A worm's eye view of the media

Editor Missing: The Media in Today's India

Author: Ruben Banerjee

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 252

Price: Rs 599

A few days ago columnist T N Ninan wrote about the many more books being written in our time by retired civil servants. He separated the Indian Foreign Service officers, who wrote about the world and tended to be better writers than the Indian Administrative Service lot, who focussed on themselves. Indian media, like other parts of Indian society, has not seen many professionals writing either about their work or themselves. This is in comparison to books by editors and columnists in the United Kingdom and the United States, also working in English, whose numbers are legion.

In India usually it is the “celebrity” hack — Vinod Mehta, Vir Sanghvi — who writes a memoir or a similar light work, which is why there are few journalists’ memoirs that come to mind. One is grateful to Ruben Banerjee for this reason — that he has chosen to write of his time as editor of the weekly magazine Outlook. He is modest enough to admit that he is not as famous as other editors and has not had a particularly remarkable career, but has written about his experience nonetheless. This is charming and one is attracted to the writer for this modesty. He is also fond of his work and the nature of it and what in his opinion makes it important. There is plenty of material that will make readers appreciate the atmosphere and energy inside of a news organisation. This is interesting at a point in time when print media in general and especially the weekly magazine have become irrelevant.

The book sketches his time as journalist, with rich detail of how he joined and left as editor and the highlights of some of the special issues and covers that the magazine put out under him. There are also glimpses of his time as reporter, and some colourful anecdotes, such as this one about meeting Biju Patnaik: “Heeding his command, I rode my two-wheeler to his office in the leafy Forest Park neighbourhood and presented myself before him. ‘You kept me waiting. You know who I am? I am Biju Patnaik, six feet two inches tall,’ he said in his trademark expansive style. Still not overwhelmed, I retorted: ‘I am Ruben Banerjee, five feet five inches tall’… Biju Babu found my response extremely unusual and funny.”

Also interesting is Mr Banerjee’s experience in Al Jazeera, where he says that the coverage of Kashmir was “shrill”. His attempts at balance and objectivity were, he says, misinterpreted by the largely Muslim staff, particularly after the ascent of Narendra Modi as prime minister. Later, after he returned to India, Mr Banerjee oversaw the reportage of a man who was tied by the army to the front of a vehicle and paraded for hours as a message to locals. These bits are some of the most readable parts of the book, because they reveal the inner workings of media houses. At Hindustan Times, which Mr Banerjee came to later, he describes news meetings as being “borderline abusive”. “Senior editors were called donkeys, monkeys and what-not,” he writes. Alas, this is true of many newsrooms around the subcontinent.

Some of the material is tedious and one is not sure why reproducing the email exchanges leading up to his exit would interest anyone. Mr Banerjee writes of how the magazine under him explored the issue of the media after 2014. However, he doesn’t delve too much into the media as an industry or contemplating the changes that have come to Indian media of late. Readers might have benefitted from knowing what insiders like him think has happened (or indeed not happened, if the writer feels this is the case, and there is mere continuity).

English organs used to be edited to the left of the Indian reader, especially on social issues. This is no longer the case and the media has volunteered itself to “balance” Hindu nationalism. Why? It might have been interesting to tell the outsider what had happened.

Like the judiciary, like the funding of politics, like the economy, like foreign policy and like national security, India’s media has been taken down a particular road under a popular and charismatic prime minister. The primary subject of our time is this and these times need to be written about and documented.

Mr Banerjee has done his bit here and, once again, we should be grateful that he has chosen to do so.