MEDIA professionals come into contact with people who are rich and powerful in the course of fulfilling their duties and obligations as reporters and analysts of news that is of interest to the public at large. Not only are readers of publications, those who listen to the radio and people who view news programmes on television, interested in learning about the activities of and/or the views of those in positions of power and authority, these individuals too can become an important source of information and analysis. The problem arises when journalists start suffering from what psychologists call delusions of grandeur. Some in the media who meet wealthy and influential individuals either become, or delude themselves into believing they have become, players in larger political and economic processes.

Let us first take a brief look at how three high-profile journalists have responded to transcripts of their conversations with lobbyist Niira Radia being placed in the public domain. The first and rather predictable reaction has been to contend that the conversations have been quoted out of context or even doctored. There is a striking similarity to the rejoinders put out by these journalists to those made by politicians when they complain about how journalists have misquoted them.

Here is what Barkha Dutt of New Delhi Television (NDTV) has stated: ‘Ironically, the one sentence being used to damn me, "Oh God, What should I tell them?", is in fact two separate sentences, neither of which are related to [former Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Andimuthu] Raja or the telecom portfolio at all. When transcripts are edited and capture neither tone nor context, the message is severely distorted. The phrase "Oh God", was nothing more than a response to a long account by Niira Radia on a DMK [Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam] leader, T.R. Baalu, speaking to the media without sanction from the party. The excerpt, "What should I tell them?", was in response to her repeatedly saying to me over several different phone calls, that if I happened to talk to anyone in the Congress, I should ask them to talk the DMK chief directly. As a matter of record, I never passed on any message to any Congress leader. But because she was a useful news source, and the message seemed innocuous, I told her I would. Ultimately, I did no more than humour a source who was providing me information during a rapidly changing news story.’

This is what Vir Sanghvi, former columnist with the Hindustan Times has written on his website: ‘Ms Radia called several journalists, including me, to ask us to convey a message to any Congress leaders we met in the course of our work. This message was, essentially, that the Congress was communicating with the wrong people in the DMK. While gathering news, journalists talk to a wide variety of sources from all walks of life, especially when a fast-moving story is unfolding. Out of a desire to elicit more information from these sources, we are generally polite. I received many calls from different sources during that period. In no case did I act on those requests as anybody in the government will know.’

 

Finally, this is what Prabhu Chawla of the Living Media/TV Today group has stated: ‘Niira called me as she said "to seek my expertise" on the "battle for gas" between the two Ambani brothers. I merely told her that the earlier the brothers put an end to their private battle, the better it will be for the public good. I did not take sides. I did say that I knew both brothers but was equally critical of the tactics being adopted by each to run down the other. Niira also asked me about my son, who is a lawyer and is retained by the Anil Ambani group as their counsel. I however made it clear that my son Ankur was not appearing in the particular gas case.’

Barkha Dutt has acknowledged that she made an ‘error of judgment’ while Vir Sanghvi said he needs to introspect. Both have claimed they were ‘stringing’ their source, a euphemism claiming that they had lied to Radia. Dutt’s response came after questioning by the editor of Open magazine (which first published transcripts of the conversations) on the channel for which she works, that is, NDTV, as to why she did not consider it important enough to report the fact that an individual acting on behalf of the heads of two major corporate conglomerates (Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani) was keen on making Raja the telecom minister in June 2009, or even a year later. In his conversation with Radia, Prabhu Chawla claimed it was possible to ‘fix’ everything in India – while they were discussing the legal dispute between the Ambani siblings – even as he denied insinuating that among the things that could be ‘fixed’ in India are court judgments.

Be that as it may, all the three prominent journalists mentioned (who write and anchor television programmes) seemed to make no bones about the fact that are indeed well connected to ‘those who matter’. Dutt, Sanghvi and Chawla had acquired the status of icons and become role models for an entire generation of young Indians for their journalistic work. Many of their erstwhile admirers are currently of the view that their idols have feet of clay, if one goes by the cathartic (and perhaps exaggerated) comments on them that are floating around in cyberspace and on the blogosphere.

 

The infamous nexus between big business and politics has been traditionally facilitated by corrupt sections of the bureaucracy. Certain journalists become bit players in this pernicious project, even if they occasionally fool themselves into believing they are among the principal protagonists. This is hardly a secret. For many years now, certain journalists have doubled up as power-brokers. The difference is that what was earlier whispered in private has today become explicit, thanks to the public airing of the Radia conversations.

A prominent editor of The Times of India newspaper used to claim he was the second most powerful person in the country after the Prime Minister of India. Another editor of the same newspaper (the late Girilal Jain) was the recipient of financial instruments from Reliance Industries Limited through a loan that had been facilitated for him. Other journalists chose to enter politics and some have even become members of the Rajya Sabha. Once again, this phenomenon is neither new nor unique to this country – where, of late, the dividing line between news and advertising, between the fourth estate and real estate (to use P. Sainath’s memorable analogy) has been frequently blurred when not obliterated altogether.

 

If journalists believe they have the right to play the role of an adversary or an antagonist against everyone and his brother, they should not become squeamish when the spotlight is on them. On an optimistic note, one is tempted to deploy an analogy used in a different context. Women splatter mud on their faces to make their skins glow so that they appear beautiful. Hopefully, the muck being flung around will cleanse a bit of the corruption that has come to characterize a section of the media in India even as another section of the journalistic fraternity continues to expose corruption in high places. Raja’s loot of the public exchequer wouldn’t have been exposed had it not been for the fact that a handful of journalists – among whom were Shalini Singh (of The Times of India), Sunil Jain (who has worked with The Indian Express and the Business Standard and who is now with The Financial Express) and J. Gopikrishnan (The Pioneer) – who slogged away diligently for more than three years.

Yet what cannot be denied is that the credibility of Indian journalists has come down more than a notch or two. There are many ordinary people in India who still trust a journalist more than the hawaldar, the patwari or the magistrate and believe that she or he could articulate (if not redress) their grievances. But this faith in Indian journalism is eroding rapidly. Witness how journalists in the country have been sought to be portrayed in popular cinema.

 

It is not as if journalists were always glorified as crusaders for the truth and those who exposed corruption in high places. In 1981, Ashwini Sarin of The Indian Express broke the law to expose how poor women were being trafficked. He actually ‘purchased’ Kamala. A character based on him was portrayed by Vijay Tendulkar as grasping and ambitious in the play Kamala, that was subsequently made into a film. When sued for defamation and breach of copyright, the Marathi litterateur claimed that he had not read the Express articles before writing the play.

But before and after Kamala, most journalists in popular cinema were depicted as the ‘good’ guys who fought against the rich and powerful and for the rights of the downtrodden. However, more and more recent films show journalists as stupid and insensitive, in perpetual search of an ‘exclusive’ story that would ‘sell’ well. In A Wednesday, a pretty young television reporter is sarcastically told by a man who has just escaped being electrocuted how happy he feels that he is now being watched on millions of small screens.

Corruption in the media has been fictionalized across the world for many years. In 1941, Orson Welles scripted and directed the classic Citizen Kane about the rise and fall of a newspaper tycoon that was a thinly disguised biography of William Randolph Hearst, the US newspaper publisher whose introduction of screaming headlines and sensational reporting changed American journalism. On its release, Hearst banned his newspapers from reviewing the film. Citizen Kane traced the life of a man whose career in publishing was first motivated by ideals of public service but who eventually became a ruthless businessman willing to go to any length – including organizing a murder – to be the first to report the ‘news’. In Ram Gopal Verma’s recent film Rann, a media tycoon (Amitabh Bachchan) who is committed to the principles of ethical journalism fights against his own son to bring out the truth. Peepli [Live] graphically highlights the venality of the media and how journalists use and abuse not just the underprivileged but their own comrades as well.

 

Indeed, corruption in the mass media in India and elsewhere is as old as the media itself. If there is corruption in society, it would be unrealistic to expect the media to be free of this affliction. In recent times, however, corruption in the Indian media has gone way beyond individuals and specific media organizations – from ‘planting’ information and spinning views in lieu of favours received in cash or kind – to institutionalized and organized forms of corruption wherein newspapers and television channels receive funds for publishing or broadcasting information that is sought to be disguised as ‘news’, but are actually designed to favour particular individuals, corporate entities, representatives of political parties and candidates contesting elections.

News is meant to be objective, fair, unbiased and neutral – this is what sets apart such information and opinion from advertisements that are paid for. In recent years in India, the distinction between news and advertisements has been sought to be deliberately blurred if not obliterated altogether. The rot set in with the ‘Medianet’ initiative started by Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. (BCCL), which publishes The Times of India, The Economic Times and so on. BCCL charges film producers, fashion designers, actors, celebrities, sportspersons, corporate captains and socialites to be featured in some of its newspaper supplements – the so-called Page 3 phenomenon.

Later, the BCCL group started a ‘private treaties’ scheme whereby it entered into financial or shareholding arrangements with various companies. Simply put, instead of receiving money for advertising, BCCL would receive unknown quantities of equity shares in companies that were existing advertisers or potential advertisers as part of a deal to enable these firms to receive advertising space in BCCL-owned media ventures. The success of the scheme turned BCCL into one of the largest private equity investors in India.

 

By 2008, BCCL had nearly 200 companies as its private treaty clients. If favourable news is published about a client and adverse news is not reported, both the publishing company and the advertising company stand to gain – the conflict of interest was clear even if company spokespersons sought to defend the move as purely a marketing initiative. The fall in stock market indices in 2008-09 and the decision of the income tax authorities to value the transactions at old ‘inflated’ prices at which transactions had taken place (instead of current prices) and shown as assessable taxable income, robbed the scheme of some of its sheen.

As in the case of Medianet, while the private treaties scheme was started by BCCL, others were quick to follow. On 27 August 2010, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) issued guidelines that made it ‘mandatory’ for all media companies to disclose their interests in companies about whom articles were published or television programmes broadcast. Time will tell whether these guidelines are properly implemented.

 

Over the last few years and since 2009 in particular, the phenomenon of ‘paid news’ has acquired an even more pernicious dimension by entering the political sphere or in reporting on candidates contesting elections. Numerous favourable or complimentary ‘news’ reports on candidates appeared in newspapers and were broadcast on television channels across the country in the run-up to the Lok Sabha as well as state legislative assembly elections in Maharashtra and Haryana that year, without disclosing the fact that monetary transactions had taken place between media houses and concerned parties.

The entire operation, which is clandestine, has become widespread and now cuts across newspapers and television channels, small and large, in different languages and located in various parts of the country. Worse, these illegal operations have become organized and involve advertising agencies and public relations firms, besides journalists, managers and owners of media companies. Marketing executives use the services of journalists – willingly or otherwise – to gain access to political personalities. So-called ‘rate cards’ or ‘packages’ are distributed that often include rates for publication of ‘news’ items that not merely praise particular candidates but also criticize their political opponents. Candidates who do not go along with such extortionist practices are denied coverage. To use BJP leader Arun Jaitley’s words, it became ‘a relationship between the blackmailer and the blackmailed.’

The deception or fraud takes place at three distinct levels. The reader or the viewer is deceived into believing that what is essentially an advertisement is in fact, independently produced news content. Then, candidates contesting elections do not disclose the true expenditure incurred on campaigning thereby violating the Conduct of Election Rules, 1961, which have been framed by, and are meant to be enforced by, the Election Commission of India under the Representation of the People Act, 1951. The concerned newspapers and television channels typically receive funds in cash and do not disclose such earnings in their company balance sheets or official statements of accounts. Thus, by not accounting for the money received from candidates, the concerned media company or its representatives are violating the provisions of the Companies Act, 1956 as well as the Income Tax Act, 1961, among other laws.

 

Substantial sections of the media have become participants and players in such practices that contribute to the growing use of money power in politics which undermines democratic processes and norms – while hypocritically pretending to occupy a high moral ground. This has also tarnished the country’s reputation as foreign newspapers have started writing about, and commenting adversely on, such malpractices. Media companies that put out ‘paid news’ damage – if not destroy – their own credibility. Whereas such malpractices were confined to individual transgressions and to a few newspapers and television channels in the past, the sheer scale of what has taken place in the recent past is alarming and frightening – for it strikes at the very core of democracy by turning the media which is supposed to be the fourth estate and a watchdog of society into a ‘first estate’ of sorts by influencing democratic processes.

 

In July 2009, a two member subcommittee of the Press Council of India (PCI), comprising K. Sreenivas Reddy and this writer, was constituted to examine the phenomenon of paid news. The subcommittee, after meeting people in different parts of the country and receiving written and oral representations, submitted a detailed report running into over 36,000 words to the council in April. A 12 member drafting committee of the PCI was thereafter constituted. On 31 July, the council decided by a narrow majority (by a show of hands as no formal voting was recorded nor dissenting notes allowed) not to annex the full report of the subcommittee to the 3,600 word report of the drafting committee before submitting it to the government. The subcommittee’s detailed report was consigned to a mere footnote. The publishers’ lobby eventually won. But, in the process, the subcommittee’s 71 page report became ‘forbidden fruit’ attracting more readers than it otherwise may have.

Some of my colleagues in the PCI and me were disappointed at the council’s decision. We had hoped that if the subcommittee’s report had been made official, it may have shamed some of those named. The full report of the subcommittee has been leaked and finds place on a number of websites (including www. outlookindia.com). The curious situation that currently prevails is that the detailed report of the PCI subcommittee on how corruption in the Indian media undermines democracy is not official but is nevertheless in the public domain.

 

Each and every allegation in the subcommittee’s report was attributed. Every effort was made to get back to those against whom allegations had been levelled. Rural affairs editor of The Hindu, P. Sainath, reported extensively on the widespread practice of paid news in the run-up to the assembly elections in Maharashtra – for instance, 15 editions of three competing newspapers (Lokmat, Pudhari and Maharashtra Times) carried an identical article showering praise on the then incumbent chief minister Ashok Chavan. Though the articles matched one another word for word, each paper carried a different by-line. Chavan dismissed the allegations saying he or his associates had not paid any money to any publication and suggested that a few ‘lazy’ journalists may have been responsible for reproducing press releases verbatim. Sainath pointed out that on polling day, Vidarbha Plus (a supplement of The Times of India) carried an advertisement disguised as news on the Congress candidate, Raosaheb Shekhawat, son of President Pratibha Patil, from Amravati assembly constituency.

During the course of our investigations we received representations from around 100 people from across India. There were many complaints against Dainik Jagaran, the Hindi daily which is the largest circulated daily newspaper in India and among the five most widely circulated dailies in the world. We also received complaints against Dainik Bhaskar, the second highest circulated daily; Lokmat, the most widely circulated Marathi daily; Hindustan; Punjab Kesari; Eenadu; Sakshi and against the largest circulated English daily in the country, The Times of India, among others. It used to be claimed that the ‘leader guards the reader’ but in this instance, the leaders took the lead in cheating the reader and lowering ethical standards.

Two examples are noteworthy. On 30 April 2009, the day when elections took place, the Varanasi edition of Hindustan carried a story that deceptively looked like a news item on top of its front page with a headline that suggested a ‘wave in favour of the Congress.’ The following day, the newspaper apologized to its readers for the mistake. The representatives of Hindustan told the PCI that when they realized their mistake they were ‘quick’ to point this out to readers – by when polling was, of course, over. This was the only instance of a publication acknowledging that it had made an error. The rest chose to brazen it out.

 

The PCI was given a letter that had been published in Outlook (18 January 2010) in which Rajiv Verma, Chief Executive Officer, HT Media Limited wrote: ‘We do not pass off sponsored news in the garb of editorial content. To the specific instance related to the Varanasi edition of Hindustan… the articles were published under the advertiser sponsored content tag. Owing to a mistake by an overzealous advertising manager, the style and look turned out to be similar to the main paper. To remove any confusion among our readers, a clarification was issued the very next day on the front page of Hindustan’s Varanasi edition. The erring manager was also suitably reprimanded. We have had no instance of any editorial transgression other than the unfortunate incident stated above.’

Parcha Kodanda Rama Rao of the Loksatta Party was the only candidate who admitted that he had paid a sum of Rs 50,000 to a representative of Eenadu for favourable coverage. He received no receipt and his complaint to the returning officer is currently pending in an election petition in the High Court of Andhra Pradesh. Predictably denying that any money had been accepted, Ramoji Rao, who heads the Eenadu group, claimed to the PCI that the problem of paid news was part of a larger malaise. He wrote: ‘…favourable coverage in the press and the capacity to spend big money in poll campaign became the sole eligibility on the basis of which political parties chose their candidates… The so-called paid favourable coverage by the press is one of the offshoots of this tendency.’

 

Member of the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Council, K. Nageshwar, told the PCI how he had been maligned. ‘On February 6, 2009, the day elections to the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Council took place, Sakshi quoted the Mehboobnagar district president of the BJP virtually describing me as a traitor. What was worse, the newspaper defamed me by claiming that I was visually challenged because I had ignored the advice given by scientists and stared at a solar eclipse. This was a complete cock-and-bull story. I wrote to the newspaper and also represented to the Election Commission but nothing happened thereafter.’

Obviously, the entire media fraternity cannot be painted with the same brush. The very fact that this malaise is being widely reported in sections of the media proves that there are many upright journalists who are unhappy about the corruption they see in their profession. However, as mentioned before, if journalists arrogate to themselves the right to criticize all sections of society, they should not shy away when the microscope is turned on them.

 

* Paranjoy Guha Thakurta is the author of Media Ethics: Truth, Fairness and Objectivity: Making and Breaking News, Oxford University Press, and is co-author of the report of the subcommittee of the Press Council of India, Paid News: How Corruption in the Indian Media Undermines Democracy.

** This essay is based on two articles written by the author for Outlook weekly, 1 November 2010, and for the exchange4media.com website, 29 November 2010.