Category: MEDIA

By Ranjona Banerji

What is the primary duty of a journalist? To ask uncomfortable, difficult, impossible, exasperating questions of course. We have to be able to examine the role of those who are in power, and those who wield both authority and influence. How far should a journalist go? This is often an individual or a newsroom choice. And it is not as easy choice.

Some journalists decide to take the line of least resistance. They play it safe by regurgitating what they are fed by press releases and officialdom. Others believe that it is alright to play along with those in charge provided they get an inside view – like “embedded” journalists during recent wars and conflicts. Many (or hopefully most) decide to skirt along the danger mark. They dip their toes into territories that are verboten and run the risk of legal notices or other actions against them.

Some resort to “tabloid” style journalism where they probe into the lives of people, often ordinary people for no reason at all except that they can. The phone-hacking scandal in the UK, involving the News of the World and the Sun are best examples of this. The newsrooms felt it was correct to hack into the cell phones of glamour and entertainment celebrities, the royal family as well of a teenage girl who was missing, later found murdered. This was direct interference in a police investigation and because the newsroom deleted messages, the police and the family assumed the girl was alive since the phone was active. It later turned out that she had been dead – murdered – all along.

This sordid episode perhaps comes under criminal interference. However the other side of the same coin is the sort of journalism practised by Julian Assange and Wikileaks. By believing that nothing is sacrosanct if the public is kept in the dark or fooled, Assange shamed all those journalists who genuflect to the official line. He paid the price and is a hounded man. One of his sources is Chelsea (Bradley) Manning, a young soldier who has been sentenced to 35 years for releasing classified files to Wikileaks. The greater public good was seen as more important than government rules.

The reason for this long diatribe is that when it came to the death penalty of Yakub Memon, convicted for his role in the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts, journalists in India showed us this entire range of journalistic choices, barring those of the News of the World and Wikileaks. We had embedded journalists, official journalists, questioning journalists and play-it-safe journalists.

And then we had several displays of the worst kind of journalists. Those who decided to embed themselves with officialdom and use patriotism as a basis to attack those who exercised the right to question. I reiterate once more that I am not talking about members of the general public or even to bloggers who think they are journalists. I am referring to people who should have known better and people who refused to do their homework. The only heartening factor in this is that many of the young journalists were in questioning mode while their seniors resorted to calling their peers traitors and so on.

Anyone who has worked as editor has had to contend with this sort of a journalist. Those who parrot the police line, those who will never question politicians they know for fear of losing sources, those who will give undue publicity to certain police officers or bureaucrats to further their own ends, whether professional or personal. We all know them.

I would repeat here celebrated American journalist Katherine Boo’s rejection of source-based journalism in favour of right to information based research. It is worth thinking about for some of our brethren.

I must also raise a toast to my fellow journalists who did not live and work through the riots and bomb blasts in Bombay in the 1990s and still decide that they are experts on the matter. I would accept their expertise if they had dedicated their careers to studying those events. Better stop before I start laughing.

By Ranjona Banerji

The Hoot, India’s premier media watchdog, carried an item this week hinting of problems at firstpost.com, the news and views website which in effect did to the web space just a few years ago what rediff.com had done decades ago – became people’s first choice for quick news and analysis.

Since its inception though firstpost.com has gone through both editorial and management changes, the most significant being the sale of its owner Network 18 to Reliance. There were expectations from then on that the website would become management-controlled but not too many indications for the average reader.

Now we have the first one. An article by R Jagannathan, who has been largely in favour of the Narendra Modi government at the Centre, was removed from the website. Jagannathan is a very prolific writer with a very quick response time. He is also head of all print and web editions of Network 18. The ostensible reason for this killing of his article seems to be a criticism of Union finance minister Arun Jaitley, questioning whether the PM should keep him on as FM. This is the tweet that announced the article:

Land Bill stuck in the Parliament: PM Modi may have to rethink Jaitley as FM, writes @TheJaggi http://t.co/mi1hU6xs2a pic.twitter.com/RGYqJHinaV

— Firstpost (@firstpost) July 21, 2015

And this is what happens when you click on the link:

http://www.firstpost.com/politics/land-bill-stuck-in-the-parliament-pm-modi-may-have-to-rethink-jaitley-as-fm-2351720.html

To do such a thing to such a senior person and veteran journalist is unacceptable. It is also indicative of a management which determines how much criticism is permissible and make it impossible for any journalist to function. And if this is the way someone who is largely sympathetic to the government, then you have a very difficult situation on your hands.

Now although firstpost.com has had a definite rightwing slant from almost the beginning, it did encourage and carry a number of different viewpoints. One of those counter voices was that of Lakshmi Chaudhry, a fine writer with a humane perspective. Recently, she was made executive editor. Now according to The Hoot she has submitted her resignation citing management interference.

This is The Hoot:

http://www.thehoot.org/

http://rjagannathan.in/2015/08/03/the-modi-governments-achilles-heel/

Anyone who has any little knowledge of the last time Reliance ran newspapers in the 1990s would have known that this was inevitable. The group bought the Sunday Observer, started the Business and Political Observer and after a small pretence towards journalism turned them both into Only Vimal PR rags and ran two products, one excellent and one potentially excellent, into the ground, with company man Tony Jesudasan in charge and Pritish Nandy and his team out of the door.

There are some former journalists who are part of some sort of overseeing team at Reliance. It is still not clear whether they are part of this fiddling with firstpost.com or not. There are rumours that there are now pressures on Jagannathan to quit. The editorial staff, according to The Hoot, is very disturbed.

One could argue that there is overt and insidious management influence in every newsroom and it is the job of the editors to deal with it. You could also argue about the question of degree – that managements, corporations, government, politicians, bureaucrats and so on wield some influence within newsrooms and some have now become accepted practice.

But these are not arguments so much as copouts. No matter what your political slant, if you are to remain remotely credible as a news organisation, criticism is imperative. If you block that, then you have in effect sounded the death knell.

**

There has been plenty of online criticism about The Times of India’s decision to devote more first page space to bomb blast accused Yakub Memon’s hanging than to former president APJ Abdul Kalam’s funeral. I myself wondered at that.

But how about the contrarian view? For one thing, it is the editor’s decision to decide on what to focus on. The New York Times for instance famously refused to lead with Princess Diana’s death unlike just about every other newspaper in the world.

On careful consideration of the TOI’s decision, you might argue that Kalam’s death was extensively covered when it happened. The funeral therefore did get the front page but only a small portion of it. And that for what started life as a Bombay newspaper, Memon’s hanging was the end of the line for a series of events which completely shattered Bombay: in which case there is some logic at work here.

I have no inside knowledge here. But I am willing to be logical and not hysterical about it.

Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator. She is also Consulting Editor, MxMIndia.com. The views expressed here are her own.