Marginal Utility Of Interviews

In fact, Mr Gujrals very short stint in power so far has been marketed by a record number of interviews to TV and other media. Hardly a day passes without him speaking to one TV channel or another and seldom a week without him addressing a publication. Mr Gujral may not have read any economics but should still be aware that such an avalanche of words in so short a time must depreciate their marginal utility rapidly. His outspokenness is in sharp contrast to the reticence of his predecessors. Mr Deve Gowda, being a poor farmer, was not much into talking and Mr Narasimha Rao was famous for his reticence. V P Singh was there for a brief while and Rajiv Gandhi was more forthcoming in the earlier part of his rule than the latter. The pattern is one of access to carefully chosen individual mediamen and organisations while holding few open press conferences.

Prime ministers must show restraint in what they say, but they also need a structured media policy. They have enough opportunity through public meetings and TV to address the nation directly. When they choose to influence the countrys thinking process by using journalistic interlocutors, the policy should be as non-discriminate and open as possible. That is, prime ministers should hold more press conferences than they have done so far and certainly speak less often to individuals than Mr Gujral has. In fact, a press conference during a major event should be mandatory and regular ones before or after important sessions of Parliament would be desirable. Now the press has access to the prime minister when it is on the plane with him during a foreign visit, but that really does not concentrate the mind. Foreign visits create a mental climate of their own from which the journalist and the reader has to extricate himself in order to address the right spectrum of national issues. If Mr Gujral were to set in motion such a tradition, he would serve his own declared policy of greater openness and also keep his utterances out of harms way.