Fall of the Fourth Estate?

“We become what we behold”, said Marshall McLuhan. “We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.” Put simply, the medium stealthily creeps inside the mediaperson, said the author of The Medium is the Message, and makes him or her do things differently. We may wish to remember this while lamenting our media’s fall from grace following the expose of the alleged conversations related to the 2G spectrum scam between Niira Radia and influential mediapersons.
Let’s look at mass media. What is the nature of the beast? Mass media exists to influence public opinion. Advertising does it openly, selling its case or product through partial, self-focused, sometimes even misleading material. The entertainment industry usually chooses profit over all else, yet cinema and theatre remain powerful tools of public influence. And journalism is hailed as the fourth pillar of democracy (after the executive, legislature and judiciary) because it is supposed to influence public opinion by offering fair, unbiased and balanced information.
Democracy is about making informed choices. News media — brandishing its white flag of impartiality and truth — makes that possible. And interest groups have always tried to use this power of the media to further their own ends. It’s not enough to take out an advertisement in the paper, everyone knows that’s paid for. You need to get written about in the editorial spaces — it needs to pass off as the unbiased truth. So business houses have been “influencing” journalists to influence the public — or policymakers — for ages. In pre-liberalised India, when salaries were as low as expectations, bribing journos was easy. Even a free five-star lunch would be fine. As stakes got higher, the freebies got more impressive. The bigger the news organisation you worked for, the bigger your freebie. It wasn’t the odd plastic pen that you got earlier, it was a silver platter of pistachios (“Happy Diwali!”) or a hamper of wines or fine perfumes, a paid five-star holiday or a plot of land — and they were always horrified, and convinced that you would write against them, when you declined. Accepting “gifts” slowly became the norm. So what yaar, said the smarter lot, just because you accept doesn’t mean you have to give them positive coverage!
Decades ago, we made a distinction between a journalist and a fixer. The fixer had an aura of power, made deals with politicians and business houses and looked pityingly at colleagues — while the journalist sniffed haughtily at the fixer, and focused fiercely on battling for scoops, front-page bylines, measly annual increments and perhaps a freebie or two. It was an age before big money and PR firms. When professional lobbyists were unknown in India. And with enviable access to power centres, the fixer was the chosen lobbyist for corporates.
Over time, as corporates and the government became more sophisticated in media management, lines between professional contacts and friends became blurred and the distinction between the journalist and the fixer vanished. With the rise of PR and lobbying professionals, media people didn’t have to do the dirty work anymore — they could just be conduits for lobbyists for corporates or politicians. They now brokered deals in a more relaxed, charming, sophisticated way.
The 2G scam involves `1,76,000 crore. That’s more than our defence-crazy country’s annual defence budget. It’s enough to fix India’s basic education or healthcare for some time. Crores have changed hands to get the right people in the right places. And it may be naive to believe that journalists helped lobbyists and corporates without expecting benefit other than a good story — the conventional expectation from a friendly source.
Especially when some excellent stories were overlooked in the process. Like the Tatas and Reliance having the same lobbyist — will we have a telecom cartel soon? Or, the bombshell, that key players in telecom were trying to influence the choice of the minister for telecom.
Maybe we needed yet another wake up call to put our media house in order. The scandal over paid news had already shown the disastrous effect of blurring the line between editorial and advertising. The 2G scam reveals the danger of blurring the line between journalism and lobbying. We need to revisit our basic rules of journalism.
Of which the most important was objectivity, the distance between the story and its reporting. News producers (including reporters, editors, anchors, producers and publishers) need to maintain a professional distance from what they offer to the unsuspecting reader or viewer, never mind their personal relationship with the news creators (including interest groups, lobbyists and PR people). For when journalism loses impartiality, it ceases to act as a valid source of objective information. The reader or viewer is not given the full picture, which harms public decision-making. The citizen does not get to make an informed choice. Which undermines democracy.
Lobbying per se is not a problem. It exists everywhere, and has existed informally in India for ages as well. We all lobby for what we believe in. The power of civil society is based on lobbying for the public good. Most development initiatives are the result of intense lobbying and advocacy, where persuasion is based on argument, not short cuts like bribes. So there is much to be said in favour of lobbying.
Unfortunately, in countries where professional lobbying has taken on mammoth proportions, like the US, the voice of civil society is often drowned in the din of lobbying powered by big money. But even that is preferable to the underhand, murky game of power pimping that we have, which swings between secret suitcases of money to the quiet persuasion of apparently uninvolved power-players. If we could recognise the lobbyists, we would not have that problem. It could be a legal, acceptable activity.
McLuhan believed that media was not just a somewhat passive “make aware agent” but a more active “make happen agent”. We, mediapersons in a confused system of favours and power play, may often wish to make things happen in ways we should not. If we want media to retain any credibility, we need to overhaul the system, go back to the basic rules of the game, and insist that we all stick to it.

Antara Dev Sen is editor of The Little Magazine.
She can be contacted at sen@littlemag.com [2]