FOR the best part of five-and-a-half years, one of my unshifting morning rituals has been to descend our apartment’s stairs, pick up a stack of six or seven newspapers and over the next hour or so work my way through the riches they contain. There will be articles that are shocking, some that are sensational and others that are plain funny. There’s invariably something that will be of interest to an international audience and worth following up. Some of them – many of them, perhaps – even turn out to be true.

It’s impossible to live in India and not be struck by the vitality of both the printed and electronic media. While in the West, the industry is struggling to find ways of surviving declining print sales and diminishing viewing audiences and a steady but irreversible shift towards online publishing, in India the more traditional forms of media are booming. There are no less than 82,000 newspapers in various languages with a total daily circulation of 107m, while there are at least 450 television news channels, with more licences awaiting approval from the ministry of information and broadcasting. The Indian reader or viewer, it would appear, has never been better served.

But such fecundity does not always mean probity. Over my years here, there have been repeated scandals within the media, be it over the role of senior journalists and their seemingly too close links to the authorities (the Radia tapes), the problem of paid news (as highlighted by P. Sainath during the 2009 Maharashtra assembly elections and elsewhere), advertising features appearing as genuine news (The Times of India’s supplement) as well as old fashioned extortion and blackmail.

 

So bad is the situation, according to Justice Markandey Katju, chairman of the Press Council of India, that the media cannot avoid regulation in the same manner recently proposed for the British media by Lord Justice Brian Leveson. ‘The way much of the media has been behaving is often irresponsible, reckless and callous,’ he wrote in May 2012 in The Hindu. ‘Yellow journalism, cheap sensationalism, highlighting frivolous issues... while neglecting or underplaying serious socio-economic issues... are hallmarks of much of the media today.’

But I am not so sure. My experience has been rather different, at least at the ground level. On reporting trips that have taken me to 23 of India’s 28 states, often following up on things I’ve read in that weight of morning newsprint, local reporters and photographers I’ve employed to help me with translation and contacts have invariably shown utter professionalism and commitment to ensuring a fair and accurate portrayal of serious events. In difficult and sometimes dangerous circumstances, they have shown an instinctive understanding of the need to show all points of view and a seriousness that I think would surprise Justice Katju.

My first small but significant insight into this came in the summer of 2007 in Bangalore where I was reporting on two brothers from that city who were involved in a bomb attack on Glasgow airport in the UK. At a nearby mosque, an imam had told gathered reporters the two men had caused problems several years earlier by trying to introduce a more strict form of Islam, influenced by Saudi Arabia.

It was a good, new line to the rolling story, but it was also obviously something highly sensitive and not something to get reported wrongly. As it was, the local correspondent from The Telegraph, Anil Budur Lulla, came to my aid and we went back to the mosque, interviewed the imam again and Anil then translated his comments assiduously – fully aware of the need to make sure we reported only what the imam had said and with precision. My articles appeared the next morning in The Independent and Anil, who is now regional correspondent for Open magazine, has become a good friend.

That was just one, small example. There are countless others. I remember being in Chhattisgarh in 2011 to report on the prosecution of Binayak Sen, a doctor who was accused of supporting the Maoists.

 

It was a very tense time and the authorities both nationally and locally were raising the spectre of guilt-by-association. Local journalists had been threatened and intimidated and yet the local television journalist I worked with, understood without the need for explanation that in addition to getting the input of the state’s chief minister and its poetry-reading police chief, Vishwa Ranjan, we had to get the opinion of the people Dr Sen had helped. When we visited the village of Bagrumnala, where the physician had for years operated a clinic, local people scoffed at the idea he was a militant. ‘We don’t know why he was arrested, but we do know he was a good man,’ said one woman.

I have found the same commitment to telling the truth among rank and file journalists in places as testing as far afield as Kashmir and Manipur. In the summer of 2010, when Kashmir was beset by clashes between stone-throwers and security forces resulted in the deaths of 100 people, I visited the Srinagar’s Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, a hospital where the wounded were being taken.

 

The scenes were chaotic and disturbing. But I was seeing them as an outsider. My colleague, a local Kashmiri photographer, not that much older than the injured people being rushed in, was not. And yet on that assignment, and subsequent ones when we worked on equally sensitive issues such as the plight of Hindu pandits, he remained utterly professional.

It is not as though journalists in India have an easy time, especially those working in rural areas or smaller towns, away from head office and where the support and backup of senior editors may be diminished. I remember one evening in February 2008, sitting and sipping whiskey in the Lucknow Press Club with some local journalists, one of whom had been working with me on a story about the then chief minister, Mayawati.

As the evening progressed, one of my colleague’s friends got call after call on his mobile phone that made him increasingly angry and upset. By the end of the evening, the man was yelling and screaming into the phone at whoever was calling him. ‘I think it is someone threatening him,’ said my colleague.

India is by no means as dangerous as places such as Sri Lanka or Pakistan, but it does not mean that reporters operate without risk here. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reports that since 1992, at least 28 reporters or media workers have been killed here.

Among the most recent deaths was that of reporter Rajesh Mishra, who worked in the Madhya Pradesh town of Rewa and who was employed by the local Hindi-language weekly Media Raj newspaper. According to the CPJ, Mishra was attacked in March 2012 when two assailants hit him over the head with an iron bar while he stood at a tea stand. The reporter died at a local hospital.

 

According to local media reports, at the time of the attack Rajesh Mishra had been writing about alleged financial irregularities in local schools. His relatives said that in the week leading up to the attack he had been threatened.

Such threats are commonplace. In Imphal, in Manipur, I met with the editor of one newspaper who told me that journalists were regularly threatened by any of dozens of militant groups if they failed to publish the militants demands and statements. Journalists were forced into hiding and despite this, they tried to approach their jobs professionally and only report on those developments they considered of genuine news value.

There are other, more subtle ways in which a journalist’s ability to perform their job in an ethical, professional manner are undermined. Often politicians or VIPs will organize ‘media interactions’ that transpire to be nothing more than a way of ensuring the politician’s image is shown on television that evening.

I had a glimpse at the way this works in September 2012 when covering Rahul Gandhi’s visit to Amethi at a time when he was reportedly planning to shake things up in his constituency in the aftermath of poor results during the local elections. Over the weekend, his office had organized a series of events for the media but it turned out they were nothing more than photo opportunities.

The first morning, I was surprised to find myself being quizzed by one of Rahul Gandhi’s Special Protection Group policemen who informed me I would only be allowed to enter a meeting of local officials that the MP was chairing if I agreed to only take a photograph and not ask any questions. The following day, at an event when Rahul Gandhi was distributing bicycles for the disabled as part of a government scheme, local Congress officials refused to permit myself and other print journalists to enter because it was ‘only for the cameras’.

It made little difference to me (and as it was we were eventually let in) but I realized that were I a local reporter or stringer, I would have had no choice but to go along with rules set down by the police or party officials or else risk not being allowed in next time. How would the local cameraman or reporter explain to his editor missing the footage that his rivals had obtained, because he had sought to insist on the right to ask the elected politician a question or two about what he was doing there.

 

In the end, presented with no opportunity to ask Rahul Gandhi a question about why things had gone so badly in the state election, the media was obliged to cover his visit by focusing on a ‘protest’ by some schoolgirls who had wanted his help in resolving a problem at their school and had temporarily blocked his route, obliging his police guards to take another route.

If I am impressed by what I find at the grassroots, among the reporters and photographers on the ground, that does not always mean what appears on broadcasts or in print, is as impressive. I am ready to believe that the factors identified by Chomsky and Herman in their celebrated propaganda model as impacting news organizations – ownership, funding, sourcing, flak and fear of Communism or another such ‘evil’ (in India’s case, the Maoists) – are as prevalent here as they are anywhere else. Stories are often skewed or slanted or sensationalized, a problem that is not unique to the Indian media.

Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the most obvious instances of bias is when the Indian media is reporting on sensitive issues such as China or Pakistan and is taking its information from MEA briefings and failing to try and get the other side. (By contrast, I’ve found Indian reporters operating in Pakistan, among them Anita Joshua and before her, Nirupama Subramanian, of The Hindu, and Rezaul Hasan Laskar, of the PTI to be impeccably fair and well-informed.)

 

Another episode that left me startled by an obvious bias was the ‘controversy’ over the Delhi BRT, a plan to give priority and ease of access to buses packed full of people rather than private cars that usually contain one person. The scheme struck me as perfectly sensible and while it may have slowed things up for cars, those on public transport had a slightly easier life.

And yet the two biggest circulation English-language newspapers launched a relentless, vociferous campaign against the scheme, repeatedly only giving the opinion of car owners and never those who took the bus. One could only ponder whether the entire controversy was cooked up because some senior editors were inconvenienced on their journey home. Either way, it was an incident that displayed a class divide in the nation and the newspaper editors clearly sided with the car owners, even though the High Court eventually ruled in favour of the BRT.

‘Cars use more space; crowd the road and move far fewer people,’ Sunita Narayan, director of the Centre for Science and Environment, wrote at the time in Down to Earth magazine. ‘The problem is that people do not matter in our cities; cars do.’

A more serious problem for the India media is getting out into the field and reporting things first-hand, rather than relying on press releases or a phone call to a local friendly policeman. If there is sometimes a reluctance to spend money on this most vital of tasks, this problem is not going to be helped by the openly expressed view of the owners of India’s largest English-language newspaper, The Times of India, that they see little distinction in whether the copy that fills their papers comes from reporters or PR people.

 

In a deeply insightful but ultimately depressing profile in the New Yorker magazine, Samir and Vineet Jain, owners of the TOI, defended their practice of charging PR agencies to run ‘reports’ of their Bollywood and sporting clients in the thinly labelled ‘advertorial’ supplements of their record-breaking newspaper. ‘We are not in the newspaper business, we are in the advertising business,’ Vineet Jain told the magazine.

Other obvious problems about ethics and professionalism – again not in anyway unique to India – involve the breathless, sensationalized way of reporting events, a habit of proclaiming what every twist or non-twist represents, and an insistence of labelling every interview as an ‘exclusive’.

I remember one day in the summer of 2010, waiting on the front lawn of Kashmiri separatist Syed Ali Shah Geelani’s Srinagar home, while a succession of television anchors sat down in turn to interview him. Later, back at the hotel, I switched on the TV and saw more than one of their channels labelling their interview as an ‘exclusive’. (I was later told that the news channels defend this by arguing that the interview given to them at that moment was exclusive.)

Shoma Chaudhury, the managing editor of Tehelka magazine, said she thought the Indian media was confronted by a series of major challenges, many of them structural. Despite this, she told me she was overall cautiously optimistic about the situation, partly because of the sheer scale of the media and that more stories, scandals and investigations were being done simply because there were more channels and newspapers.

 

Yet, ironically, she said she was struck by the similarity of the stories covered by the leading newspapers and channels. She assumed each was closely monitoring the others. She said she wished editors were larger personalities who were willing to take a chance editorially. ‘Editors, by and large, do not see themselves as powerful agents,’ she said. ‘I feel that if the editors would take their place in the world and took calls based on an editorial basis [the situation would be better].’

While things may not be perfect, there seems much to be positive about within the Indian media. Yes, there are too many stories about cricket and Bollywood on the television, yes reporters often prefer to sit at their desks and phone the police rather than go to the scene of an event, and sometimes stories get skewed or spiked because an editor is afraid of upsetting someone powerful.

And my reading habits have changed over the last five years; these days I know which writers or papers have the most reliable reports, which papers will explain things clearly (I think The Telegraph does some of the clearest political reporting) and which I can set aside. But most days there is plenty of reporting to read that is good and alive and inspiring.