product, thinks your way, lives the lifestyle you want them to live. It is happening because you need to invent an audience conditioned to your framework. Its happening because the advertisers need it, the sponsors need it. The media are the establishment. It is so interwoven with the establishment that it is had to tell the difference.
You have the cabinet of President of the US which is full of CEOs and top executives of great corporations. the same guys are also media owners. They are linked to the media and have media powers because they have corporate power. Editorial matter as someone put it has turned into a something that you separate ads with.
Take the case of India. Till May 2004, India was shining. The press refused to take note of the farmers suicide and agrarian distress. It kept shouting India is shining and then India stopped shining. 600 million voters went out and showed the world what electoral democracy was. They rejected the media, they rejected the pundits, they rejected the opinion polls, exit polls. They just dumped the whole thing and changed the government. I think it speaks so highly of the people of this country that they didn’t give a damn about what the media thought. They just went out and did their thing democratically.
For the media leaders, the lives of ordinary people makes no sense in their economic calculations and rationale. They cannot buy the products that these guys are selling. So of what interest is their lives to the media owners?
We had this fantastic spectacle recently where a gigantic fashion is going on with over 500 journalists accredited to cover it for a full week. The journalists and cameramen were fighting with each other for spaces threatening to hit each other to claim their space because they need to get the girls coming down in their clothes with just the right angle. The percentage of people who use designer clothes in India according to the fashion industry is something below 0.5%. You had so many journalists to cover that. Its not the journalist's fault. Its what their media wants.
In the Vidarbha area of Maharashtra more than 5000 farmers have committed suicide in the last 6-7 yrs. You work out how many hours that is. Those thousands of farmers were cotton farmers. While the fashion show shows models wearing cotton garments, the guys and their families who grow cotton are killing themselves one after the other because the price of cotton has been destroyed by Indian government on the one hand and by American and EU's subsidies on the other hand.
You do not have a single correspondent of the National Press whose full time job is to cover poverty. And the country which has the largest number of poor people in the planet, newspapers and channels do not think it is important to treat poverty as a news stream. If you are not talking to 70% of your population, how can you reflect what you are asking them to reflect. You do not have news stream called labour, rural. you have decided 70% of your population do not make news. They how can we expect the press to reflect the realities of the countryside. You cover it when 200 people die of plague, then something about them become news. They have to die in sufficiently large numbers to make news.
Earlier the western media earlier saw nothing but reptiles, disease, snake charmers and poverty in India. Right now the Western media find it very difficult to find anything wrong in India. It is the IT/Software superpower, the 4th largest cyber nation in the world as one newspaper wrote. I find it very strange, We would be the 4th largest in anything in the world. We cannot help it. This is something what you call the Tom Friedman view of the world or Tom Friedman brand of journalism. Ain't it wonderful - look at what is happening in India wow!! Where once, nothing nice, nothing decent, nothing noble, nothing good could ever be seen in this country by the media - now it is very difficult to find anything negative in it because the media is doing as it is told. It is doing what it is being asked to do - which is to increasingly handover control of its decision making, Today India is increasingly opening up its banks, the funds and to the WTO. it is to increasingly open up its markets to penetration by MNCs mostly from the Western world. When it is doing all this, how can you say that it is doing something wrong. So that is where the Friedman's school of journalism draws it philosophy from.
Don't confuse the freedom of the press with the freedom of person. My freedom of expression is not guaranteed by corporate media. It is guaranteed by the political process, it is guaranteed by the constitution of this country, it is guaranteed by ordinary people who assert their rights. I would love to see that the media played that role. I want them to. I respect the media because I have a belief and a vision of a media that plays such a role. Do they play such a role? Yes sometimes. increasingly rare and ever more reluctant. There will always be glorious exceptions, there will always be spaces even within the worst newspapers. I believe that in the worst of newspapers and publications, you get the chance occasionally to do what is the minimum job of decent journalism which is to signal the weaknesses in society.
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