Category: BLOGS

By Ranjona Banerji

 

I feel strongly about plagiarism by journalists. You might argue that if an inexperienced journalist does it, it’s a mistake. And if a seasoned journalist does it, it’s laziness. But frankly, whatever the excuse, it’s stealing. But more than the perpetrator, plagiarism affects the news organisation where it happens. It affects their credibility and tells its reading public how much or little it cares for principles and ethics.

 

Some take the high road and suspend or sack the thief, no matter how highly regarded they may be. Some think a little tap on the knuckles is enough. Some decide that to apologise is okay. Some decide to apologise with the rider that the robbery was “inadvertent” should make everyone happy. However any writer knows that there is no such thing as inadvertent stealing. When you pick up whole paragraphs from someone else without attribution, you are passing someone else’s work as your own. How far can that be allowed?

 

Indian news organisations need to take a closer look at this if they want to hold their heads high.

 

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What makes a news site and what doesn’t? At the very least, it should contain journalists. I am repeatedly directed to Opindia.com by supporters of the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a news source. However, although Opindia may call itself a news and analysis site, with “Journalism free from journalists’ bias and incompetence”, by what reckoning does it provide “journalism” when its ardent and passionate creators appear to have day jobs which are not in any news organisations?

 

Opindia.com has every right to support the BJP, to take on journalists it does not like, to list mistakes and prejudice by the media as they see it, and even for its various founders to troll whoever they want.

 

But it has no right to claim that it is a news site or that it provides any journalism to its readers unless all the people who work on it are full-time journalists. How many reporters does it hire? How far are they spread across India and the world? How many sub-editors does it have? How many news and photo agencies does it subscribe to? Who is its editor? Does it have an ombudsman? And why are there so few bylines?

 

Thanks to television bringing journalism up close and personal, everyone in India thinks that they know how the media operates. And everyone who has a friend or a relative who is a journalist is also an expert, without having ever spent even one day in a newsroom.

 

One current little squabble on Twitter is over a journalist – who Opindia does not like — discovering and making public that a founder of Opindia.com works for a pharmaceutical company. Many have disapproved of the journalist tagging the employer in these tweets. Certainly, attacking someone’s livelihood is dangerous.

 

But there are some problems here. If you attack people on social media, are you representing your employer or yourself and to what extent are the two separable? Is having an anonymous handle enough leeway? And also, if you yourself have tagged someone else’s employer to complain about them, is it fair to weep for justice when the same thing is done to you?

 

I for instance have been called names by someone who claimed to work for a very well-known hotel chain in India. How do I feel confident about visiting any of the hotels it owns and manages when I know that this man works there?

 

For those out there who are upset with journalists who you feel are unfair to the BJP and overly fair to the Congress and AAP, just as an example, there are websites like Swarajya which are dedicated to rightwing politics with many reputed journalists on their pay roll. DailyO provides you a mix of opinion, including strong right-wing views. News channels like Times Now find it hard to criticise BJP governments. India Today TV has some high profile BJP sympathisers on its employee list. Across all media in India, there is a mix of news and opinion to be found, which covers all viewpoints. It is worth a little application of mind to not fall for excitable party sympathisers pretending to be journalists. Read this or that website by all means and with full excitement and agreement. Just know it for what it is.

 

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And here’s an eye-opening report on how journalists who investigate corruption in India often pay with their lives: http://www.indiaspend.com/making-sense-of-breaking-news/27-indian-journalists-investigating-corruption-murdered-over-24-years-77424

 

By Ranjona Banerji

 

Thanks to satellite television (or is it just mainly Tata Sky?), anyone tired of the nightly fisticuffs on primetime news, can switch to the tranquil and focused “foreign” news channels now available, many of which may be government PR machines but are still soothing. NHK World from Japan will give you local news as well as informative wildlife documentaries and snippets about Japanese culture (also a lot of Shinzo Abe). France 24 and TVMonde (wonderful to see it again after a hiatus) mix news with features and, especially TVMonde, with serials. DW from Germany has a strong focus on world news. And so on. Sometimes they can be a bit like Doordarshan of the old days but more stylish.

 

None of them are full of the sensationalist anger of that marks our main news channels in any language. The exception seems to be the World is One Network (WION), started by the Zee network. WION has so far eschewed the usual TV news route and concentrated on news itself. It shows focuses more on one-on-one interviews rather than 20-member panel discussions. The “world” part is evident in the attention given to world news and the varied accents of its anchors. Most of the news seems to be from agency feeds. However, it is also easy to watch and less breathless and senseless than many of its kin.

 

Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha TV of course remain the grown-up person’s news channels and therefore it is largely unsurprising that the nightly escapades of Arnab Goswami and his band of merry “open debaters” rule the ratings. We know that the inner child throwing a tantrum is the best role model for news television in our times. On Thursday night, news anchors were breathing fire about some Aam Aadmi Party MLA having sex or some such – I must confess I could not conjure up enough interest in this matter. The discussion on Rajya Sabha TV anchored by Arfa Khanum on the implications of the Supreme Court’s verdict on the Tatas and the Singur land acquisition was far more interesting and perhaps significant than politicians having sex. At any rate, land acquisition is likely to have more impact and affect more people. You can tell that I am really old.

 

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Is it worth questioning whether too much attention is being given to the Aam Aadmi Party and its government in Delhi? Its everyday problems cannot be of great significance to the whole of India, surely. The Delhi-centric view of life, especially when it comes to its municipal problems, is not really that entertaining or informative. And since distance has been reduced by communication, it is unfair to saddle the whole of India with the doings or travails of one city government.

 

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Most of the media – and in this I count myself as well – was enraged by marathon runner OP Jaisha’s accusations against the athletic federation and her own coach that not enough water was provided to her during the Olympics. The most noisy debate was of course on Times Now where Goswami and his chosen guests went to town, attacking the athletics federation and coming up with proof that the runner had been badly treated.

 

Sadly, it now turns out that the poor runner had overstated the case and that there was enough water provided by the organisers along the whole route. No apologies will be forthcoming of course but for those interested, the Indian Express has done an excellent series on how some athletes could not even match their qualification times when they competed in Rio.

 

By Ranjona Banerji

 

How do we deal with the problem of deadlines? When I started working in journalism, I used to do my subbing in the day and writing at night. Those were the days of typewriters so you often did multiple rewrites and wasted a lot of paper. Also I worked in magazines for seven years which meant each story was about 3000 words long! After your third rewrite various editors went through your copy, slashed and ripped it apart so the final product came after several trees had been chopped down. It was difficult therefore to start writing just before deadline. Or, perhaps I was just more disciplined in my youth!

 

Years of working in a newspaper corrupted me. Now I find it impossible to write until I have reached deadline. The rush is everything; the brain does not work without it. For the past four years, I have had two deadlines to meet on Tuesdays. This column by about 11-ish in the am and for Mid-day, for which I was allowed leeway until 6 pm. There have been times I confess when I only sent that one by 5.55pm.

 

Now Mid-Day has thrown me a googly and asked me to deliver the column at 11 am on Tuesday. That’s impossible because it would clash with this one. Any sensible person would write the Mid-Day column on Monday. So, imagining myself to be sensible, I tried that for three weeks. Opened the laptop on Monday evening, fiddled around on Facebook liking random photographs of cats and children, checked some fights on Twitter, outraged about this and that, saved a Word document with the relevant name, wrote a couple of lines, deleted them, changed the subject and gave up after half an hour.

 

No inspiration was my excuse. But I knew the truth. It was impossible to write so far ahead of the deadline. My mind just refused to cooperate. So now I have to wake up a little earlier than usual on Tuesday morning and get to work.

 

I can only pat myself on the back that I am not as bad as some colleagues who kept editions waiting and the press on hold as they finished their columns: The joys of being editor in the days before the media was corporatised! But almost everyone I know struggles to get down to work without the deadline looming. Every newsroom I have been in has tried to grapple with this problem. Meetings have been held, deadlines fixed, work timings changed…

 

But everyone knows the truth. Getting a journal to print is a finely tuned process but there are plenty of loopholes. If advertising matter has not come in for a page, you get a little leeway. The order in which pages have to be released gives you leeway. The section into which your page falls gives you leeway. And in these little gaps, great genius work may emerge!

 

And then there are all those little lies… When I was editor of Sunday Mid-Day years ago, there were many complaints from every department that the editorial deadlines were delaying the paper. A management consultant, full of all kinds of the then latest Japanese management jargon, had been hired to streamline processes and he was put on my case. We had weekly meetings with editorial, marketing, pre-production, press, distribution and circulation.

 

Unfortunately for every department but editorial, it turned out that they had added 45 minutes to their timeframes to cover up their own mistakes, thus cutting into editorial time. At the end of this three-month exercise, I managed to get our editorial deadlines extended by one hour, and more if there was a serious newsbreak!

 

So how long do you think I’m going to keep waking up early on a Tuesday morning?

 

By Ranjona Banerji

 

This is probably just me, but a time seems to be approaching when TV journalists in India will need to “reset” their idea of what constitutes “news”. Right now, everything is seen as a pro-wrestling match. The announcer gets the audience all excited and then spokespersons from Indian political parties enter the arena and start bashing each other. It serves no purpose other than gross entertainment and even that has started to pall.

 

How many people actually watch these “primetime debates” for their news content? And where is the news in them? Each spokesperson defends their top leader and implies, insinuates or openly abuses leaders of other parties. We know all this. Thanks to TV news for exposing the extreme pettiness of our politicians. Lesson absorbed. We’ve got it now. Move on.

 

On Thursday night, Bhupendra Chaubey on CNN-News18 had a one-on-one interview with Muzaffar Baig of the PDP, in coalition with the BJP in Jammu & Kashmir. It was a good interview in that Baig was actually allowed to speak and made some interesting points. Chaubey did not try to show off that he knew more than Baig. And, at least you could understand what he was saying without getting distracted by 9000 people yelling, putting their hands up and/or sneering around him. It is almost impossible to concentrate on what the main feature is, if the screen is constantly twitching with extraneous matter.

 

On NDTV, an inordinate amount of time was spent on Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s run-in with some women of the BJP’s Mahila Wing in Punjab. We understand that most news channels are based in Delhi and that both India Against Corruption and the Aam Aadmi Party were carefully nurtured by TV journalists until they turned against them, but is it necessary to follow every move of Kejriwal’s so assiduously? Nothing that extraordinary happened in this so-called “attack” by an opposing party.

 

What was really annoying was while this “single column” news was getting airtime, the news scrolling below was that BJP president Amit Shah’s meeting in Gujarat was disrupted by members of the Patidar movement and supporters of Patel leader, Hardik Patel. Chairs were chucked around from what we could see (I would have thought that would have been a good fit for the pro-wrestling idea of news). However, we could not understand a word of what the reporter at the site was saying, so we were left with half a story if that. (Does TV not have editors?)

 

Back then to the obsession with Kejriwal. Sometimes you have to agree with accusations that Delhi-based journalists are, well, obsessed with Delhi. Notice how much coverage we get of V Narayanasamy or K Chandrashekhar Rao or Laxmikant Parsekar or Okram Ibobi Singh, to name just a few. Some of these are chief ministers of full states, not just trumped up Union Territories.

 

Increasingly, news television is starting to resemble those old Films Division news bulletins we were forced to watch at the movies in the 1970s. And then this minister said this and that minister did that. Where is the science news? The health news? The environment news? The business news (business news channels mainly discuss the stock markets and finance so no luck there)? Is there nothing else in life except BJP versus Congress versus AAP?

 

Okay, end of diatribe. I write this in hope that some journalist somewhere in TV’s LaLaland will start looking up the meaning of “news”.

 

By Ranjona Banerji

 

The Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, appeared, for all practical purposes, as a model for a large corporation to advertise the launch of its new phone service. How has the media reacted to that? I have seen several jokes on social media. I have seen a few business articles on how the claims made by Reliance Jio are somewhat misleading. But on the propriety of the prime minister modelling for a private company there has been an almost ominous silence. Some official justification was made after social media asked the questions but propriety is different from technicality. A few editorials have been written questioning the PM’s decision but certainly no high-pitched TV news debates from all our bristling Ultra-Nationalists. I leave you with this question: suppose it was any other prime minister from any other party?

 

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Several commentators from within Kashmir, writing about the turmoil in the Valley which has now been going on for two months, have mentioned the tenor of TV news anchors as one contributing factor to the anger and violence. The media however will do what the media will do, regardless of the consequences, but it bears asking whether ill-informed TV journalists bent only on their personal aggrandisement are serving any purpose here. The media does not need to find answers; it needs to expose the problem and it needs to ask the questions. Kashmir is too complicated to be seen merely through a patriotic prism. These TV journalists from our most patriotic news channels might perhaps like to ask themselves where the national interest lies. If indeed, they ever question themselves.

 

On the issue of Kashmiri separatists – ever a subject to get TV’s blood boiling with rage – the ruling BJP government has recently come up with two contradictory statements. Jitendra Singh, who holds various portfolios, has said that the Indian government has to supply security to Kashmiri separatists to foil any possible assassination bids by Pakistan, which if successful will only give Pakistan more fodder to foment trouble in Kashmir. The Union Defence minister Manohar Parrikar has said that the security should be withdrawn.

 

A prominent news anchor from one of the non-ultra-patriotic channels asked a BJP spokesperson about these two contradictory statements. His answer was “there is no regulated policy” on these statements. What does that mean? Is there no need for further questioning? Do the people of India not deserve to know why the Government of India has no “regulated policy” on the security for Kashmiri separatists? Did we get answers to these questions? Of course not. The BJP spokesperson wandered off somewhere else and that was the end of that.

 

Incidentally, how many TV debates have you seen on the number of Indian fishermen now languishing in Pakistani jails? Evidently, patriotism cannot possibly stretch that far.

 

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In the good news section, it is great to see that India’s Para Olympians are getting so much news coverage. I can I think safely say that this is the first time that these athletes are getting their due. It is also true that they have done extremely well in Rio and definitely a whole lot better than our Olympian athletes.

 

And if you missed it, here is a shame-inducing story on what differently-abled athletes have to go through in India:

http://indianexpress.com/article/sports/sport-others/spurred-by-jibe-16-yrs-ago-devendra-jhajharia-hurls-javelin-into-record-books-3031632/

 

By Ranjona Banerji

 

I spend much of my time on social media and even among my family and friends defending journalism and the behaviour of journalists. I take pains to explain that there is no such thing as “the media” in the sense that this is one entity that thinks and works alike and in tandem.

 

But there are times when I fail completely and sadly, these times are usually when television news anchors dominate the discourse. So where are we now? Ever since the attack on Uri by Pakistani terrorists, either state or non-state actors, our esteemed TV news anchors have been frothing at the mouth, calling for war and more. If I was a Pakistani, I would be laughing my head off because I could see the biggest thorn in my side revealing its weaknesses and its ideas. In my limited understanding of both “the media”, geopolitics, diplomacy and even warfare, this nightly media warmongering does not seem like a wise policy. Irresponsible is the word that comes to mind.

 

You would perhaps have thought that moustachioed retired army bigwigs would know better than to give away ideas and their emotions on national television or perhaps that phrase means nothing because satellite television combined with the internet means almost nothing is merely “national” any more.

 

You might even imagine that TV news anchors would know better than to ask “What should our strategy against Pakistan be?” You would of course be wrong. “Our strategy” is only and only to have the loudest and most “patriotic” screaming match possible. I heard part of a long editorial comment from Rahul Shivshankar of NewsX the other night. His main target it seemed was not Pakistan or the terrorists it has nurtured. His main anger was directed at what he called “peaceniks”, a phrase I have not heard since the 1960s and 1970s when hippies ruled pop culture. I doubt that Shivshankar was either born or sentient at the time.

 

It seems that in this sort of a mindset, when war has to be decided on new channels, the question du jour is: how dare anyone conceive of peace? How dare anyone decide that diplomacy had a place in international relations, how dare a “peacenik” even exist and not have his or bloodied disembodied head placed on a stake in the middle of the town square for all to be warned of the dangers of counselling against war? Why should medieval psychopaths in Game of Thrones have all the fun, eh?

 

Yet, the role of Pakistan is apparently less important than that of “peaceniks”. Go figure. I mention Shivshankar but life has not been much different on any other news channel at night, including Times Now, the most patriotic of them all with due apologies to India Today TV. The aspects of the Uri attack that would conventionally call for journalism have barely been tackled on television but been left to newspapers. And in newspapers, strangely, there is Other News! How anti-national of them!

 

I am unaware if these news anchors are indeed “patriots” or anything else. I question their understanding of war and of international relations. I question their understanding of “covert” operations, given the way they talk about it so easily. I question their judgment calls. I question their knowledge about nuclear warfare. I question their ability to read, assimilate and assess.

 

So far, thanks to news television, we have informed Pakistan that war is imminent, that diplomacy is wrong, that we are going to get involved in “covert” operations and “hybrid” warfare. In fact, I would reckon we have walked straight into Pakistan’s trap. If you look at it the other way, it suits someone high up in the Indian government to have this noise and distraction from whatever’s happening within India. Either way, then, news television is both the prey and the pawn.

 

As I finish writing this, I hear someone on India Today TV say and through all this, “No one knows what is on Prime Minister Modi’s mind”!

 

Although, you might suspect if you were me, it is the job of the journalist to find out what is on Prime Minister Modi’s mind. This is an admission then perhaps, of someone who is not a journalist? I only ask the question.

 

And dare I use the word “irresponsible” again?

 

By Ranjona Banerji

 

The news website Quint, started by entrepreneur Raghav Behl who also once owned Network 18, put out a story on Thursday that Indian Special Forces crossed the Pakistan border and killed 20 terrorists to avenge the Uri attack. This is a story right up our wear-on-your-sleeves patriotism currently on trend. Times Now apparently (this is hearsay evidence, I did not watch our Chief Patriot on Fire) was also gung-ho about this operation, though why it did not break this “exclusive” story, I cannot say.

 

The rest of the media and this includes our other patriotic news channels rubbished Quint’s story. Whether that is because the story is bogus or whether the rest were jealous, I cannot say either.

 

But I can say that what is a very serious problem between two neighbouring states (one of which has consistently attacked India in a number of ways) has turned into a Who’s The Better Patriot battle between competing TV news channels. It’s almost like a children’s game, apart from being so bizarre and bereft of responsibility.

 

NewsX continues to scream and shout about leftists not being up to its anchors’ ideas of ‘patriotism” and India Today TV made much of a “top secret” meeting chaired by the prime minister. Although the fact of the meeting should not be unusual because one would expect several such meetings after the Uri attack; significantly our patriots do not know what happened at the meeting so close but no cigar.

 

If there ever was a divide between print and TV journalism, it is most evident now. Matters of war and international relations are serious. The complete lack of depth in our public discourse since TV is the dominant media is now proving to be dangerous. This is not the usual complaint of glamour and frivolity getting more attention than “serious” news. It is far worse. This is “serious” news being treated like it was a Hollywood or Bollywood action blockbuster.

 

As for the Quint story about the “revenge” for Uri, it is most intriguing. If we work on the principle that journalists must carry any story they get (bypassing the New York Times’s famous motto of “All the news that’s fit to print”), then Quint had to carry its “exclusive”. But a little further thought takes you into the mindset of whoever leaked the information to Quint. Usually most countries keep their covert operations, well, covert, for self-evident reasons. So why was this operation revealed? To buy a little street cred with war-hungry patriotic votebanks? Or was it just a story sold to a credulous reporter? Despite the backlash, Quint has stuck to its story, so perhaps its sources want to ensure that this idea is out there even if it threatens future covert ops by India.

 

I sincerely urge my fellow journalists to watch the Barry Levinson film, Wag the Dog. A little cynicism is necessary if you want to be a journalist. I phrase it like that because I feel there is some hope yet for my compatriots in the world of television news.

 

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There’s war, there’s Syria, there’s racial tension, there’s the fight between Donald Trump and the sentient world and then there’s “Brangelina”. First, cynically, one has to give thanks that this awful portmanteau word will no longer be heard. Second, how important is it to anybody that Hollywood actors Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are about to divorce? Actually, extremely important if you consider the amount of space and time this split has been given in the media. There was plenty excitement when Pitt left Friends’ star Jennifer Aniston for Jolie. But that was over a decade ago and basically, what is so surprising about Hollywood stars not being married to each other any more?

 

Was it one of the Gabor sisters who said she was a housekeeper because every time she got divorced, she kept the house?

 

By Ranjona Banerji

 

How disappointing life must be for our so very patriotic TV news anchors and their “guests”, handlebar generals and all, who were clamouring for a war with Pakistan after the attack on the army base at Uri. The Prime Minister of India, who promised his followers strong and stern action against our troublesome neighbour before he was elected, decided that the way to beat Pakistan most effectively was to compete with it on who gets rid of poverty first.

 

But fear not. Our patriotic colleagues in the world of TV news are past masters at the art of shifting gear (not much of an art actually when anyone who drives a vehicle can do it, but perhaps not with so much shameless aplomb). Immediately we went from war talk to fulsome and lavish praise about how Narendra Modi was now a “world leader” and a “statesman”.

 

Those Patriotic TV Journalists with a little brain (this is a reference to AA Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, for those who are ill-read as well) may recall that they already called Modi all that and more when he invited Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif to his coronation, when Modi zipped around the world in 300 days in his first year as PM and when he dropped into Sharif’s birthday party in December last year. However, selective amnesia is useful and short-term memory loss is essential for TV news anchors, especially when you want to make some point, any point to stir the pot night after night on television.

 

Modi having now declared a war on poverty (shades of Indira Gandhi’s “garibi hatao”, anyone?), our TV anchors were left with their own problems. The next idea that came to them was “meetings”. These are secret things that happen in government and high places. So everyone informed us that Modi was going to have a “top level” and “secret” meeting about the Indus Valley Treaty – a water-sharing deal between India and Pakistan which was worked effectively since 1960.

 

It’s quite remarkable how many ways you can find to say, “The prime minister is going to hold a secret and top level meeting” (see how I switched those words around?), but they managed it.

 

Since then the meeting has been held but I don’t know what happened. It was secret.

 

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Meanwhile, the newspapers have quite cogently explained the Indus water agreement and how it works, for those interested. The upshot seems to be that the best course for India would be to use water which it is allowed to but has not done so far. The best course apparently is not to stop water to Pakistan. But as we all know, newspapers are nowhere near Patriotic enough.

 

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External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj gave Pakistan a good answer at the United Nations General Assembly. Sadly for her however she will not be hailed forever as a world leader or a statesman by our Patriots because we can’t have so many of them from the same government in the Modi era.

 

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There was an interesting discussion on Rajya Sabha TV the other day, on the way the problems with television news brought up the fascinating point of calling a discussion “live” when the same guest appears at the same time on another show wearing different clothes. Everyone laughed, no one had an answer.

 

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Happy Birthday to Google! The search engine celebrates its 18^th birthday today. There can be no doubt that Google revolutionised the way we work and for journalists at least, there is no better friend! If only TV people used it more often to find synonyms for “secret” and “top level”, no?

 

By Ranjona Banerji

 

A fortnight since the attack by Pakistani terrorists on the army camp at Uri and we have not changed the discourse in television media. The calls for war are not just getting louder but are also careering from outrage to outrage in way that makes a mockery not just of journalism but also of good sense.

 

A good number of our TV news anchors are now wearing a permanent expression of almost mystified fury: how dare anyone criticise their cries for war? Does no one want to avenge the deaths of Indian soldiers? Unfortunately for them, two words come to mind: Cynical and Disingenuous. It is evident that their war hysteria is carefully calibrated and aimed at increasing viewership. Their pain is bogus. Therefore, Cynical and therefore, Disingenuous.

 

For how long people are going to fooled by this strategy is another question. There are other issues that would ordinarily interest journalists but not apparently the Patriots in news television. The deaths of the entire Bansal family after AK Bansal was jailed during a corruption investigation contains many levels of interest: top of the pile is Bansal’s accusation that he was tortured by a CBI officer who boasted of his closeness to BJP president Amit Shah. There is also the human interest story of four people in one family committing suicide. How many prime time TV discussions have we had on this?

 

You may point out that it is unfair to ask such a question. Each media outlet has the right to make a judgment call and decide which issue it wants to highlight. That is 100 per cent correct. But this is a branch of the media which headlines the same sort of question to just about anyone: “Why has X not spoken out against Pakistan?”, “Why has this Pakistani person not condemned his own country” and such.

 

Any journalist who wants an answer to those questions needs to go and ask the persons concerned what they think. It is easier however for an anchor to rant and rave, then call up a few people who also rant and rave, to go on Twitter and report on anyone else is ranting and raving or not ranting and raving.

 

This is in fact the normal tactic of an internet troll, to accuse someone you follow of not speaking on this subject or that. The accusation is made without research or reference. A troll though is looking to annoy and provoke. What is a TV anchor purporting to be at the forefront of news trying to do? Further the cause of the Fourth Estate by inventing issues?

 

The monsoon in India has been destructive and inconsistent across the country. Do we perhaps need a primetime debate on environmental degradation and water and the future? If you want a further “peg”, you can try the Paris climate deal. How many discussions on reworking the Indus water treaty with Pakistan focused on the diminishing reserves in the Indus basin aquifers – something that will affect not just the subcontinent but also the planet?

 

How many primetime discussions have we seen on all the claims being made by various regions across India that they are now “open defecation-free”? All of us who live in India usually don’t have to do more than look out of the window to know the truth. How about the continued abuse of Tribals in Chhatisgarh or is that too anti-national a subject to discuss? Farmers? Have they magically become better off since we last discussed them? Black  money? Defence deals to friends of the government? The state of telecom? Jayalalitha’s health? What went wrong at Uri?

 

No. Evidently, the invented absurd is all we are interested in.

 

By Ranjona Banerji

 

A “brave” reporter from CNN News18 phoned a Pakistani police officer in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, claimed to be his boss and found out that India did attack several spots in POK, kill and wound several jihadis and that these jihadis were supported by the Pakistan army.

 

This was obviously played up by the channel as “proof” that India did conduct “surgical strikes” inside the Line of Control because it had been confirmed by this one police official, even if the Pakistani authorities were denying anything happened.

 

Some questions: sting journalism itself is questionable. Journalistic ethics demands that you declare who you are to the person you are questioning. Journalists are not interrogators either authorised by or employed as spies by the Indian state. There is another intriguing aspect to this “sting” – it suggests that the news channel did not believe the Indian Army’s statement on the strike. The news channel of course would like to dress it up as trying to gather evidence for the naysayers and doubters within India and for the Pakistani authorities. It shows a distressing naivete about the way geopolitics works or of the complicated nature of Indo-Pak relations.

 

Not surprisingly this “coup” was not picked up by rival TV channels or by newspapers as a major event.

 

In fact, what has overtaken everything else is Bollywood. Because no matter what happens in the world it is vital that film stars, directors, producers, extras, dance directors, make-up artists, singers and stunt doubles et cetera comment on it. For Indian news television, this remains the biggest question of the hour: Patriotism for Indian news anchors is Bollywood saying all Pakistanis should go somewhere else. And for Pakistanis in India, here is a new kind of Tebbitt Test: if you want to work in India, publicly denounce Pakistan and its actions. What was seen as wrong in the UK in the 1990s when put forward as proof of loyalty for Pakistanis and Indians by a Conservative politician is now seemingly proper for Indians to use on Pakistanis. Talk about double standards.

 

Actually, what is the use? Television in times of patriotism dances to a very different tune. Vineet Jain is Managing Director of Bennett Coleman and Company Limited, owner of The Times of India and Times Now among other properties. This is what he had to say on Twitter on October 6, 2016:

 

“By supporting Pak artists v come out stronger globally.we get known as a liberal&peaceful nation.We isolate Pak even more among pak citizens”

 

Contrast this with what Times Now and its editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami and his colleagues have been doing every day on the news channel. Jain’s tweet is wise and wide-seeing. It looks at the importance of soft power and its undeniable influence on choices. It is a long-term view on how to “infiltrate” Pakistan with culture and thought. Perhaps such subtlety of thought is beyond Times Now or it just does not care. As BCCL already informed us a while ago, the organisation is a “federal structure” where every editor is free to project whatever point of view he or she wants. Sigh. If only that were completely true.

 

Meanwhile, forcing Pakistanis in Bollywood or random film people in India to denounce Pakistan is just smoke and mirrors. An attempt by Times Now to create drama and more noise than the next news channel one touch on the remote away.

 

So, luckily, is the viewer’s choice to save himself or herself from idiocy.

 

By Ranjona Banerji

 

This is Trevor Noah, the South Africa-born comedian who took over the satirical Daily Show from Jon Stewart, quoted in Time Magazine: “There is a certain level of naivete when you say Hillary Clinton is worse than Donald Trump. I think that is a very dangerous position to be in. And I think the press has gotten to a place where they are realising that it’s about truth and not neutrality.”

 

The discussion of course is about the US presidential election and the media’s need to be “fair” to Donald Trump which is what Noah calls a “false equivalence”.

 

And is this not where we are when you consider Indian news television and its attitude to Pakistan? This week, some of our prominent news anchors were full of rage and pleasure that well-known Pakistani journalist and columnist Cyril Almeida had been barred from leaving Pakistan by an angry Pakistani government. It exposed to them all that was wrong with Pakistan. And what had Almeida done? He had discovered and written about a meeting between the Pakistan civilian government and the Pakistani army about Pakistan’s increasing international isolation and the need to fight militancy. The government apparently told the military not to interfere in the government’s attempts to fight terrorist organisations which operate within Pakistan.

 

For Indian news anchors, Almeida promptly became a hero because he had exposed the lies of his army over militancy within Pakistan – which led to attacks on India. Of course what these news anchors – I cannot and will not call them journalists – failed, deliberately or otherwise, to see is that Almeida was doing exactly what any journalist would do. He was questioning claims made by the establishment. Now imagine if our Indian news anchors lived and worked in Pakistan? Immediately, Almeida would be tarred and abused as an anti-national. Irony of course is alien to news television in India and so is common sense or even in too many cases nowadays, simple intelligence.

 

This is what Dawn had to say in its strong and well-argued defence of Almeida and journalism: “There are times in a news organisation’s history that determine its adherence to the highest principles of journalism – its duty to inform the public objectively, accurately and fearlessly…

 

“Journalism has a long and glorious tradition of keeping its promise to its audience even in the face of enormous pressure brought to bear upon it from the corridors of power. Time has proved this to be the correct stance. Some of the most contentious yet historically significant stories have been told by news organisations while resisting the state’s narrow, self-serving and ever-shifting definition of ‘national interest’.”

 

You can see those key words there: “the state’s narrow, self-serving and ever-shifting definition of ‘national interest’.”

 

How are we doing with that problem here in India? We are so proud of our democracy compared to Pakistan, are we not? And yet, you have a Pakistani newspaper up against worse odds than us, standing up for the principles of journalism while we sit back and watch various degrees of capitulation to “national interest” in India.

 

The same news channels which applaud Dawn and Almeida are unable to turn that same scanner on their own government and its organisations. They attack any Indian journalist who does what Almeida has done. They stand on their pulpits and collect cheap “patriotism” points, pretending that they are our main defenders of Indian borders. It is becoming painful to watch and to accept, as they go against every tenet of journalism.

 

What you feel is shame. Terrible, excoriating, miserable shame.