The virtue of self-control

The media must guard its reputation more carefully

Last week's revelations of close relations between journalists and corporate houses will have underlined commonly held suspicions that, for the media, ethics are breached more often than not. The guilt or otherwise of those involved in this latest episode is still open to debate. But the broad facts add to concern that journalists are increasingly careless and amoral when it comes to relations with corporate houses. To be sure, the corporate-journalist nexus is no novelty. But the current developments suggest that the malaise is becoming institutional. Recent scandals over "paid news" highlighted a practice that several media organisations sought to legitimise at the start of the millennium. More recently, the notorious tapes involving conversations between senior journalists and a corporate lobbyist representing some of India's largest and most powerful corporations further shot the media's reputation.

Should this matter? Yes, as much for practical reasons as broader ones of principle. Indians take great pride in the freedom of the press; and, on balance, warts and all, it is hard to deny that it has mostly worked to the good in this vast and chaotic democracy. It is a value that cannot be overemphasised when India is compared with countries like Russia or those in West Asia where censorship is the handmaiden of oppression and worse. But the other side of press freedom is independence. By definition, it is an enterprise that demands certain internal standards. This is admittedly a difficult tenet to follow when there are bills to be paid. But there is no dearth of examples of news businesses surviving without compromising their ethics, globally and in India. Since the 1990s, however, India has seen this system stutter somewhat. Partly this was due to pragmatism on behalf of media companies - they may have believed it was better to harvest gains institutionally rather than leaving them to some individual journalists. Competition also has driven this change, so that revenues from subscriptions, whether to print or broadcast, have scarcely risen, forcing a disproportionate reliance on advertising.

But an unfortunate result of these trends has been a steady erosion of media brand equity with more and more questionable practices in both reporting standards and media behaviour. This, in turn, is encouraging successive governments to toy with the idea of media control. Ministers in the previous United Progressive Alliance had periodically raised the issue and the current government has, too - all in the name of that nebulous value called "national interest". That is why it is becoming urgent for the media to pause and look at some practical self-regulation. As the late judge J S Verma bluntly put it at a conference, "The media needs to start regulating itself because the government is dying to do it." With a strong government in power at the Centre, the time to start is now.