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Journalism of Courage
If for nothing else, the BJP certainly deserves an A Plus for media management. Not only does it have a formal media division headed by senior party functionaries and sympathetic journalists which systematically grades newspapers and television programmes according to its own BJP-friendly index, the party has in Pramod Mahajan a pro-active minister of information and broadcasting. Now no one can accuse Mahajan of not taking his job seriously. So seriously, in fact, that he has his own informal cell gathering its own information on news presentation in both the print and visual media, with the conclusions reached then being duly broadcast to the concerned editors and TV network presidents.
If this is done for the relatively benign purposes of deepening and strengthening news values in Indian media and promoting values like freedom of information, and so on, there would be no great quarrel with such a display of overzealousness. But it does appear from all accounts that these exercises border on themanipulative. They, in fact, seriously serve to undermine the freedom of the media. The very fact that there is a Big Brother out there constantly watching the scene does not particularly make for an atmosphere that is conducive to free and fair coverage. After all, it is the government and the highest functionaries in the land that are doing the monitoring and lesser mortals like media personnel may find it more convenient and comfortable to fall in line. Besides, the Iamp;B minister seems to follow the classic carrot-and-stick routine. While his disapproval over perceived 8220;biases8221; is subtly conveyed to 8220;erring8221; editors and mediapersons, he is also willing to farm out lucrative airtime on Doordarshan8217;s new 24-hour news channel to those whom he believes deserve to be thus honoured. In other words, he and his party colleagues make it very difficult for media personnel to distance themselves from the ruling party, as their profession demands them to do.
