By Ranjona Banerji
Anyone who has ever worked in a newspaper knows that there are last minute changes made to copy at deadline time. New material has come in. A breaking story or an ad which has to be carried. Something has to be sacrificed. Adjustments must be made.
What has to be removed to make the cut is another matter. The standard excuse when things go wrong is: judgment call. Also, journalists are human, they make mistakes and the default position in a newsroom is SNAFU. And occasionally even FUBAR.
When a copy is important, usually someone senior is assigned to do the snipping. The worst sort of editing is to just cut the end. You will see this occasionally in newspapers and magazines. The assumption would be that it was left to the pagemaker or fell between the cracks. Hands up those who think we need proofreaders back?
Anyway, that’s the excuses and system failures out of the way.
So what happened with The Times of India interview with world-renowned conductor Zubin Mehta? The conductor recently performed in Mumbai, the city of his birth. This has caused much excitement, and he was interviewed extensively.
One such interview was done by The Times of India. Before Mehta arrived in India.
In a subsequent interview to journalist Karan Thapar for The Wire, Mehta revealed that the Times of India removed the following line from the interview: “I hope my Muslim friends can live in peace forever in India.”
The excuse given by the newspaper is that the “interview was long”, “had to be trimmed to fit the page” and this line was towards the end and so presumably fell into the black hole of end lines.
However.
There are several curiosities here.
This the online version of the Times of India interview with the line restored. It is not the last line, nor at the end of the interview, by any stretch of the imagination.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-times/dont-underestimate-the-power-of-music/articleshow/102588769.cms?from=mdr
There are several throwaway lines which could have been edited out.
Why pick this particular line?
The Wire has done a total breakdown of the incident:
https://thewire.in/media/times-of-india-removed-quote-on-wanting-peace-for-indian-muslims-from-interview-zubin-mehta
The line was restored, by the newspaper’s own admission, when Mehta spoke to the interviewer and asked for it to be put back.
The line in itself is not controversial. It does not accuse anyone. It is not defamatory. All it does is hopes for peace. But of course, it has context. It is significant that a prominent person has hope for peace for a community in his home country which has been systematically attacked and targeted for the past nine years.
Is even this hope for peace too much for a captive media to allow someone else to say?
They could have put a disclaimer if life is so tough for them with Some People in Power: “This newspaper does not hope for peace and is not liable if anyone powerful gets upset”. No?
It is unlikely that the interviewer did this. From Mehta’s comment to The Wire, it appears that he was shown the interview before it went to print.
The question for The Times of India to answer – to itself, because what are the odds it would tell the general public – is why people within its newsrooms feel that this line “I hope my Muslim friends can live in peace forever in India” is a controversial line.
Is this the general position in TOI newsrooms? Is the fear of retribution from Someone or Someones in Power so enormous that they cannot even allow a famous person to say this?
And having removed this sentiment of peace for Muslims by Zubin Mehta and then put it back, what have Times of India gained but loss of face?
Already, bad editorial decisions have only earned this newspaper insults from its readers.
Forget showing truth to power, this is cowardice and stupidity of the lowliest sort.
Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator. She writes on MxMIndia on Tuesdays and Fridays. Her views here are personal.