Credibility of Indian media at stake; stake-holders watch from sidelines

BY IMPACT Staff

By MOSES MANOHARAN

The collective credibility of the media in India is under threat as never before from corporate and political entities, as civil society stake-holders watch from the sidelines.

For the first time since the Emergency days of the mid-1970s, matters have come to the boil, as a political leader who is also a corporate heavyweight takes on Subhash Chandra, who founded and made Zee India’s first significant TV network. His two senior executives are already in jail on charges of trying to extort money from a business Group, Jindal Steel and Power Limited, whose chairman, Naveen Jindal, is also a Member of Parliament from the Congress Party that heads the ruling UPA alliance. Chandra and his son Punit have themselves been accused of masterminding the alleged extortion attempt.

Meanwhile, the actual issue over which the extortion bid was allegedly made – that Jindal family-associated companies have been accused of improprieties in what has come to be called the Coalgate scandal – has been effectively sidelined. In this scandal, the rich and the powerful, from the nexus between the corporate and political worlds, have been accused of gaining favour from the governments at both the Centre and State level in the allocation of lucrative coal blocks.

Then, as now, the media was attacked or ignored by prominent figures from the other pillars of democracy. Indeed, there appears to be an insidious attempt across the political spectrum to uphold a spurious moral code that faults a freethinking media.

The chairman of the Press Council of India, Justice Markandey Katju, has described the media as largely ignorant, the same view he unfortunately holds for the people of India at large because, according to him, they vote on caste. The media, again in his view, should be regulated by the government with powers to severely punish those whom it considers to have erred. And all this angst because the media, according to Justice Katju, carries paid news, reports trivial stories in Bollywood and cricket, and ignores serious issues such as farmers committing suicide because of indebtedness.

Katju, an eminent jurist who retired as a judge of the Supreme Court of India, has never been effectively countered by the media.

The media, as with every other pillar of democracy, namely the legislative, the executive and the judiciary – together known as the four estates – has both the good and the bad in its fold. Just as the first, second and third estates have suffered scandal in a few instances, to condemn everyone is ludicrous. Indeed, it is notable that of the four pillars of any modern democracy, only one – and Justice Katju would be familiar with this - has the privilege of levelling the charge of contempt against anyone accusing any of its members of wrongdoing.

The third media contention is of course to desist from shooting the messenger. The media, unlike the other pillars of democracy, merely holds up a mirror to society. That society includes representatives of the three other estates.

Finally, any media in the private sector is a business enterprise run on a bottomline that must show profit, though it admittedly has a responsibility towards upholding good societal values. But the new attack on the media seeks to divest it of the right to a legitimate profit motive, which the corporate world claims as its own prerogative. In the case of Zee, where criminal wrongdoing is proved, the law, as politicians always claim when they or their parties are indicted, will take its course.

In all this, the public at large have been kept in an unwilling suspense of disbelief. They have been fed the alleged wrongdoing of Zee, while allowing the Coalgate scam to fade away.

The floodgates of the attack on the media were opened by the leak of tapes that took its name after its main protagonist in the saga, Nira Radia. Famous media personalities from both Print and Television were heard in taped conversations, apparently collaborating with political and corporate leaders for unethical ends, yet it has all died down without even a whimper, raising concerns about the estates of our democratic foundation.

Institutions which took little or no action against their employees in Print and Television who figured disgracefully in the Radia tapes have now joined the pack in denouncing Zee TV’s Chandra.

Though Chandra has corporate entities in his portfolio, he has remained rooted in media initiatives that have often been pioneering, unlike many major TV networks that have been recently acquired by big business conglomerates.

With the corporate and political leaderships becoming increasingly intertwined, there is a genuine possibility of independent media entities being put out of business. The danger is real, and civil society must rise up to defend its own interests lest they are consumed by corporates thriving on the profit motive alone.

(The author, formerly of Reuters, is CEO, TV 99)

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