Media matters...

...and why a recent kerfuffle points at a much larger malaise

The Bible tells the story of the Judas kiss. I have no idea why I thought of that when I saw this picture — maybe you do.

IN course of a press conference where Rahul Gandhi asked for a Joint Parliamentary Committee investigation into the stock market scam that caused retail investors to lose huge sums on 4 June, a reporter tells him that a JPC is a waste of public money.

“This is a BJP line,” Gandhi responded, and told the journalist that she should wear a BJP badge, or party-branded T-shirt, if she was going to ask such questions.

(NB: Joint Parliamentary Committees have in the past been constituted to investigate various fiscal improprieties, including in the stock markets — as for example the Harshad Mehta stock market scam of 1992 and the Ketan Parikh scam of 2001. It is interesting that in “new India” the JPC and its equivalents, a vital part of this or any democracy, is seen as a “waste of public money”. It is also worth noting that the reporter says it will cause disruptions in Parliament — a JPC by definition is bipartisan and has members from various parties including the ruling party.)

Rajdeep Sardesai, one of the senior anchors of the channel the reporter is attached to, was “deeply upset” at the injustice done to his colleague, who he endorsed as a “fearless journalist who reports with integrity”.

This triggered an avalanche of clips exemplifying the supposed fearlessness and integrity of the journalist in question, including her stalking of Rhea Chakraborty and this one where, firing off Smriti Irani’s shoulder, she asks Priyanka Gandhi about her supposed connections with terrorists.

Sardesai then posted what I can only characterise as “self-pity on my plate”, with a sizeable side of exculpation.

Sardesai is just one example — the incident triggered considerable heartburn in media circles. Whatever be the case, you cannot treat journalists with such contempt, was the consensus — a feeling that was conspicuously absent when, in an “interview” given by Modi to four of Sardesai’s colleagues, he called the media “buzdil”. (In fact, the senior anchors fell about laughing).

An interview on 4 June featured psephologist turned political activist Prof Yogendra Yadav, with Sardesai and Rahul Kanwal as interlocutors. In the opener, Kanwal made the point that Yadav had repeatedly said he is no longer involved in psephology, that he had said he wouldn’t play the numbers game, and yet he did — and got closest to the actual outcomes than the star pollsters with all their resources.

(In passing, note Kanwal’s use of the word “anecdotal” to characterise Yadav’s methods — this is what the media has come to, in that it thinks criss-crossing the country, listening to actual people about their most pressing concerns, is “anecdotal”).

Yadav picked up on the snide aside, and responded in his usual calm, measured fashion. His reason for intervention (from 1:52 in this clip) is apropos the larger context (emphasis his):

I did not want to do psephology, I had given it up 12 years ago. I don't want to do it. I had to come in, as a political activist who saw that the tools of survey were being misused - were being misused to hoodwink this country, in an attempt in which all the major media channels in the country including yours was a partner...

Kanwal promptly jumps in with “Can I quarrel with that, just to say…”. He would, wouldn’t he? But Yadav was spot on, not merely in his election analysis, but also in underlining why such interventions by himself and by various indie news sites were necessary — MSM was hoodwinking the country, and it knew every step of the way exactly what it was doing and why.

Through this election campaign, a large section of the media acted as force multipliers for the ruling party. BJP campaigns led by star campaigners were telecast live; Opposition campaigns were blacked out on prime time. Clips of sundry Opposition leaders joining the BJP were shown on loop; similar migrations in reverse were not even alluded to in passing. There were “vast crowds” at Modi rallies; if you watched only prime time, you could not be faulted in thinking that the Opposition hadn’t even held any public meetings. Hate speech was normalised as “PM slams”, “Modi blasts”. And then there was the spate of “interviews” — thinly veiled advertorials designed to amplify Brand Modi. Watch:

And if you have the stomach for it (or at least a sufficient supply of barf bags), watch this cringe-inducing show hosted by varisht patrakar Rajat Sharma:

It all built up to that infamous display on 1 June when every single media house hyped obviously faked exit poll surveys as the real thing (“exact polls”, in Sardesai’s forgettable wordplay) — despite knowing that it was fake.

I’ll say that again for emphasis: The senior anchors knew the polling numbers they were going orgasmic over had been faked. The numbers were fake, as was their narrative about the inevitability of the BJP returning to power with an even larger majority than in 2019.

After all this, to wonder why large sections of the polity (and readers and TV watchers) are treating MSM with open contempt is be wilfully blind to your own shortcomings.

In his lengthy post linked above, Sardesai asks politicians to introspect — which reminds me of the cliche “Physician, heal thyself.”

***

The reporter whose interaction with Rahul Gandhi triggered this storm has been facing considerable flak on social media. Fair enough, you will be judged by what you do — but it is a pity that the real culprits do not get called out.

It is worth asking, where does the real problem lie? Memory is short, but surely not so short that you can’t identify the speaker, and the context, of this quote?:

“…he soon realised that the reporters were being used to carry out hit jobs on behalf of Arnab. He talks about how he was told to ambush Sunanda Pushkar’s father and get him to blame her husband, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, for her death. He also says his prime job as the Jammu and Kashmir bureau chief was to “target and speak against Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti”, former chief ministers of the erstwhile state. He did that job well, he adds, and “ensured to project them as anti-national and find fault in whatever they say”.

Do you remember Tejinder Singh Sodhi, and why he resigned from a leading TV channel? How about Shantasree Sarkar? (These are just two of many examples.)

As I pointed out earlier, Mausami Singh, the reporter at the centre of this storm, is a serial offender. Kanwal and Sardesai are senior anchors at the channel she works for; they are the ones who decide what clips to run on prime time, and what narrative lines to take. Singh’s clips were repeatedly aired on that channel, under their watch — dating back to the Rhea Chakraborty witch-hunt and even further back.

Did they think Singh was doing a good job? If they did, then this is on them, not on the reporter who was doing her job the way she came to believe was required of her. (Okay, blindly carrying out orders without thinking, without a sense of personal ethic, a sense of right and wrong, is not kosher, but leave that aside for the moment).

Did the seniors in the channel — in all channels — lay down the laws, discuss media ethics with their juniors? Was there any attempt made to teach the young ones the essentials of journalism, to counsel? Was — is — there in-house training given to newbie reporters? Are there periodic performance reviews?

The answer to all of the above is, sadly, no.

I remember co-teaching a journalism workshop alongside Pulitzer-winner Paul Salopek, the multi-talented author and environmentalist Arati Kumar-Rao, and then National Geographic senior writer and editor Don Belt.

An indelible memory from that time came on the penultimate day. We were working with individual members of the cohort, reading their first drafts, guiding them on how to shape narratives, how to edit themselves. At one point one of the participants, herself an experienced journalist with a national website, turned to Paul and said, in words that saddened me at the time: “You know, I have spent more time and received more editorial inputs from you guys in these six days than I have from my editor in the three years of my working there.”

You want reporters to have standards? It is up to you to teach them, to show them how, to share what you have learned over the decades you have spent in your job. Your brief is to show them how to do it right, not to indulge in a public orgy of exculpation when they get it wrong.

And then there is this: These reporters are doing exactly what their seniors tell them to do. ‘Get a good — read, controversial — sound byte we can play on prime time’. In fact, a very senior anchor who, when he headed a newsroom, was in the habit of starting the day’s news conference with Aaj kya khelenge hum?

Not ‘What is the most important story of the day, the one people need to know about in depth?’, but what do we ‘play’ today.

I’ve only worked under two editors in my life: The late Vijayan Kanampilly at Free Press Journal for about seven months, and with Nikhil Lakshman at three print publications and then at Rediff/India Abroad for 19 years.

They were very different as people, as editors. But they had some common characteristics largely missing in today’s mainstream newsrooms. Both were fierce guardians of media ethics — they let their newsrooms know where the lines were drawn, and the consequences if they were crossed. They both pushed you hard, even to near breaking point, beyond what you imagined your limits were, and in doing that they let you discover that you could do even better.

They both, in their own ways, taught you what you needed to know — and it was not a one-and-done type of teaching, either. Everything you wrote, they dissected pitilessly, but also showed you how something could be done better. When you did well, they pointed it out, and their praise was in public; when you screwed up, they took you to task, but in private.

So many of us became better journalists for it — and I am so very grateful.

And I so dearly wish today’s young journalists had the benefit of such editors, who taught them that TRPs are not how you measure your work as a reporter, an editor, a media leader.

From the archives:

Given how things are shaping up, the role of the media is going to be even more critical in the coming months and years than it was during the past ten years, or even in the previous decades. I suspect that media matters will form a recurring theme of this newsletter, so for both background and context, here are links to a series on the media that I had started way back when, and had to abandon midway. I’ll be building on these over time, so for convenience I’ll collect all of the posts here as a single repository.

The first in the series, dated 12 August 2017, is pegged on an interview the politician and entrepreneur Rajeev Chandrasekhar gave, in which he says among other things that the only measure of media credibility is the size of the audience. What is wrong with that picture?

In part two, dated 13 August 2017, I use a few personal experiences to explain how we ended up in a world where it is increasingly impossible to differentiate between news and noise, to distinguish signal from surround sound, to differentiate real events from manufactured ones.

Part three, dated 16 August, looks into how bean counters and excel jockeys began to take over media operations, pushing editors onto the sidelines, and how this triggered a race to the bottom that is still ongoing.

Part 4, dated 24 August, zooms out from the contemporary, made for TV political theatre that has become so prevalent, and looks at the rise of what historian Daniel Boorstin called ‘the pseudo-event’. This is important, because this is when, and how, journalism forgot its basic credo and became a handmaiden of power — power not merely in the political, but also in the economic sense.

The above four all plug into the larger theme. Other than that, there are a few shorter pieces that play to the same theme. In one, I look at the very real danger of the media excusing, even valorising, criminal behaviour.

In another, I demonstrate how the media — our media — uses the tropes of magic (deflection and distraction) — to shift the public discourse away from a very real problem and peddle the government’s spin. (While on this, here is a piece on how Modi used the principles of magic to good effect to get out of a hole he had dug for himself).

Up next — Kulbhushan Jhadav. Do you remember his story? And finally, a case study on how the media uses “quotes”, without benefit of due vetting process, to sensationalise, to gaslight, all in the interests of TRPs and totally regardless of real world consequences.

Elsewhere, I am reading Timothy W Ryback’s new book Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise To Power. I was pointed to this book by an Adam Gopnik review/essay in the New Yorker. The book — I am only about a third of the way into it — chronicles in pointillist detail the events of a single year, 1932, that saw Hitler’s rise from relative obscurity to one of absolute and untrammelled power. Here is the nut graf:

Ryback details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed absolute power over to someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic clown with a violent following. Ryback shows how major players thought they could find some ulterior advantage in managing him. Each was sure that, after the passing of a brief storm cloud, so obviously overloaded that it had to expend itself, they would emerge in possession of power. The corporate bosses thought that, if you looked past the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you had someone who would protect your money. Communist ideologues thought that, if you peered deeply enough into the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you could spy the pattern of a popular revolution. The decent right thought that he was too obviously deranged to remain in power long, and the decent left, tempered by earlier fights against different enemies, thought that, if they forcibly stuck to the rule of law, then the law would somehow by itself entrap a lawless leader. In a now familiar paradox, the rational forces stuck to magical thinking, while the irrational ones were more logical, parsing the brute equations of power. And so the storm never passed. In a way, it still has not.

So that’s a *lot* of reading matter. While you read, or not, I’m taking a breather and will be back sometime Tuesday or Wednesday (unless momentous events happen in the interim). I need to get over the hangover induced by several weeks of immersion in numbers and vote shares and all the rest of it. Stay well, all.