Structural compulsions of crony journalism

Here is the situation on which we begin the ideas of structural compulsions of crony journalism. Here is a supreme Court  judgement of enormous importance, which directly affects the future Indian journalists who come under the Journalist’s act, and how come the newspapers are so silent about it? This SC judgement upholds the Majithia Wage Board for journalists. Look at the extent censorship is exercised to the point there is no discussion when the SC says it is valid, and the complaints by the newspapers against it are not, and dismiss the petitions  by Newspaper owners. The wage board is organized officially with government intervention and all parties are guarded by it. It fundamentally changes the structure of wages in newspaper  industry and you have not written a word about it. 

The TOI had an article attacking the court decision, saying this is the damage it will do. The article was remarkable for the fact that it did not have a single quote from a journalist, or a union, and the newspapers that carried it only carried quotes from INS  leadership, news owners, corporate CEOs, but not journalists. This is your introduction, welcome to the world of crony journalism.

The newspapers and TV channels are essentially corporations. It’s not about someone being a good or bad editor, it is not about an individual being a good reporter or a bad one. Those are the structural compulsions of corporate journalism. One of the expressions that anchors are freely in corporate media also, even in everyday Television- Crony capitalism- even Arnab uses it. You need to think a little bit- capitalism, we know. Here’s the question. Who is the crony in crony capitalism? That’s us. That’s what increasingly corporate ownership reduces us to cronies of capitalism. Of course, that’s a situation you resist and reject, and fight. But first you need to understand how the media are structured.

The world economic forum takes place  in Davos, Switzerland. Here is one more thing to look about crony journalism. Switzerland is one of the costliest countries in the world as you know, Davos is the most expensive city in Switzerland, at the time of the World Economic forum- where the top CEOs and billionaires meet for a week. Every major Indian media has been represented at Davos, covering Davos for ten days. The costs are enormous for sending a correspondent to Davos. At the time of the world Economic forum, your average millionaire finds it difficult to get a room, because the billionaires are gathering there! Yet, there are more journalists from India than any other country, than there are from any country in Europe or the US. How is it that the newspapers and channels that do not spend 10- 15k to send a reporter to cover the drought in Maratwada, have  the money to spend 20- 30 lakhs to keep the anchors to hire a studio in Davos? We’re talking about millions of rupees, hotel rooms that are not less than $500 per night, where instead of one to cover the drought, you’re willing to spend a whole team to Davos. It costs a bloody fortune. Any guesses who pays for it? By the way, in the last two years, the coverage has gone down. Because two years ago, we wrote and printed a story on who’s paying for it. After that some of the sponsors developed cold feet. Before 2011, there were far more Indian journalists, even anchoring the panels in the Forum. So who pays for it? Confederation of Indian Industry, in conjunction with the Commerce ministry, and maybe with grants from the Finance ministry as well. But the first one is confirmed. I wrote it, published it, and they did not challenge me. 

How did we know it? We got the internal ‘fatwas’ of the TV channels to their correspondents. The PR part is given concessions by the forums itself. “You will use the whole ‘WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM’, not the abbreviation WEF. Why? Because they think it’ll be confused with the Wrestling Entertainment Federation !. Throughout they are saying ‘agreement with our partners CII, is for six hours of back to back coverage. Every second of TV coverage costs money, you know that. Yet, this is entirely paid for. These are people who are sponsored and funded by industry to go there and make a case for greater liberalization, greater privatization, and greater neo-liberalism. All these brilliant entrepreneurs and businessmen join together- in 2008, they spoke in the forum just before Wall St collapsed, they said the situation had never been better. The world was going ahead, we were in a period of unprecedented prosperity. A little later it collapsed. After Wall St collapsed, nobody takes responsibility for having made utterly bogus claims. In fact, the people who made the predictions couldn’t show up at Davos because their companies were destroyed. They weren’t, in a corporate sense, alive to come and speak. Yet, year after year, we go through this thamasha ritual of hundreds of journalists covering it. There’s a good example for you of being structured cronies. You are brought into a signed agreement with corporate, and that is how it is covered in the media.

Which are the two major scandals you associate with journalism ?- let’s look at it in structural terms.  Radia tapes, and paid news. The Radia tapes as it appeared in the media was stupidity and call for ethics of a group of journalists. Look at how the media covered the fact that Mr Ratan Tata went to SC to stop the release of the tapes. No journalists went to the court to stop the release of the tapes, none of the effected journalists were exposed as idiots and morons (which they are). It was a corporate guy, Mr Tata, who made the speech, “India is being like a banana republic where bodies are found in the trunks of cars”. I was sympathetic to Mr Tata, because he was a leading car manufacturer, you don’t want to find bodies in your car especially when you make big ones like Jaguars which can take two bodies in the trunk. Now, here is the country’s second most well-known brand name, and corporate leader quietly going to the SC to get an injunction for the release of the tapes.

 What were the Radia tapes about? They were about a bunch of idiots making idiots of themselves, that’s one part of it. But they were not important to the scandal of the tapes. In a Bollywood movie, you have a hero, heroine, supporting actor, and villain, and comic relief, right? The journalists were the comic relief. They were the comedians in that film. What were the tapes really about? Four or five corporate leaders, The Ambanis, the Mittals, the Tatas… They could discuss on phone with Radia, and with each other, who should hold what portfolio on the Indian Cabinet, and then they could enforce that. They said Raja should be in charge, the other fellow should go, that happened. Four or five people who probably have never been to a voting booth could decide who should and shouldn’t be in the cabinet and their portfolio. That is the Radia tape scandal. Have you seen that angle of it covered in your press? No, because we had a crony journalism. It is structural, because, you try writing in that angle, and some did and succeeded, but that remains microscopic comparatively. The Indian Express, for example, said the villain of the episode was Radia. He didn’t say a word about the Ambanis or the Tatas reconstituting the Indian govt. It said Nira Radia – the lobbyist from hell. If you listen to the tapes closely, the only person who appears to have doing her job honestly was Radia. She is a lobbyist, she was lobbying. Now, the journalists, they were not doing journalism. They were lobbying. The industrialists, were interfering in the political system of a country and deciding who will be in the cabinet. Thirdly, Radia has no power by herself, her entire power to corrupt the Governmental process derives from who her clients are. Her clients are Ambani, Tata, Mittal- these sort of people. Mr Gupta thought it was entirely her power, the lobbyist from hell- Suppose Radia had the same power. That is the structural trouble of the corporate world. She derived her power from them, but her skills are another matter.

 

Mass media and mass reality

The growing disconnect between mass media on one hand and mass reality on the other. That is the first feature that strikes me when I look at it. The second and important point about this is that this disconnect is not accidental. It is a highly engineered disconnect. How do I prove it to you? Every newspaper, like every corporation, has clear policies where they draw out what their priorities of coverage are. Like in a University, you have departments, in a newspaper for reporter, you have beats. Tomorrow you may be on the municipality beat, she may be on the sports beat, etc. Just look at what are the beats in the media. Today for instance there is - in a country with the most number of poor people in the world, than most of Africa combined- not a single full time correspondent on the beat of poverty. Even I do rural reporting, but it is not entirely about poverty. No full time correspondent on housing and homelessness, in a country with the most number of homeless people and the second largest housing problem in the world. Show me how many newspapers have a full time labour correspondent or employment correspondent. When I joined journalism 33 years ago, most of the newspapers had at least one agricultural correspondent. Now there are people thinking they are agriculture correspondents because they are covering the ministry in Delhi and are writing what Sharad Pawar says. Mr Pawar does contract farming of a different kind, but covering Mr Pawar isn’t covering the whole field.

 The old time agriculture correspondent was somebody who covered the whole process from the pre input credit season through the sowing season, the spraying and cultivation season, then he went with the farmer when the crop was there and noted the prices. All this was a part of their beat. Now they just take it from the Press Information release. Let me just give you an idea on how important it is to have a labour correspondent. How many people are in the employment exchanges in India, in a ten year period? What is the average? In India we don’t use impolite language like “unemployed”, we call them ‘job seekers’. We don’t say they’re jobless. There are a large number of unemployment exchanges in this country but they are primarily in urban areas. Very few exchanges are really rural. A limited number of people get covered by them. Even then, the number of ‘job seekers’ registered are between 36 and 40 million. That is just a fragment of the reality, it doesn’t capture the rural unemployment.  Have you a sense of how much 40 million unemployed human beings are? It’s not the full figure- only those who have registered at the exchange. A fellow stands like ten years, doesn’t get a job, goes away, doesn’t show up for a while, his name is dropped- to the dead register. He is assumed to have gotten a job, which is why he doesn’t come. He actually got fed up of waiting for years in the exchange and given up. 

So what exactly is 40 million people? That’s just a few million less than the population of South Africa. But let me do it differently. Suppose we take these 40 mil people, and put them in a single queue, how long will that queue be? If the minimum space required is one meter, when my nose would be in the collar of the guy in front of me. If you pack us like sardines, you can put two people in a meter. Two to a metre is two thousand to a kilometre. So the length of a line of 40 Million unemployed? It will be three and a half times the Indian coastline, not counting the island coastlines.  Mainland Indian coastline is about 6 lakh kilometres, where this is 20,000 kilometres. But there is not a single labour correspondent. In 1980, there was a designated labour correspondent, an industry correspondent - today the guy who handles labour has a portfolio. He’s the industrial relations correspondent. Which means the company PRO talks to him about what labourers need. He’s covering labour through the corporations, not through the trade union. The one I know in Bombay has not even spoken to a union, they don’t need to. They just speak to the CSR department, or the corporation itself. Even when there is a bloody wage board for journalists, they don’t speak to the union. Is it difficult for you to find a journalist in your own paper to get a quote? That’s utter nonsense. And what does an education correspondent mean? It means a campus correspondent. Not primary or elementary education. It’s about the middle classes and the season coming when you are applying for college.

 

Journalism and stenography

When you have this kind of a situation, you have taken a policy decision. You’ve created a structure to report certain kinds of issues, but to exclude other types of issues. At the height of farmer suicides in 2006 in Vidarbha, minimum six farmers were killing themselves every day. I did a count on how many journalists outside vidharba were covering the issue. We counted six. (That included me). If six of us were covering this, and at the same time in Mumbai, there were 512 covering the Lakme India Fashion Week. That is not the decision of journalists, it is a policy decision taken by the corporation who runs the newspaper. Indeed the largest newspaper, Times of India put out a memo to its correspondents: “Dying farmers in Vidharba do not buy our newspapers”. The elites of South Mumbai do. They categorically laid down a line. The farmers are not buying my newspaper, why should I cover them? It gives you a very clear definition of what they understand to be journalism. Over a period of your career, you are going to realise there are two kinds of journalism. There are multiple kinds within these two, but ideologically, there are two. One is journalism. The other is stenography. When you are just taking down dictation from corporate owners, that is corporate stenography. I use this analogy frequently- “Do you want to be a journalist or a stenographer?” There’s nothing wrong in being a stenographer. It’s a skill. And in the old days, journalists had to know stenography- compulsorily. But the question is whether you want to remain in that level or be a journalist? Once in Chennai, where I was criticizing, an old man put up his hand and said, “You keep making this analogy and it is unfair.” I asked, “Who are you?” He said, “I am a stenographer.” “What is your problem with my analogy?” He said something very profound. He said I am a court room stenographer. I have retired from court four years ago. The good stenographer writes down accurately whatever is said and whoever says it. We write what the judge, witness, prosecution etc , say. You guys, you only write down what the powerful say. We are much better than you.” From that day on, I amended my analogy into stenography for the powerful. 

Media and journalism are two different things. Who owns media? The biggest owner today in the media is Mukesh Ambani. If you stay long enough in the profession, you’ll all be working for him.  Apart from CNN-IBN, he owns, ETV and entire Network 18. Remember ETV? They have 22 channels, of which 18 are Indian. Except the Telugu ETV, the rest are owned by Network18, which is owned by Mukesh Ambani. Network18 bought the entire bouquet, before Ambani bought Network18, so he could remain in the background of the deal. So first, all the eggs were given to the goose, and then he bought the goose.

Please go on to the internet, go to each media company site, and look at who all the board of directors are. Please find me three journalists in the board. You will find real estate agents, corporate food caterers, aviation and electronics chiefs, banking, automobile people, but you’ll find it difficult to find journalists. Because after all, what does journalism have to do with the media? Mr Jain said almost thirty years ago, for him, the newspaper was like any other product. You’ve got to be able to sell soap if you want to sell soap, similar for newspapers. Actually, there’s a hell of a difference. That is you can sell the same soap 365 days a year, but you can’t sell the morning newspaper in the evening. He made it clear that he approached the media as just another product. It’s the difference between journalism as a calling, as a craft, a vehicle of information, and journalism as a revenue stream. I’m not saying journalism should not have a revenue stream. I’m not saying newspapers should run on loss. Who will pay my salary? I want them to make a profit. But if the profit element is the only reason you’re running a newspaper, you’re doomed. Then you will not have journalism, you will have stenography and paid news. The stenography part is like this.  Which is the biggest newspaper in India? The giant? The biggest group in terms of revenue and all. The Dainik Jagran which claims 53 million readers, 35 editions. It’s franchisee journalism. It means if I want to start an edition in Kochi, I pay a franchisee fee to the owners of the Jagran, and I will have a newspaper of 12 pages from Kochi, they will supply the editorial, front pages, articles, news, and two pages will be mine to do what I want. I can run my dynasty on those two pages. 

You will find the South Asian chief of McDonalds, (I suppose that’s because it’s franchisee journalism), two corporate tax lawyers, two of Delhi’s biggest real estate people, the one fellow connected to newspapers is Gavin o’Reary, president of World  Association of Newspapers, who can’t read a single word in Hindi. But as I said, what does journalism have to do with newspapers? Mr Vineet Jain told the New Yorker in Oct. 2012, “We are in the advertising business, not the newspaper business.” Now I salute him for his honesty. Once you have said that, the news will always be secondary, journalism will only be a supporting product-It is not the purpose of the newspaper, the mission or the vision. One lord Thompson who used to own the London Times, said more honestly thirty years ago when asked why he kept buying more and more newspapers- he was on an acquisition spree in every county of England, “Gentlemen, I buy more newspapers to make more money to buy more newspapers to make more money.” Today at the global level, six major companies control the world of media, including the internet- if you think the internet is special and there is no ownership- that is bullshit. The ownership concentration on the internet is far more dangerous than the monopolies of print or TV media. The extent to which a newspaper has monopoly is limited to a few cities, there is a limit to what it can it do. The monopolies on the internet- of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, are far more serious. The digital monopolies own your personal data. They follow your transactions. The ads come to your email based on how you have used your card. If you write an email to your brother saying you’re thinking of buying a house, next day you see the ten ads of realtors. They sell, trade in, and profit from your data. The print and TV monopolies don’t have that. The largest spying and espionage scandal in history- the Snowden revelation. One of the biggest target s was India, by the way. They know the metadata, who you are calling, how many times, etc. It is the most intrusive form of spying possible. But know this- a) they trade your data, b) they have collaborated with the spying, the NSA, and c) we have shouted and screamed over Khobragade, but we kept quiet about this. Our entire UN mission was bugged by the NSA. The entire consulate was bugged. The Government knows and acknowledges this, and Salman Khurshid says, “Arrey, all the countries do it.” The president of Brazil cancelled their official visit to the US in protest. She went to the UN and condemned this as intolerable. Dr. Manmohan Singh went like a poodle scratches on the door to be given entrance. And all your big ISPs are involved. They haven’t said a word about the spying. The minister said “Chalta hain”. Don’t think somehow the net has liberated you. There are liberated zones in all media, but don’t romanticize the internet.

 

Who owns our media? 

You’ll see the dramatic changes from 1980s with the second press commission. You have over 200 industries in which Indian media has interest. What was the least covered aspect of the Coalgate scam? That the fourth biggest newspaper owners- of Lokmat was the major allottees- Vijay and Jawaharlal Darda.  All the files related to their allotment have disappeared from the ministry. One of them, Vijay Darda is a member of parliament. The same people were involved in the paid news scandal. Once you accept that news is only a commodity, then it is saleable. So the owners of Indian media have interests in industries from aviation to agriculture. Those are the structures of ownerships in media. In the last twenty years, the number of media might have grown, but the number of owners is shrinking until today, one Mukesh Ambani (who twenty years ago didn’t have a single media presence) is the biggest media owner in the country. 

Now we know the structural compulsions, but why the compulsion to lie?  In 2002, the Indian newspaper world had a remarkable achievement. Private treaties. It sounds like an agreement between India and Pakistan, but it’s an agreement between a large newspaper corporation and a private corporation. Now you’ve heard of Pantaloons- biggest retailer of men’s trousers. Pantaloons owner Kishore Biyani is one of the biggest retailers in the country today. In 2000, he was a middle level retailer who wanted to break into the big league. He signed a private treaty with the Times of India- this is no secret, by the way, they’re also so proud of it that when another paper used the word, they threatened to sue them for infringement of copyright. Something like Davood suing Chotta Rajan. It would be wrong to say TOI is doing this, the other guys are good.

The moment he signs a private treaty with me, I become owner of 7-10 % of his shares, the return will be paid by advertising in my paper. Suppose newspapers signs treaties with two hundred clients- and they have, many newspapers already have multiple private treaty clients. It means that your reporters cannot cover any of those companies negatively. If I am the owner, and Sri Rajendran is my biggest hotshot investigative reporter, how can he cover a company of which I own 10% shares negatively? That is your structural compulsion again. I am the owner of the company again, will I allow you to mess with it?  So with 250 private treaties signed, the reporters cannot cover anything critically. They can only criticize Nehtas and Babus. 

Now look at the latest developments in politics- the Aam Aadmi Party. AAP was the darling of the media as long as they were attacking Babu and Nehta corruption. When they were attacking the bureaucrats and politicians, all the anchors, NDTV, CNN-IBN, were praising the AAP. From the day AAP extended its vision to corporate corruption, the AAP is the villain in the media. Notice when the turn takes place from being completely pro-AAP (which I am not), to being completely anti-AAP (which also I am not). For me when they appeared first, I criticized them strongly for not taking up corporate corruption. Today, when they’ve taken it up- then the media and I were on opposite sides, today too, the media and I are on opposite sides. They actually dared to use the word Mukesh Ambani. There was an interesting debate on CNN-IBN, where Harsh Vardhan, BJP leader, was fulminating against AAP and Yogendra Yadav was saying “would you have filed an FIR against Ambani?” Vardhan said, “We will file, we will punish.” Yogendra said, “I’m asking you can you just mention the name Mukesh Ambani on air?” He didn’t. That is the extent of crony journalism. If A is a crony of B, A is not necessarily uncritical of B. He’s a sycophant who’ll say everything nice on B, because he’s dependent on B. That’s the kind of crony we are. We know that B is a crook, but we’ll praise him to heavens because of structural compulsion and because freedom of the press has been replaced by freedom of the purse. Your money power decides how much you can get away with it. On the nuclear deal, when the Government of India was threatened with folly, how did Manmohan singh get the vote? He called the two Ambani brothers. They visited the PM. Each has their MPs who are dedicated admirers. So both were called to the PM’s office where he said you both are good boys, and should not fight with each other, you are brothers. One week later, all the MPs, even those who belonged to the opposition parties, aligned with the Ambanis voted in favour of Manmohan’s government. The media celebrated his victory- the same Manmohan Singh, who the media are now saying is a useless fellow, the worst PM we ever had. A meeting with the Ambani brothers won a trust vote in the Parliament. Those are your structural compulsions.

 

Media is business, Journalism is not

I don’t want to discourage you, I want you to go into journalism. Mr Samir may believe journalism is a business, I don’t.  Let me tell you what I believe. Newspapers and media are a business. Conglomerates and corporations and TV channels are a business. Journalism is not a business. It is a calling. You do it from your heart. You do it because it is noble, and right, and because the greatest of Indians were all journalists during the freedom struggle. Mohandas Gandhi and Babasahib Ambedkar- Have you considered them as journalists? They have written 150 volumes of their collected journalistic writings. They have founded newspapers. The entire history of the Indian freedom struggle is about people who became journalists from their heart. You know a person who couldn’t get an article published, so he sent letter after letter under various names to have them published? His name was Bhagat Singh. All your great freedom fighters doubled up as journalists. They didn’t talk about revenue streams; they talked about freedom, the liberation of the humankind. That is your tradition. Our traditions are far greater than the traditions of European journalism where journalists, newspapers and agencies came up to supply commercial intellectuals to the stock market. 

Origin of journalism in the third world was for anti-colonial movements. Even the right wing Indians did some journalism from time to time. India journalism in its true sense will be 200 years ago in 2016. I don’t count the Gazette and all which people say was the first newspaper.  It was from an idiot in Britain who was full of gossip columnists who were covering who the Governor General’s wife was sleeping with. I don’t think that’s journalism. The first Indian owned journals that we know of with an agenda comes out in 1816 from Rajaram Mohan Roy. In his newspaper, Mirat-ul-Akbar published in Persian (the then language of the elite), he addressed sati, child marriage, widow re-marriage, anti-infanticide. That is journalism. You can be proud of your 200 year old tradition. Look at the fact exposed things, created trouble- ultimately someone published the Radia tapes. You have people even today. How many of you joined journalism as a commercial proposition and how many of you joined it with idealism?  How many are going into it because you believe it has a serious social role that connects you to a society which you can participate in making the lives of others better? Almost every student has his or her hands up. That has been our history as journalists. Did Ambedkar go into journalism to earn money? He went to fight for the liberation of humans from caste and oppressions. Gandhi was driven by the anti-imperial uprising. All of them were driven by something other than commerce. 

There will be the commercial in journalism, there will be the revenue idea, but if for you, it’s only about that, you are doomed. And I’m very glad to see how many hands went up for the opposite option. Many before you have done those great things. How do we solve the problem? How do you go into a major corporate newspaper tomorrow and function and survive? You have to be clever about it. There will be many times when you’ll have to cover rubbish. You don’t have a choice. That job is a trade-off. How many stories you publish that you actually want to, and how many you publish that your editor wants to? Let me put it this way. You join a newspaper and over the next year or two, you publish two stories that you want to do, in exchange for eight that your editor wants to do, that is an honourable ratio. If you made the ratio, 3:7, that is a big improvement. If you reach the ratio 4:6, you are doing very well. 5:5, you’re doing brilliantly. 6:4 in your favour, and you’re a genius. There is always going to be that element of trade-off. When I was a young Reporter at UNI, I did every damn story the editor wanted me to do, and the ratio of stories that I wanted to do rose rapidly, because the then editor (by the way, who was from Kerala, and is still in contact with me) KPK Kutty of UNI, (Now in Palakkad at age 84, teaching young students classical music. Well he didn’t teach me singing, but he taught me something.)  The more we delivered and showed our competence, the more freedom they give us to go out and do other kinds of stories. The point is to make yourself indispensable. 

 

Dalits in media

When I said features of media, I left out one thing. They are the most exclusionist institution of the Indian democracy. In my opinion, the best president of India we ever had was KR Narayanan who stopped in this era, the business of Central governments dismissing state governments.  Narayanan sent back the NDA’s demand for dismissal of the Bihar government. And from that day, no government in India has been dismissed. The federalism increased dramatically because of his bold judgement. He refused to give in to the NDA on three such occasions. I’m telling you, the greatest president of this country came from your state. If the community of Dalits, who produced a president of India, could produce the Chief justice of India, 30 Vice chancellors in the country, 10-15 governors, chief ministers like Mayawati and a deputy PM, why can’t they produce a chief subeditor in a major newspaper? Because our media are essentially casteist and exclusionist. Know this also. I’ve done a survey of it. They are discriminated against in the media. They try for government jobs, because there is at least a reservation, an affirmative action, a quota for them. Hamid Ansari put it very well. He said, “Of the four estates of Indian Democracy, Only the fourth estate is explicitly based on for-profit activity.” Therefore the question of social liberalism doesn’t arise with us. I could tell you, some of my classmates- tribal students- who were far better students than I was, couldn’t make it to journalism. The fact is that we are exclusionist. When it comes to anti-Mandal agitations, anti-reservations, the greatness of the freedom struggle journalists are that they rose above that. Ambedkar faced far more hostility that you ever will, but he rose above that. But as citizens, you have to fight monopolies.

I don’t believe we should replace corporate monopolies with state monopolies, but I do believe one of the things we can do is to strengthen the public broadcasters. Today the so called public broadcasters are actually government broadcasters. There is no private corporation in the US that gives you the coverage like BBC or Al Jazeera does. Every time the US is in a war, Al Jazeera viewership in the US shoots up. Incidentally, last July, Al Jazeera opened in the US and immediately got a good viewership. BBC’s viewership in the US doubles during times of a crisis, because people don’t trust their corporate media. They also have their own vested interests, but at least it is seen as a rival corporate showing something different. My last visit to Kerala was in Trivandrum, we had a discussion on ‘Deepening democracy, deepening decentralisation’. My remarks to the audience who wanted to have panel discussion consisted of one line. Everybody wanted to know what the role of media was. The first role is to democratize the media. The first necessity is to decentralize the media. We’re decentralizing the polity, but centralizing the media until one Mukesh Ambani will come to own everything. There are two kinds of decentralization- genuine and fraud ones. I salute Kerala- this is the state that has shown us what decentralization can really be. Fraud decentralization is what happened in the last 20 years at the centre of this country. You decentralize the problem, but you centralize the resources and the power to make solutions. A bunch of bureaucrats decide what we say at the WTO.  We say agriculture is a state subject. But is the Government of Kerala arguing its case against free trade zones in the WTO?  When you centralize that power to make solutions, you destroyed the democratization.

You know who you would be if you were idealistic and is moved by those principles? You are not going to be citizen journalists. You are going to be guerrilla journalists. When they burn one forests, you come to another. At some point, they will burn your forests. Because that is the trend- less diversity. But it can be done. Remember that your predecessor journalists fought far greater odds and achieved it. While you are in the mainstream media, and you should be in the mainstream media, keep your connections with alternate media. Because in most cases the big stories come out in little journals, before becoming national scandals. Kerala has a rich history of small library and journal movements. Here is your basic principle in your struggle ahead as aspiring journalists. Sell your labour, not your soul. As journalists, we sell our labour to our capitalist owners, we don’t have to sell our souls with it. Too many journalists do that willingly. They become stenographers. What you do is a struggle to keep your soul. You do the world allotted to you, also try doing other things, and expand the freedom that you have. Also, as citizens, the role is to create more and more outlets, for ten and a half years I’ve worked in blitz weekly, many of the “scoops” we had, weren’t really done by us. Those were stories killed in the Times of India and the Indian Express. The reporter would come to us, and say, “They killed my story”. We would disguise the reporter, change the wordings, language, and carry it front page. The reporter would tell his chief, “I gave you the story, now one week later, and the Blitz has got hold of it.” Of course, he gave us the story. That’s also guerrilla journalism. You plant the bombs elsewhere, but you cannot fight this battle if you do not fight monopoly. We need legislation, mass participation, and public action for that. It wasn’t easy, but it has been done. It won’t be easy, but it has to be done. 

 

This is the unedited complete version of the N.N.Sathyavrathan Memorial talk made at the  Kerala Press Academy, Kochi on 16.2.2014. Transcribed by Ananthu R. A.