This week,I plan to take a calculated risk. I am going to defend Niira Radia and attack the media. As someone who has been a small but proud cog in the vast machine of the Indian media for more than thirty years,I believe I have the right to criticise when criticism is the need of the moment. Ever since the Radia tapes were revealed,there has been much denunciation of the media icons who crossed the line between journalism and lobbying,but in this self loathing the real horror of the Radia tapes has been forgotten. Where did they come from? Why was Ms Radias phone being tapped? Is phone tapping legal when not done for reasons of national security? These are all questions that the media has failed to find answers to.
But,the real crime of the media has been the manner in which our private television channels have allowed themselves to be used by the agencies of government to damn Niira Radia before she has been given a chance to defend herself. Ironically,she has been damned for lobbying without anyone noticing that as a lobbyist,it is as much her job to lobby as mine is to write columns.
So breathlessly competitive are our news channels that they almost never have time to do a real story. This would mean sending a reporter to go out into the field and do his own investigation. This involves time,money and research. These are the real constituents of investigative reporting but somehow none of our news channels have noticed. Instead,nearly all our so-called TV reporters spend their time rushing about getting details from sources that are never named. In the old days,when the media in India was no more than a handful of badly printed newspapers,we used to call this kind of reporting press release journalism. Second rate journalists,too lazy to do their own research,would toddle off every evening to the Press Information Bureau and report what the government wanted them to.
When this happens on television,it acquires a dangerous edge because the media ends up losing its adversarial role and becoming a tool of government and its investigative agencies. In recent months,TV cameras have been allowed into homes and offices that are being raided by the Income Tax or they have been leaked information by mysterious sources. This spares the investigative agencies from gathering evidence because usually their victim is tried and condemned by the media. Our news channels faithfully report at the end of every raid that incriminating documents have been found and computer hard drives seized. They never stop to ask why these would be lying around carelessly waiting for the CBI to find often months after some scam has been
revealed.
As someone who has always praised our private television channels for acting as an engine of change in India,it saddens me to say that they are now playing a dangerous and irresponsible role. Things have got so bad that almost on a daily basis these days you see our news channels crossing the line between journalism and lobbying. When a news channel reports a story that has been deliberately leaked by government,does it not become as much of a lobbyist as the reviled
Ms Radia? At least in her case she was being paid a hefty fee to do her lobbying. When our news channels compete to report stories supplied by sources in government,they become lobbyists for free.
It is not for nothing that the press is called the fourth estate in the democracies of the world. In India,we can be proud of the role the press has played in remaining fiercely independent and adversarial. When private TV channels appeared twenty years ago,they strengthened this role but of late things have gone badly wrong. We need to understand why before things get worse.
