FDI in print media

Vir Sanghvi in his well-articulated essay on Indian media makes a case for entry of allowing FDI in print media. It's an idea whose time has come and some day the Commies would surely give in and allow the foreign media to have a stake in Indian media. As Vir Sanghvi in his Counterpoint argues how competition would help infuse much-needed discipline and accountability in the sector.

Perhaps because there has been so little real news to report – before the earthquake, of course – over the last several weeks, the media themselves have become the story. Nearly everywhere I go people are discussing the media, arguing about our ethics and lamenting the trend towards sensationalising news.

The most influential of the critics, of course, has been the Prime Minister. Angered by reports that the PMO had called a meeting to discuss the rise in the Sensex (no such meeting took place), he used the anniversary celebrations of The Tribune to complain about the lack of accountability in the media.

But there have also been other attempts to analyse media issues. At Outlook magazine’s tenth anniversary celebration, Vinod Mehta made an excellent speech on the role of the press and the Chief Guest, Sonia Gandhi, expressed concern at the move towards “tabloid journalism”. The anniversary issue of Outlook also contained Shefalee Vasudev’s comprehensive look at the issues facing the media. On Wednesday, AK Bhattacharya, the journalist’s journalist, wrote a thoughtful piece in Business Standard about the media and responsibility.
I have written about the media before – and I was quoted in Shefalee’s piece – but I think it is probably worth restating some basic positions now that we have embarked on a phase of introspection.

Accountability: The general view among politicians is that the media are accountable to nobody. This is plain wrong. Individual journalists are constantly being held accountable by editors and most newspapers are far more concerned about accuracy in reporting than they were, say, ten years ago.
The reason for this is simple enough: competition.

If people stop believing you, then any media outlet (print, radio, TV, internet etc) is dead. Take our own paper. Ten years ago, the HT’s position in Delhi was unassailable. But today, with newspaper price wars and the competition with TV and the internet, we have to consciously strive to hang on to our readers. The latest readership surveys may say that we have 3.4 lakh more readers than The Times of India (that’s the IRS result; according to NRS we are 3.98 lakh ahead) but we know that it is a damn close run thing. A few months of sloppy reporting and readers will switch papers.

In Bombay, The Times is still number one by a long, long way but the entry of the HT and DNA has forced it to become a much better paper than it ever was: it has even re-introduced such features as the books page, which they used to tell us were outdated concepts.

In TV, the situation is even more competitive. Take the Bombay floods. Of the many TV channels, only Uday Shankar at Star News had the insight to realise that citizens were mad as hell (and in all fairness, I have to add that, among newspapers editors, our very own Avirook Sen was the first to reach the same conclusion). Uday seized the moment and turned his channel’s fortunes around with his angry flood coverage. Last week, Star News was the number one news channel in the country, ahead even of the mighty Aaj Tak.

To argue that the media have no accountability is to miss the point. We are accountable to increasingly demanding viewers and readers all of whom have more choices than ever before. If we stop doing our jobs, people stop reading or watching us.
To say that this does not amount to accountability is to insult the intelligence of readers and viewers.

To all the politicians who take this line, I have only one thing to say: the reader is not a fool. He (or she) is the person who elected you.

Defamation: I am always told that newspapers can write what they like because libel laws in our country are so weak. This is simply not true: the libel laws are very strict.

The problem is with the courts: a defamation case may take years. But this is a problem with all cases, not just with defamation. A murder case can take ten years. If somebody cheats you in a commercial transaction, then the courts will take over a decade to provide justice. So, why single out libel cases?

And if politicians are serious about media accountability then they should do something about the delays in the legal system. It is no good blaming the media for the mess in our judicial process – we didn’t cause the delay. And as citizens, we are also denied justice because of the unwillingness of all governments to spend the sums of money required to overhaul the system.

Dumbing down: When I joined the HT in 1999, I treated it as a sacred mission to resist the trend towards dumbing down of newspapers. These days I am less passionate about the issue for several reasons. First of all, I think the danger has largely passed. Dumbing down was a 1990’s phenomenon, spearheaded by The Times of India. But in this decade, The Times has changed track and has actually smartened up. Nor do I see other papers rushing to follow the 1990’s Times of India model.

Secondly, much of the nostalgia for the papers of the 1960s and the 1970s is misplaced. If you go back to the files and look at them, you will find that most papers were very dumb – even in those days. They were shoddily produced, poorly written, full of government handouts and obsessed with politics, crime and municipal issues. I yield to nobody in my respect for the great editors of yesteryear but let’s face the truth: most of them only cared about the editorial page –which the vast majority of their readers did not even look at. The rest of the paper was produced by poorly-paid, badly trained news-editors and reporters, many of whom could not write English and some of whom would happily carry plants and accept the odd envelope.

This situation only began to improve in the late 1970s when such magazines as Sunday and especially, India Today rewrote the rules of journalism. It was not till the Sunday Observer in 1981 and The Telegraph in 1982 that we had any professionally produced papers that would meet today’s standards.

In 1979, when I came down from Oxford I was offered a job as an Assistant Editor at The Times of India. Other people of my age – many of them much brighter than me – were told they would have to start as trainee reporters. So why did I get to be an Assistant Editor? Simple: I had been to Oxford while the others had been to Indian universities.

How can anyone not be glad that this journalistic caste system is dead and that so many of our best editors – TN Ninan, Shekhar Gupta, Shekhar Bhatia, Tarun Tejpal, Jaideep Bose and so many others – are people who went to Indian universities and worked their way up to their present jobs?

Sensationalism: This criticism is usually directed at TV channels (though sometimes we get it in the neck as well, viz HT’s Salman Tapes) and reflects an annoyance with the number of crime programmes – many hosted by guys who look like criminals themselves – on TV. Viewers are also angered by the Breaking News slug which is used all too frequently.

I have two broad responses to this criticism. The first is that if sensational TV programming offends you, don’t watch it. I don’t watch Sansani or Hello Control Room or Red Alert or whatever and frankly, my life is not any poorer for it. The great thing about satellite TV is that – unlike the bad old days of Doordarshan’s monopoly – we all have choices. Nobody forces us to watch anything and there’s always another channel that has different programming. For instance, if you stick to the three NDTV channels, Headlines Today or the two CNBC channels, then you need never encounter anything grotesquely sensationalistic.

Secondly, I suspect that tabloid TV is a phase. TV channels are eschewing the traditional journalistic methods to reach out to viewers. And because all of this is so new, there are no rules or guidelines and they tend to go overboard. But if viewers are tiring of too much crime and too many bogus Breaking News slugs, then the channels will be forced to rework their programming. That is how the market – a far better guide than any politically-appointed regulator – operates.

And finally: Unlike the doomsayers, I am hugely optimistic about the future of Indian media. There was, I concede, a danger in the 1990s, but I think that moment has passed. Our problem is that we are too used to a judgemental culture of limited choice: one or two newspapers or one Doordarshan. We need to accept that today we have virtually unlimited choice. And in this diverse marketplace, there will be something for everybody.

Equally, not everybody will like everything that is on offer. But that’s fine. The whole point of a diverse media culture is that as long as you have a choice, you don’t need to approve of other people’s preferences.

And as the media grow, we will have more and more choices.