I am in the position of the proverbial cat who set out on Haj after devouring 900 mice. Having practised journalism for over four decades, I do not feel morally entitled to warn against the dangers of a profession which by its nature is full of perils.
But it is precisely because I am an old sinner that I feel both qualified and compelled to speak of the temptations, sometimes irresistible, specially in difficult times such as these, to which we journalists tend to be prey. The temptations I refer to are not all physical. These do not worry me overmuch. I refer to subtler temptations – the temptation to believe, for instance, that it is in our power to launch a moral crusade and produce a moral order.
I have occasionally written about these problems. I have not been heeded in the past, and I am not likely to be heeded now. But habits die hard. So here I am to read you a lecture, though my own experience should have warned me against yielding to the temptation. I hope you will bear with me.
A little over two centuries ago when journalism was in its infancy, it was described as literature in hurry. Those were leisurely times, both in terms of the pace at which events moved and the speed at which they could be known and reported even over short distances. We live in very different times. Events of great import follow one another with breathtaking speed. They get known, reported and commented upon instantaneously the world over. Surely it is intellectual laziness, if not something worse, intellectual dishonesty, which can persuade us to repeat this worn-out description of the profession.
Journalism today is only hurry, not literature in hurry. We report and comment, often without reservation and qualification, on developments about the background of which we know precious little. Quite candidly, more often than not, we spread misinformation even if unwittingly. We do not inform. We only create the illusion in the mind of the reader that he is being informed. And I am not referring to the casual reader who looks at the headlines on page one and moves on to the sports page, commerce page or the local reports page or whatever else interests him. I am referring to the small minority who reads the editorial page of its newspaper. I am also not referring just to Indian newspapers. I am referring to papers the world over. It is the same case of the blind leading the blind.
This is not the only source of the dilemma the conscientious and responsible among us must face. As the profession has become increasingly competitive, Gresham’s Law of the bad driving out the good has come to operate. The Times, London, is a classical example within our knowledge. It has had to deliberately lower its standards in order to attract the kind of circulation which can help it attract the kind of advertisement support it needs to stay in business. Lord Thompson poured in millions and millions of pounds sterling to keep it going as the ‘national institution’ he, and many others the world over, regarded it, but to no avail. The Times had to find a proprietor and an editorial style appropriate to the times in which it now operates. It has found them and thus ensured its survival, but at the cost of its spirit.
Whatever the validity of the concept of economies of scale in industry, size beyond a point must militate against quality in journalism. I for one am convinced that both mass circulation and bulk are by and large the enemies of quality in journalism. The second is, of course, a new phenomenon in journalism even in the West. It is the result of the unprecedented economic growth and the rise of the consumer society in the post-war period. But even the concept of mass circulation is not all that old. It dates back to the twenties and the thirties in Britain, for instance. Earlier journalism was quite an elite phenomenon. In India we are just beginning to move into that kind of situation. Even so, the English language press is protected against the dangers inherent in it to some extent by the more or less static nature of the total readership. That creates problems of a different kind. But that is another matter.
The fact that millions of trees are cut down every day so that so much piffle may circulate without let or hindrance and choke the readers’ minds with trivial details is a sad commentary on modem civilisation. It is not for nothing that discerning minds in the West itself call it a predatory civilisation or organised vandalism. In India, the cost of newsprint, restrictions in its availability, and the smallness of the total outlay on advertisements have acted as constraints. But the drift in that direction is all too visible
The size of a publication inevitably depends on the advertisement support for it. In the case of the successful one, it must, more or less inevitably again, concentrate the management’s attention on the publication’s commercial aspect. News and views then tend to be seen as editorial material thrown in between advertisements as if to break the monotony and to hook on the reader. This cannot but affect adversely the status of journalists, however exalted a view they may have of their calling and role. Again, we in India are far behind the so-called advanced countries in this regard. But again, the trend in that direction is obvious enough.
As I see it, the dice is loaded against what one might call ‘responsible journalism’, though I must hasten to confess that, if asked, I would find it difficult to define ‘responsible journalism’. There is scope for genuine differences of opinion on what constitutes ‘responsible journalism’. Even so, I shall make a couple of points on the basis of my own experience as editor of The Times of India. First, an editor of even an established newspaper has to be sensitive to the public mood, especially when a certain emotion seizes a significant section of the readership. Second, he can ignore it at some cost to his own reputation and the institution’s interest. Third, the cost may not turn out to be unbearable in the long run, but it requires stout hearts on both sides of the management-editorial divide to stick to the chosen course in the short run if the atmosphere is as surcharged as it was, for example, in 1977, and again in 1987.
To bring in a personal note, the proprietors of The Times of India stood by me on both occasions. But it did put considerable strain on me, especially in 1987. I was torn between the demands of what I regarded as ‘responsible journalism’ and the demands of many readers, and therefore the interest of the ‘institution’ I was serving. I would have in all conscience felt obliged to quit if the proprietors had as much as hinted that I was jeopardising the future of the organisation.
This is, however, an aside. The central point I wish to make is that ‘invisible’, indeed not so ‘invisible’, pressures have also begun to operate in the profession. These pressures do not come from the government and not, at least in some cases, from the proprietors and the advertisers. They come from the volatile section of the readership which, like the floating vote, can be crucial at least in the short run. Fellow journalists and publications catering to this volatile readership can add to one’s woes, even though they themselves do not benefit from this approach in the long run. The problem, if anything, is more acute in Indian language publications, which are closer to the people in their areas. Most Indian-language publications are therefore more vulnerable to mass emotion in periods of stress and strain, as on the occasion of sharpening of linguistic and communal and caste tensions, for example.
Up to the sixties, it was possible to talk of a publication in terms of it being compliant and non-compliant; that is, sensitive to the desires of the chief authority. Since then, it has been even less than honest, to use the old yardstick. These days it requires enormous courage to be on the side of the Prime Minister, or even a chief minister, the latter observation, of course, applying to the regional press. So who is compliant? Those who run against the current? Or those who run with it?
There is a lot of vague talk of one being pro-establishment or anti-establishment in connection with journalists and journalism. I firmly hold that there is no establishment in India in any sphere of activity in view of the divergence of the social, economic, educational, and linguistic backgrounds of the individuals in top positions. There is, of course, a bureaucratic elite dominated by the IAS. But in the last 20 years, a majority of its senior most members ruling the roast in the central secretariat have, to my personal knowledge, been opposed to the Prime Minister in office except for brief periods when the intelligentsia as a whole has, by and large, been similarly disposed.
We are a truly ‘democratic’ society, if by ‘democratic’ society we mean that there is not much difference between the ‘views’ of a clerk and a secretary to the Government of India, or chairman of an industrial corporation. So how can anyone be pro-establishment or anti-establishment? Indeed, one cannot even be pro-government or anti-government in the proper sense of the term. For the non-parochial press, the issue has since Independence been personalised. One is either broadly for the Prime Minister in office or against the Prime Minister. This was true in Nehru’s days. Only the problem has got accentuated since the Congress split in 1969 when Indira Gandhi came to practise what has been called the ‘cult of personality’.
This opposition to the Prime Minister is, in my view, not an aberration or passing phenomenon. It is there to stay. The reasons are simple. India is going through a social and economic convulsion. This convulsion must weaken moral and other restraints which held our society together in the past. This must in turn produce a nostalgia for a stable order even among those who have made fortunes in this period precisely because of unstable conditions. This nostalgia, accompanied as it must be by the need to cut comers, leads to the search for a scapegoat, especially among those who have felt left out of the loot, that is, salaried members of the intelligentsia. And who can be a better scapegoat than one who is seen to concentrate all authority in his or her hands?
“Power without responsibility,’’ the saying goes, “is the privilege of the harlot.’’ In this line of reasoning, the critics have compared journalism to harlotry. We are supposed to command power without accountability. The comparison is just to a point, though not for the reason which is cited. The journalist and the harlot provide ventilation for emotions which can, if allowed to accumulate, explode into much greater violence than we already witness in our society. The experience during the Emergency is an illustration in point. The absence of ventilation led to an accumulation of hatred against the regime of such intensity that it blew off the latter when it got an opportunity in the shape of elections.
But this argument should not be pushed too far. It should not be used to justify the doctrine of the adversary role of the press as a whole. In troubled times, when discontent against the government is only to be expected, this is a very tempting proposition. But it is as dangerous as it is tempting. The argument runs as follows: the government is corrupt, inefficient and inept; Parliament does not perform its proper duties by virtue of the overwhelming majority of the Congress party; the effectiveness of the higher judiciary, though useful, is limited, especially in enforcing accountability on the government; so the people have only the press to look up to in their natural desire to impose on the instruments of the state certain standards of public morality and accountability.
The pitfalls in this argument should be obvious, but they are not, at least for the more vocal and articulate in the journalistic community. For, if every institution of the state is in disarray and the people cannot be depended upon to elect legislators who will not cheat them, it is difficult to see how the press can escape the general collapse of standards all around. It is also difficult to find out how in fact attempts to discredit politicians belonging to the ruling party can help raise standards of public morality and performance when their worst critics acknowledge, even if not so publicly and frequently, that the malaise is equally widespread among the Opposition and that no party in office can be expected to behave better than the Congress.
Quite frankly, arguments have less to do with the advocacy of a necessarily adversary role than with a kind of messianism which has come to dominate certain sections of the press. Some of us have come to see ourselves as saviours of the nation. It is a phenomenon which is not peculiar to India. The same kind of obsessive moralism is at work in sections of the American press. Moralism is the obverse side of rootlessness which modern industrialism must produce. The Americans are a people without history and strong tradition by virtue of having been immigrants. Our top crust too is tending to be rootless not only because we use an alien language, but also because as a result of its unintelligent imitation of the West and contempt for our past, it has developed a contempt for old values, traditions, mores, social arrangements and indeed people. It is common among educated Indians, for instance, to speak of illiteracy as if it is a form of leprosy. Mercifully for us, traditional India has proved surprisingly tenacious and continues to provide an anchor for even the alienated among us. But that can only mitigate the disaster; it cannot eliminate it.
I am not about to deny that the problems of widespread corruption, inefficiency, ineptness, misuse and waste of scarce resources, lack of concern for the weak and the poor, low quality of education, and utter indifference to ecology are threatening to overwhelm us. Of course, they have assumed menacing proportions. But these are, in my view, the inevitable results of the policies fellow members of the western-educated intelligentsia have deliberately adopted and managed to impose on the Indian people. Most of the journalists have most of the time endorsed those policies and cannot in all conscience avoid responsibility for the consequences.
We have denigrated religion, which has been the centre of Indian life and activity, in the name of modernisation. We have turned upside down our value system and, in the process, replaced the worship of gods and goddesses with that of Mammon. Success, specially financial and bureaucratic, has come to be prized above the old Brahminical virtues of learning, austerity, and uprightness. We run down old established institutions in the name of equality and individuality, not realising that in the East, unlike in the West, we have traditionally sought fulfilment as members of a group and not as individuals, which concept must of necessity emphasise ahankar (ego) and deny the spirit.
It is not my purpose now to go into the relative merits and demerits of the western and eastern civilisations. Indeed, I refrain from engaging in such comparisons and contrasts because I believe every civilisation has its own logic and coherence. My purpose today is only to point out that we cannot possibly denigrate and discard existing social arrangements and value systems without paying the cost in terms of the evils we deplore. We have sown the wind and we have to reap the whirlwind. I for one do not see tranquility return at the end of the day.
In such a frame of mind, what advice am I to give except to say that we should try to look beyond the symptoms and address ourselves to the deeper malaise with whatever light providence has given each one of us in its wisdom? Finally, I may say that personal bylines, publication of pictures of writers as in a number of newspapers and frequent TV appearances cannot but aggravate the already acute problem of egotism among journalists and add to the temptations and dangers inherent in the profession by its very nature. We should, if somehow we can, return to the practice of anonymity. For this by itself may help restore to the profession a degree of objectivity, fair-mindedness, restraint and modesty it desperately needs.
This article is based on a lecture delivered on March 30 on the occasion of the YMCA annual convocation
The Telegraph, Colour Magazine, 23 April 1989