By John D Jayakumar
Media mirrors the society and when the society is ailing, media cannot but be ailing. Media today is the first pulpit, second curriculum, third parent, fourth estate and some would say, after the Wikileaks, ‘the fifth column’ in the society. Media is ubiquitous. It is the quintessential cultural icon, supplanting religion. It makes the nation’s economic, political, social road maps and is acknowledged to be at the cutting edge of technology, and for many brash ‘up in your face’ young pretenders it is the site to cut their teeth into public life as well. India, with upward of 30,000 print media products, thousands of radio stations, hundreds of TV channels, world’s biggest cinema industry that is cocking a snook at the world arena, a cell phone market of more than 650 million and a galloping Internet coverage, is a huge media market, showpiece and power. Every body, including the Chinese want a share of this pie. The salaries and perks are reaching stratosphere in the industry. Things look honky-dory for media industries. Yet we are told it is ailing.
So what ails the media?
It is a funny question. There is a Anthony Quinn movie ” 25th Hour” if I am not mistaken, where the main character portrayed by Anthony Quinn is wrongly and by force taken as a model for perfect Nazi physiognomy and exhibited around Europe by Hitler’s Germany. His family pays the price for his unwanted fame. Anti Nazis burn his homestead, kill his people and rape his wife. When finally the unlikely hero renounces everything including Nazism, he is discharged and reaches home to find a shattered family and the wife with the rapist’s child. The media lands in his front yard en masse and forces the man to pose for photos with his cringing wife and the shivering child, all shouting for smile. The man and the film end with a big grimace splashed across the screen in big CU, with shouts for more smile from the media in the BG….that is how funny the media is, often.
It is a crass bania question. Today there is no qualms about media selling itself to the highest bidder like the Jains of TOI and other market savvy media barons, with substantial quid pro quo demanded for every headline and by line and company shares for column spaces. Sometime ago, there was a Press Day celebration in a private hotel in Shillong. The media guys who landed there were nary worried about making something out of the day towards learning about better media practices or listening to experienced media mavens. They were more interested in the table fare and the gift pack provided by the host and the scale of plugging the hotel could get for the quid pro quo. This is of course small change compared to the liquor Bill of the Press club of India in the capital, alleged to be the second only to what the diplomatic community spends and conveniently paid for by PR guys both in and out of government. Today market guys determine the editorials, front pages become huge Advertising hoardings, news is paid for, information becomes infomercials, editorials become advertorials and beat reporters reproduce verbatim copies of press releases. Old Editors like Chalapati Rao, Dom Moraes et al, must be feeling that they are on a carousal spit in a commercial cauldron. No wonder Ronald Reagan compared media guys to “street walkers” ‘who wield power without responsibility’.
It is a blind man’s bluff. All media want to follow Time Magazine’s dictum: “every page in colour and every page illustrated”. So broadsheet newspapers turn into tabloids with more colour and pictures with minimum of analysis. True, pictures, any picture is worth 1000 words, a colour picture, more so. But those words must be said and be written. There in lies the problem of Indian English media manned by non native English speakers and ‘printer’s devil’ becomes a convenient scapegoat for poor spellings, sentences and juxtapositionings. Pictures do save you blushes when you cannot put together a decent sentence. But what happens when you cannot put the pictures themselves correctly? Mismatch of the captions and even upside down or inverted printings are quite common. It is pathetic when all the news channels run the same pictures provided by the same source and call it ‘exclusive’. The chest thumping rises to dinning proportions when the pictures themselves are empty, hardly capable of standing scrutiny.
It is the middle class angst that translates into media news stories in the few million strong English media, while the billions out there are left with very little in the way of platform to air their life and death stories. Even ‘citizen journalist’ episodes are fronted by quite well rounded people only , while the lean and weaned out cannot break out of self-imposed or society ordained barriers. No wonder the good prophet said ‘the poor you will always have’ and the pity is that this has been taken as license to perpetuate the ‘unwashed’ classes. Even sixty years after independence untouchability is rampant in Odisa. Feudal chiefs lord it over in Tal regions of Bihar. Khap Panchayats run their writ in Haryana. Millions of poor women die for want of basic health care in the hinterlands. Farmers try to escape their drudgery through suicides. Tribals in major portion of India are grudgingly given second rate citizenship and Grandmothers routinely suffocate to death the girl child in Rajasthan and deep South. Media will go to town with these stories once, but soon the novelty value is lost and the issues go back to where they came from, while media hunts for the next sensation
Aping the foreign media joneses, especially the American media is a malady that Indian media suffers quite willingly. Normally fire breathing and frothing media spokespersons become models of reason and rectitude when put together with foreign journos. They not only try to model their pronunciations on American ‘twang’ but want our national leaders to ape the foreign leader’s tweeting exploits and tangos on Letterman shows. It should not be forgotten that what kept our economy floating, our industry chugging and our democracy thriving during the various economic tsunamis is the functioning of our Indian genius, that opens doors for all winds of change, but refuses to be swept away by any one of them. Indian media must walk the difficult path of being free and independent, a voice for the millions of our voiceless, even while it is owned by the big money, the Corporates and the Industrialists. How it will find its own space to act will depend in general on the Indian genius as a whole and that of the independent Editors in particular.
The ersatz ‘sting’ journalism. All journalism embraces some form of investigation. In India there is a penchant for ‘sting’ journalism mainly because of the secretive ‘babudom’ and their political masters who hide behind an archaic colonial Official Secrets Act. In many ways we, including the media have not really freed ourselves from the colonial mindset. ‘Divide and rule’ was a successful British strategy and today media is not averse to becoming the hatchet man of vested interests, whether it is the government or the business corporations. (Here I must record my admiration for two big businessmen who have carried out mega frauds on the country and government from their first IPO onwards to the latest stealing of national assets and yet keep themselves off the radar screen of media behind the smokescreen of ‘family feud’). ‘Sting’ operations as a rule have an element of duplicity, often overlooked in the effort to ferreting out deep buried secrets that is in the interest of public good. But the journey through the slippery back lanes is perilous. It can and does inure the journalist to habitual bending and even breaking of the law. When media induces people to commit crime and then cry foul, it is nothing but entrapment journalism. It is not surely investigative journalism. Some Judges are of a view that easy availability of high tech spy technologies and the lure of big ‘hush’money could tempt some journalists to resort to full blown black mailing. In such a scenario the media ‘watchdog’ has been fully neutralized with few juicy steaks of high flier status. There are examples of journalists trying to ride the beast to glory, but end up consumed by it.
Finally one cannot understand why media, especially the electronic version has to project politicos as the experts in every field of knowledge there is. They have their uses, but do not allow them to arrogate to themselves all wisdom. They do not respect other people’s views, their fire-fighting and street fighting techniques only bring down the tenor of the debate and truth is given short shrift in the noise and demagogy they create, ‘for the higher the decibels, lower the substance’ is very true when politicians take to stage. Besides putting the same faces in all the TV channels is not good for the TRP even.
However, in ending one must follow the Indian tradition of SUBHAM or with the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart , must say “All things will be well” or to quote singer Paul Simon’s song about Media which goes: These are the days of miracle and wonder/ This is the long-distance call/ The way the camera follows us in slow-mo/The way we look to a song/ The way we look to a distant constellation/That’s dying in a corner of the sky/ Don’t cry baby, don’t cry.
The media is still about ‘miranda prorsus’ – miraculous proceedings, that happen despite ourselves and our cussedness and it is the ‘inter mirifica’- best of marvels that can offer us hope. It is not only about media’s cutting head technology, but about the wonders of true human spirit to which media witnesses to, even if unwittingly. There in lies the hope for the regeneration of media. Never say die and never run with ‘nay’ sayers.
(The author was former Director , Mass Communications Department St Anthony’s College, Shillong.)