The curious case of Barkha Dutt (and others)

Excerpts from Silver Blaze (The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes), by Arthur Conan Doyle

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

Gregory: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."

Holmes: "That was the curious incident."

Reality TV met News Opinionating met Court TV yesterday when well known TV journalist Barka Dutt, news editor of the NDTV channel came under cross questioning by four editors - Sanjaya Baru of the Business Standard, Dileep Padgaonkar, former editor of the Times of India, Manu Joseph of the Open Magazine which broke the “Radia tapes” story and Swapan Dasgupta, right wing columnist and contributor to The Pioneer and The Telegraph among others.

The key behind this charade held by the channel was to bring into focus the role played by Barkha Dutt as a news editor reporting during the UPA-II cabinet formation based on information she received from corporate lobbyist Niira Radia. The conversations with Radia establish a few things - 

a) Barkha Dutt explicitly agrees to act as a message courier between Radia (ostensibly speaking for entities within the DMK) and Congress leaders - senior ones like Ghulam Nabi Azad for e.g., 

b) Radia was particularly keen on passing the message as to who among the DMK was a preferred candidate for ministership in certain berths.

The anger against Barkha Dutt expressed online was on various counts. Many in the public were linking this up with the 2G scam and role of DMK minister A Raja in it. They saw it as a case of Radia playing a facilitator for the re-entry of A Raja into the UPA-II cabinet despite serious questions about the 2G scam during UPA-I and journalists helping her in the process. It was galling for the public to see journalists who they ideally see as detached players wanting to partake into such murky processes orchestrated by corporate players.

No wonder, Barkha Dutt, being the high profile journalist that she is, was prominently highlighted along with a few others. The other high profile journalist Vir Sanghvi was caught even more red handed, playing the rat to Radia’s Pied Piper in helping in message delivery and opinion making about two issues - again the A Raja re-installation in cabinet and also the Mukesh Ambani line in the gas dispute between the Ambani brothers. Sanghvi has recently taken a break from writing his column, Counterpoint. And he makes a bogus defense based on “stringing his source”, but the proof is in the pudding that is his writing and there, as is pointed out earlier, he is caught red handed doing Niira Radia’s bidding.

Evidently Vir Sanghvi is more interested in pushing for the national interest as long as that interest expediently serves the corporate lobbyist's.

Barkha Dutt in her first response was outraged by the insinuations of lobbying in particular. She insisted that her assurances to Radia were basically “fibs” wanting to string her to get further information. And it is this outrage that pervaded her response besides the point on media ethics, where she questioned Open magazine (and Outlook magazine)’s decisions to publish transcripts of her conversations without contacting her for a response and so on.
This was evident in her replies during last night’s inquisition-of-sorts as well.

But substantively, the key question remained and asked only by a relative few - Siddharth Varadarajan of The Hindu in his article, and by the Open magazine’s editor, Manu Joseph and his colleague. 

Joseph asked Dutt why wasn’t it that as a news editor she saw it necessary to bring to the public’s purview that a corporate public relations person having two of the richest clients in the world and indeed most powerful in India, was trying to pass on messages on which DMK leader was suitable for a particular cabinet post? Wasn’t it obvious that the role of corporate players wanting to  have a say in getting ministers of their liking was a case of gross crony capitalism?
Why was her coverage restricted to the minute-by-minute reporting of what the DMK’s demands were and what bargains were being struck by the Congress and the DMK rather than this substantial question of great public import? And why wasn’t this point highlighted even during the height of the revelations of the 2G scam, as representatives of various political parties pointed out irregularities in the 2G auction and the losses to the public exchequer (as early as early 2008). Or even during the recent release of the CAG report that put a number to the notional loss suffered by the exchequer - a mind boggling Rs 1,76,000 crore. 
Why didn’t Barkha Dutt want to bring out the undue and unusual interest shown by corporate players in wanting A Raja’s continuation in cabinet, during her reportage of the 2G Scam recently? Surely it was in public interest to bring out the nuances and minutiae of how crony capitalism worked and how ministers were at the bidding of big corporate players who controlled the strings of functioning of democracy from without, wasn’t it?

No, according to Barkha Dutt. It was a mere judgement call whether to report this or not. This was commonplace - the undue and shady corporate interest in public affairs and day-to-day and she didn’t consider it important enough.

Here is where Barkha Dutt is trying to string the public along with her and fib to us. Here is where  the main contradiction is brought out clearly. Here is why the import of the Open magazine and Outlook magazine stories are brought out in the clear and in substance. It is similar to why the dog didn’t bark in the Silver Blaze story in the Sherlock Holmes series.

Our news media revels in trying to outdo each other in bringing out procedural, titillating details as if they are doing ball-by-ball commentary of a cricket game, when it comes to political reporting. But they do not want to displease their advertisers, mostly big corporate fund dispensers, by seeing and reporting things that are fundamentally wrong in the core issue of crony capitalism. It makes more sense for them to ridicule the political class and play up the middle class imagery of the crooked political class without distinction and difference and win eye balls in that process.

This is the problem with Indian news journalism. As Lydia Polgreen of the New York Times tweeted, “the larger problem of political journalism, esp[ecially] on TV: it privileges process minutiae over substance”. The question is why? This editorial in the EPW commenting on the Paid News issue can provide answers - “The Indian media is selling its soul to the market and forfeiting its claim to be an independent estate” or this editorial , which comments on the media coverage of the 26/11 incident says,

The manifest failures of the political establishment though, cannot obscure the fact that older notions of the media serving as a vigilant watchdog over public affairs have once again proven hopelessly romantic and outmoded. The media is a slave of the market. Its social role is little else than to serve as an echo chamber for the voices of the rich and the powerful, however shrill, irrational or lacking in coherence these may be.

Or more systematically as to how profit privileges public interest in the mass media, by the formidable intellectual, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in the excellent book, “Manufacturing Consent”. A film made on the subject can be viewed here - 

From Pragoti.org More Here

"What we have is freedom of purse, not freedom of press" : P. Sainath

The Indian media is a free media, they are free, they are politically free, but they are imprisoned by profit and commerce. No one is shooting you for saying something in India in journalism. But you’re a prisoner of profit. So even if they are politically free, they don’t make use of the political freedom because their first priority is profit. If profit entails loss of freedom they will accept it because anything but profit matters. Now every time they do some crime like “paid news” or anything else and if there is criticism of them, they respond it to by saying “you are attacking press freedom”.

The press doesn't have the freedom to loot and extort me. This is not freedom of press. This is freedom of purse. So whenever they want to make money, they say this is a business - we are on a business, etc. When they are criticized they say no...we want special rights because we are the press, we have freedom of press. When you are defending your privileges, you claim freedom of press. But then you are telling your journalist, this is a business. You go out and do what I tell you to do. 

The hypocrisy of freedom of the press is that freedom doesn’t apply to journalist. That is why AJ Liebling said 70 years ago in the US, “Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one”, those who own the press have freedom. This freedom is not for the journalist, it is not for the society, it is not for the readers or viewers of these channels. It is for the corporate interests that control them. So it is very interesting when they are defending their position, they defend it on the high moral ground of press freedom. The rest of the time they are operating not as guardians of freedom but as extortionists and profiteers. 

That is the hypocrisy involved and one day that will boomerang very badly on all of us , so this is the thing, .you have free press……it is free, it is not that there are any editors in prison ,there are no prisoners of conscience in the media happening yet. 

But the freedom we have is very limited. It belongs to the bosses, not to the journalists, not to the readers, not to the audience. It is a very limited freedom and the freedom related on your capacity to pay for it. How much money you have and your equation with power. There is also a real freedom of press in India that also has to be said. The fact that is real freedom of press is that there is still a space for dissident voices. I can function in the press, hundreds of people like me also function in the press. So we have a space. There is some freedom even for the journalist and a particular kind of freedom exists. But that space is shrinking. I won’t say that I have no freedom. I have enjoyed lot of freedom as a journalist in India working for different publications but I am saying if I look at how was it twenty years ago and how it is now, then the space overall is shrinking. It is becoming more and more homogenized, corporatized and those who have anti corporate views will find it increasingly difficult to find employment in the media.

What is “paid news”? Paid news is run to pass off an advertisement, a piece of propaganda and advertisement...pass that as news, pretend that it is news, that is “paid news”. Paid news does not disclose to the reader that this information has been paid for.

Suppose you are a quack doctor you are putting out medicine which will cure asthma or tuberculosis. It may be fake. I write the story saying this man has some found cure for asthma. He has done this, he has done this, and he is a genius. You buy this; you will be liberated from asthma. I do not tell them that I have taken three lakh rupees from the advertiser - that is paid news. 

But during elections - paid news becomes twice as dangerous, because it is not only harming the readers' information, it is harming the readers' electoral democratic rights. It is concealing from the reader - if X is standing in an election, X is paying me as a news paper to run positive information on X...According to how much X pays I will run so much positive information on you..The reader will not even know the name of X's opposing candidate in the election unless I mention the candidate to attack him. His name will not appear. 

So it’s what vice president Hameed Ansari calls a double weapon. Paid news destroys the concept of a free and fair and balanced press. That the same time the paid news undermines the very basis of electoral democracy because it prejudices and interferes with the free and fair election. It allows huge use of money power without accountability. 

So in elections paid news becomes even more damaging but it is not only in elections that there is the phenomenon of paid news. There is paid news every day in the news paper and channels. If journalism does not wipe out paid news; paid news will wipe out journalism.

From a wide ranging interview of P Sainath given to V Sivadasan in Pragoti. More Here.