Category: COLUMNS

By Ranjona Banerji

And so we reach our most ridiculous news headlines via Twitter – so far. A bizarre and somewhat corny marital spat between Union minister Shashi Tharoor, his wife Sunanda Pushkar and a Pakistani journalist, Mehr Tarar. Tharoor is not new to Twitter controversies. He has got into trouble for a jokey tweet about travelling “cattle class” to please the “holy cows” of his parties. His involvement in the shortlived Kochi IPL team and that of Pushkar was revealed by Lalit Modi on Twitter and cost him a ministry position.

But this was something else. Tharoor, who has over 2 million followers on Twitter, was suddenly found to be tweeting odd messages from Tarar, claiming undying love on whatnot. Then he issued a tweet saying his account had been hacked. Then his wife popped up saying the account was not hacked and that she had put up those tweets, based on messages sent on the Blackberry messaging service to her husband. Then Pushkar gave a series of interviews claiming that Tarar was an ISI agent who was stalking her husband, then she denied some of them, then she didn’t. Tarar jumped in, defending herself and threatened to sue Pushkar.

All in all, another fine mess for Tharoor and a hilarious day for the world of Twitter and the media. Getting into the personal lives of celebrities is normally the domain of film publications and even they pussyfoot around our precious film stars (for fear of being denied the next interview) or upsetting some PR person. But for the Economic Times to put this Twitter fight on the front page is certainly unusual. Thursday’s ET had this headline, above the fold: “Tharoor gets into a Border Love Row”.

By Friday, every newspaper had the story. The Times of India dedicated a whole page to the matter – and this when there was one more horrific rape in the national capital, the AAP was involved some questionable form of vigilante justice and Rahul Gandhi was or was not going to be the Congress nominee for prime minister. Now we all know all about Pushkar, Tarar and Tharoor – or at least I know far more about them than I ever wanted to.

What to make into news… Journalists use the term “judgment call”. So how much news was in a spat between a husband, a wife and another woman? Yes, the husband is famous, the wife is high profile and the other woman was a great admirer of the husband. But was this front-page worthy for anyone, apart from the salacious nature of the story and the fact that the wife made it public? It is difficult to make a value judgment here but it is easy to see that this will not be an exception. It is likely to become the rule.

Once again, social media is changing the equation as far as the traditional media is concerned. I am holding back from using a cliché like “interesting times” but I do concede that this particular story is quite funny, proving that other cliche that the truth is much funnier than fiction.

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The media spotlight on the Aam Aadmi Party and Arvind Kejriwal is turning out to be a curse as much as it was a boon in the movement’s formative days. The vigilante actions by two AAP ministers in Delhi and their run-in with the police, Kejriwal’s need to hold a press conference every two minutes, the revolt by a vocal member – all these have only increased the scrutiny and the more the scrutiny, the more the trouble up ahead.

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The only person weeping right now (apart perhaps from Tharoor) is Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi who will have to pull off something staggering to become the media’s foremost darling once again.

Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator based in Mumbai. She is also Contributing Editor, MxMIndia. She can be reached via Twitter at @ranjona. The views here are her own

By Ranjona Banerji

Remember these words: “You shouldn’t think the media can do everything. It has a limited role.” This is Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar talking to The Economic Times in a straight-talking, candid interview, about the BJP and Narendra Modi’s chances at the general elections. This interview comes just as I was getting bored with The Economic Times! Some food for thought for the media here: it does have a limited role. And the way the English media at least is going, ignoring large swathes of India to focus on the nitty-gritty of the local Delhi government, it is limiting its own role.

Kumar mentions in this interview that a senior Delhi journalist had told him in 2012 – after his party the Janata Dal (United) split from the NDA – that four rounds of opinion polls had been planned to promote Modi and BJP as the winners in 2014. The collusion between political parties and Delhi’s journalists is nothing new and we see it in our newspapers and on our TV screens every day.

For instance, Mamata Banerjee held a massive rally in Kolkata which saw lakhs of people turn up on January 30. It did not dominate media space the way any of Modi’s tiny little conversations or Arvind Kejriwal’s coughing fits do. I could not find a photograph in any of the national newspapers which I receive at home (four) although they did carry stories. Banerjee also has prime ministerial ambitions and as of now, she has control of Bengal, which sends 42 parliamentarians to the Lok Sabha.

Talking about interviews, I only caught the Omar Abdullah interview on the BBC’s Hard Talk series in India. Stephen Sackur asked tough questions but interacted with Abdullah, who stuck to his own and answered those questions. If there is no back and forth in a conversation, the viewer gets distracted or annoyed. This interview managed to grab your attention. But enough flogging the same dead horse because from what I can see, people are still talking about the “interview of the century”!

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In a small segue to sports coverage, I am disappointed to see so little about the Davis Cup ties which are about to start today. The Times of India has sidestepped tennis completely, except for a small mention that Roger Federer will play for Switzerland. Mid-Day, surprisingly, has nothing. The Indian Express comes good – with a focus on how both Leander Paes, who has India’s best Davis Cup record, and Mahesh Bhupathi are not playing.

But the winner has to be Hindustan Times. On January 30, it carried an excellent interview (here we go again!) with Leander Paes and why he’s not playing this Davis Cup tie, underlying the politics that is strangling tennis in India. In today’s paper, (January 31), the back page is dedicated to tennis.

The Times is perhaps like Star Sports India for whom sport is equal to cricket.

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In all this media bashing, one has to acknowledge that when it comes to gender issues and violence against women, the media is not letting up. Every day, more and more horror stories are highlighted about just how women are treated in this country. Distressing as all this is to read, wider publicity is one way to tackle the issue if just to highlight what is going wrong. The media’s role may be limited but this is one instance where it can be effective!

Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator based in Mumbai. She is also Contributing Editor, MxMIndia. She can be reached via Twitter at @ranjona. The views here are her own

By Ranjona Banerji

If you go by the internet alone, the Indian media is involved in some gigantic Spy vs Spy battle where Congress and BJP aligned journalists are playing a cloak and dagger game as sinister and silly as the one in Mad magazine. The words “paid media” are used so often that they have stopped being tiresome and are now just funny.

And yet and yet, there is something that is going on under the surface, a division in the journalistic world perhaps not seen on this scale since the BJP’s rath yatra and the split in the country between those who wanted to break down a mosque to build a temple and those who did not. At that time, many journalists were quite surprised to discover that their colleagues were actually not as “secular” as they seemed and many were quite turned on by the religious sectarianism propounded by LK Advani and his BJP. The default image of the journalist as a jhola-bag-carrying Commie was forever banished.

But there is a subtle difference between what happened then and what is happening now. At that time, individual journalists expressed their choices. For instance, The Times of India was a middle of the road newspaper, rather dull in fact while its editor Girilal Jain was a Hindutva supporter. The ownership played little role. The Indian Express and Ramnath Goenka were openly anti-Congress but in those days, pre the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, there was a sort of innocence as far as religious loyalties were concerned.

Now, it is managements who are setting the agenda and journalists who are falling in line – some, it must be said, with more enthusiasm than others. TV18 has been the most obvious and the most prominent to recently align itself with the political right and most notably with the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi. Before this switch though Rajdeep Sardesai, editor-in-chief of CNN-IBN had been accused of being in favour of the Congress. Even now, Karan Thapar is scrupulously fair and Sagorika Ghose is seen as the last Congress outpost in a BJP bastion! And what about the others? NDTV has long been accused of being pro-Congress. But during the Kargil “war-like” situation, others called it out for its “embedded” journalism which benefitted the BJP electorally.

I worked with The Times of India in Ahmedabad during the Gujarat riots of 2002. Despite enormous pressure on the newspaper ownership and management from the governments in Delhi and Gandhinagar to stop our edition from reporting on the riots freely and fairly, the management not only stood by us but supported us wholeheartedly.

The Living Media group has been accused of being pro-Sangh Parivar for some years now. And there was a time when its flagship magazine India Today was clearly tilted towards the right. (I worked with the group for many years in the 1980s when no such tilt was visible or conveyed to us.) But in that case, what does one make of the So Sorry cartoon series on Headlines Today which lampoons all Indian politicians quite superbly? This is unlike the once excellent The Week That Wasn’t on CNN-IBN which has suffered since TV18 turned right. It’s a tough call here – maybe they change their minds from week to week.

One of the reasons why The Hindu apparently removed Siddharth Vardarajan as editor was because he did not give enough coverage to Narendra Modi on the front pages of that venerable newspaper. But The Hindu has always been seen as a pro-Left newspaper (and therefore not pro-right). So what is one to make of that?

The Indian Express often receives the most flak from the rightwing on social media so evidently it has not stuck to the Ramnath Goenka brief.

The fact is that because the Indian media does not openly align with political parties or movements, confusion is easy and suspicions even easier. In the UK, for instance everyone knows where a Guardian reader stands politically vis-a-vis a Daily Telegraph reader. The best compliment a newspaper or media group can be paid in India one supposes is when all groups accuse it of being biased. That means that something is being done right.

The new player in the pack is the Aam Aadmi Party which has learnt the game very quickly and throws around allegations of media conspiracy theories with impunity. The irony in the fact that several senior journalists have jumped on to the AAP bandwagon does not occur to them. That is not surprising because irony-deficiency is a well-known symptom in the congenitally self-righteous.

In all this, the maximum confusion is over the expression “paid news”. When the media uses the phrase, it is a direct reference to money taken by newspaper or media house managements from a political party to get favourable news printed. This is also how the Election Commission uses the phrase. When social media uses the phrase, it means any journalist who does not agree with the political position of the accuser! Ah well, sticks and stones.

Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator based in Mumbai. She is also Contributing Editor, MxMIndia. She can be reached via Twitter at @ranjona. The views here are her own

By Ranjona Banerji

It’s familiar territory but it still requires revisiting. Both Rajdeep Sardesai and his wife Sagorika Ghose, both of the news channels CNN-IBN, were targets of online trolls this week – again. And again, the anger was aimed at their political affiliations. Or more specifically, because they were perceived as being opposed to the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi.

Now online trolls are a well-documented group who use anonymity to attack people for all sorts of reasons. These attacks are often personal and vicious. Some have the ability to withstand them and some don’t. I myself have argued that journalists – because we operate in the public domain – must develop thick skins if we want to survive.

So the discussion here is not about viciousness and threats of bodily harm. It is about the increasing inference that any journalist who does not support the BJP or Narendra Modi is corrupted. The obvious corollary is that journalists who do support the BJP and Narendra Modi are pure and untainted. Yet, both cannot be true.

Either we want total objectivity at all times from all journalists which means that Swapan Dasgupta and Ashok Malik (I am just pulling names out of a hat) can no longer support or become mouthpieces for the BJP and Modi in print as much as all the others who are accused of being “Congress stooges” must stop interpreting Rahul Gandhi for the benefit of the rest of us. But if you allow one – and I see no one stopping either Dasgupta or Malik – then you have to allow the other – and that includes just about any political party or formation, not just the Congress.

The irony for Sardesai and Ghose of course is that their employer and the channel they work for are widely seen as being pro-BJP and definitely pro-Modi. The same odd situation was faced by TV journalists of the Hindi news channel Aaj Tak during the Gujarat riots of 2002. While the India Today group was clearly pro-BJP (and this was evident in the writings of the India Today correspondent in Gujarat, among other indicators) members of its news channel were attacked for simply reporting what was happening.

Indeed, this is why it is dangerous for media houses to have clear but unstated political positions. Everything is open to misunderstanding and attack. It is perhaps time, it needs to be reiterated, for media houses and journalists to be clear and open about their political affiliations. It happens in other countries; why not here?

There is little doubt, for me at least, that this credibility crisis for the media has worsened after the revelations of the Niira Radia tapes and the conversations of Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi with the lobbyist and PR person. After the initial disclosures by Open and Outlook magazines, there was some media coverage which soon petered out. This was a serious lapse on our part. We needed to have been more stringent because we in the media suffered the most. Instead, we hoped that if we ignored it, it would go away. Rot, however, has its own patterns of behaviour.

The attacks on Caravan magazine for publishing interviews it did with terror accused Swami Aseemanand emphasise again the dangerous media environment we know live in. There’s no point denying it: the question is how we deal with it.

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There is one brand of journalist who is forgotten in all this Congress versus BJP hoopla: those who do not support any one party but find various elements of many parties disturbing or difficult. I happily put myself in this category. As the old saying goes: I am not prejudiced, I just hate everybody!