Lifting the siege

What should be the role of media in a democracy? In India, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh raised the question during his commiseration with five editors on June 29, remarking that their profession has become “the accuser, the prosecutor and the judge”. This way, he concluded, “no parliamentary democracy can function.

” In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron bemoaned the modern political culture of over-reliance on media against the background of the arrest of Andy Coulson, his director of communications who has been with his party since 2007, for suspected complicity in phone-hacking and bribery earlier as editor of the tabloid News of the World.

Both Prime Ministers were off the mark. While Dr Singh overlooked the fact that the Indian media was responding to a moral vacuum generated during the seven-year rule of United Progressive Alliance (UPA) and laissez faire decision-making by its Cabinet members, particularly those from coalition partners, Mr Cameron was overlooking his party’s Faustian bargain with Murdoch i.e. political endorsement in exchange for future business support. Media is, after all, both a business as well as democracy’s lifeblood, because it holds those in power accountable, keeps the electorate informed and the markets under scrutiny. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell correctly surmised that “politicians always say they want a fair press, when what they really want is a positive press”.

The media’s role, historically, has oscillated in relation to the nature of political leadership, existence or breakdown of national cohesion on vital issues — domestic or foreign, and the infusion of new technologies. If television in the West compelled print media in the 1970s to adapt, merge or perish, then the same occurred in India three decades later. Today, however, the role of Internet in news dissemination and the innovative rise of Twitter, Facebook and Google are impacting globally simultaneously. India is both bucking the trend, as newspaper readership is still expanding, and yet conforming as seen in the expansion of television news, with over 80 of the 500-plus satellite channels devoted to it.

To assess if investigative journalism is good or bad for democracy it would be useful to turn to the US, an older democracy and a global power. In the early 1970s, the US presidency came under the sort of attack that the Indian Prime Minister is bemoaning now. The publication of the Pentagon Papers, a history of the war in Vietnam, in the New York Times beginning June 1971 and the Watergate revelations by the Washington Post in 1973, about illegal phone-tapping of political rivals, set the stage for the resignation of US President Richard Nixon. By 1975, the public mood swung the other way. David Rockefeller financed a Trilateral Commission, under Samuel Huntington, to study whether the US had “an excess of democracy” and also if “the development of television journalism contributed to the undermining of government authority”. As it turned out, from 1981, President Ronald Reagan’s accession to power set the stage for a harmonious, if not collaborative, relationship with the media. Mark Hertsgaard in his masterly 1988 book, On Bended Knee, analyses how success depended partly on Reagan’s likeability, and partly on his ability to perform to a script in a radio trained voice, but above all on the deftness of his handlers.

In India, too, Prime Ministers’ media relations have had their highs and lows. Nehru the patrician ignored aides and media barons. Indira Gandhi cultivated individual editors, treating the beast with disdain, calculating that her constituency was beyond the English press. Imposition of Emergency and press censorship in 1975 rested on similar logic. Rajiv Gandhi, idolised in the first two years, found in 1987 his worshippers turning into inquisitors over Bofors, the Postal Bill and a Muslim woman’s alimony. The reformist Prime Minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao, to whom India owes its current global rise, came unsought and left unheralded. Erudite but taciturn, exuding knowledge but without charisma or charm, for the press he was Chanakya masquerading as king.

Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was India’s Ronald Reagan. Both got power two decades too late. Despite being consummate public communicators, both rarely came close to the camera. The former clammed up on seeing one; the latter tended to commit gaffes when off-script. One survived Kargil, a damning intelligence failure, turning it into electoral success; the other lurched into the Iran-Contra imbroglio, yet surviving with his ratings intact.

The media, thus, does not undermine democracy, nor does investigative journalism. It inconveniences ruling parties, sometimes even ousts governments. The antidote is synchronisation of a government’s political and media strategies; continuous and coherent briefing by designated spokespersons (not party interlopers); and maintaining of a firewall between bureaucracy, which can do background briefing or on-record statements, and the ministers, who must defend policy.
Foreign secretary Nirupama Rao’s recent television interview that Pakistan’s stance on terror has changed, contradicted later by Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, alleging Inter-Service Intelligence’s hand in journalist Shahzad’s death, and that despite the recent Nuclear Suppliers Group rules amendment India had counter-leverages, are statements best left to politicians to tackle.

The author is a former secretary in the external affairs ministry