Breaking the news

Aggressive TV came into its own in 2010, but T N Ninan looks at the new show called 'reality media'

The gutter press in Paris was a powerful mobilising force. In the run-up to the French Revolution, it churned out reams of scandal, real and imagined, factual and twisted, about the Bourbon royals. Its particular target was Marie Antoinette, who must go down as one of history’s more undeserving tragediennes. The lines most famously assigned to her (“If they don’t have bread, let them eat cake”) had been attributed to someone else decades earlier, by Rousseau, so she could hardly have been its author. But the streets of Paris were filled with people ever willing to think the worst of the lonely wife of Louis XVI; she was Austrian, and she had the traditional Hapsburg hauteur, while her witless husband was already the butt of much derision.

 

And so the gutter press (one of them had a title which translated as The Royal Dildo) had a field day. Pornographic pictures of Marie Antoinette were routine, even as she was accused of lesbianism and incest, and personal profligacy that bankrupted the treasury. The calumny ended with the beheading of the monarchs.

What does all this have to do with India in 2010? Just this, that it may go down as the year of India’s vigilante TV. “The people of India want to know…” asserts Arnab Goswami on Times Now, and waves a piece of paper at the camera as he asks angled, opinionated questions that don’t need answers because they are really accusations hurled into the electronic ether. Impartiality is for the clubby Prannoy Roys of the world, who even when they ask the difficult questions do it with an urbane reserve that takes away the sting.

Goswami, in contrast, is the tribune of the people demanding answers from the representatives of the people. His counterparts on Headlines Today and elsewhere have contributed to re-inventing Indian news television. While the chat shows still descend to mostly pointless political jousting, TV anchors in attack mode can be more riveting than any soap opera. Breaking News is now about smashing reputations.

There is more than one irony in this. First, the credibility of India’s media is at an all-time low, after the Radia tapes and scandals over paid news. Second, despite its seeming ubiquitousness, English news TV has a strictly limited reach. Media research suggests an audience reach that accounts for one-third of 1 per cent of TV viewing in 100 million cable and satellite homes. Individual newspapers do better; the Times of India has an average issue readership of 7 million; Dainik Jagran goes up to 16 million. Taken together, the circulation of India’s press is over 100 million, and should yield readership of at least twice or thrice that number. News TV, in English especially, simply does not measure up.

And yet, when Barack Obama failed to mention Pakistan in his first public comments on Indian soil, at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, the Rottweilers who went into attack mode were from news TV. A relentless barrage of comments threatened to divert attention away from the carefully scripted narrative of a US presidential visit. When Obama did finally say the two things demanded of him (condemnation of Pakistan’s record on terrorism and support for India’s claim to a permanent Security Council seat), Times Now was quick off the mark to claim credit for having forced the US president’s hand. And who is to tell whether the claim was empty tub-thumping or a smidgeon of the truth?

Headlines Today in turn claimed credit for some of the domestic scalps. Shashi Tharoor lost his ministership, as did Andimuthu Raja. Raja is now being quizzed by the CBI, while Suresh Kalmadi has had his homes and offices searched. Others who have been caught in the crosshairs discover very quickly that they have nowhere to hide. So they come back under the klieg lights, to either seek redemption through public confessions (“I was a bloody fool,” said a contrite Tarun Das to Karan Thapar) or brazen it out (like Barkha Dutt). What matters is the court of public opinion, and in that court the inquisitor and judge are the anchors who fill the airwaves.

The comparison with 18th-century Paris’s gutter press is of course stretching things to make a point, which is that every half-formed society (to use Naipaul’s phrase) probably needs a vigilante fourth estate — because the other institutions of governance are either not fully established or exist more in form than substance. The very term “fourth estate” goes back to 18th-century Europe where the first estate consisted of the nobility, the second the clergy, and the third commoners. Edmund Burke is supposed to have first used the term in 1787 when proceedings in the House of Commons were thrown open to press reporting. Thomas Carlyle quoted Burke as saying that there were three estates in Parliament; “but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all”.

How right he was, except that it is no longer what happens inside Parliament that makes news, as every MP who makes a laboured speech knows. Nor is it the mainstream “national” press, despite large readership numbers, that uses its latent ability to set the cat among the pigeons. More often than not, the vigilante press has been the marginalised press, like Blitz, the muck-raking Mumbai tabloid that Russy Karanjia ran in the 1960s and 1970s, making news as often as he was hauled into court for libel. Or Tehelka in our times. It became mainstream only with the Indian Express under Arun Shourie in the 1980s, but there hasn’t been anything quite like that combination since. And so, though there was never any shortage of scandals, the stories about them began to have less and less impact — until the birth of sting journalism (remember Bangaru Laxman?) and aggressive TV, and the marriage of the two.

Despite its small audience, the immediacy of news on TV magnifies impact, as does the fact that the audience comprises the increasingly influential middle class. And what seems to work is news with an attitude. The country seems to be in the mood to say: “Don’t give us neutral-position journalism. We know there is large-scale corruption and skulduggery, so go out and fight the enemy, or at least make him squirm in your studio!”

But as with most people and institutions cast into heroic mould, the promise is greater than the delivery. Anchors shouting at hapless studio guests are not a substitute for the hard grind of investigative reporting — for which most TV channels have neither the budgets nor the staff. TV reporting teams are small, compared to what newspapers command, and yet many of the major TV news channels are losing money hand over fist. Naturally, there is no scope for providing in-house expertise on complex subjects, and the alternative of inviting outside experts into the studio only delivers “talking heads” programmes, not the muck-raking that is in demand. All power then to the anchor who can use the minimum ammunition at his command for maximum bang.

But anchors are frontline artillery. They can fire effectively only if the news organisations that hire them have sound balance sheets. And this is where the picture gets complicated. For, what defences do the targets of the media attacks mount? Advertiser pressure is now old hat (Reliance, Tata and others have cumulatively blacklisted offending publications times without number), and newer techniques have emerged — like PR agencies that permit or deny access to reporters on the basis of “good” behaviour. Niira Radia wanted to blacklist even PTI, despite its virtual monopoly status as a national wire service. Some business houses have invested in the media, and it is a moot question whether the objectives are entirely financial. The Ambanis, for instance, make more news than anyone else, so how do they respond? They join the game, that’s what. They launched their own newspaper in 1990, but The Observer of Business and Politics never amounted to much and died unsung.

More recently, if reports in Jagan Reddy’s Saakshi newspaper are to be believed, Mukesh Ambani is a behind-the-scenes investor in Eenadu, the leading Telugu daily. There is also unconfirmed speculation about his money having found its way to an English newspaper and a TV channel. Niira Radia is on tape, arranging money for NewsX, presumably from one or other of her principals. And where there is one Ambani, can another be far behind? Either directly or through the mutual funds that he controls, Anil Ambani has invested at various times in Television Eighteen, Bloomberg-UTV and Headlines Today; but these are mostly secondary investments through the stock market and no one has said that he has acquired any editorial control. Still, given how financially challenged many TV channels and newspapers are, it is not surprising that some have gone out and sought help from those who have the money. Questions raise their heads when the helping hand stays hidden. (Disclosure: Kotak Mahindra Bank is a significant stakeholder in Business Standard.)

Politicians are even more nervous than businessmen about an assertive media that is out of control, and they too know that it helps to have some Rottweilers on your side. It was in the wake of Eenadu’s investigation of Y S Rajasekhara Reddy’s land deals that son Jagan launched Saakshi. When Jayalalithaa, as chief minister of Tamil Nadu, ordered the arrest of M Karunanidhi some years ago, it was nephew Murasoli Maran’s Sun TV that endlessly looped the scenes of the chaotic arrest sequence, along with heightened commentary, to keep the news on the boil. In other states too, political parties (including the Communists) control either news channels or cable distribution, the latter in order to influence what people can watch in specific constituencies.

So it is no longer a one-facet story about self-appointed tribunes of the people going after the rich and the mighty in the hunt for market share of eyeballs. The rich and the mighty are the hunters as much as the hunted. Recall the BJP-organised sting operation on Amar Singh when the no-confidence vote was on in the Lok Sabha a couple of years ago, and ponder the mystery of who really got and then leaked the Radia tapes to the TV channels. Given how some editors have readily compromised themselves in conversations with Niira Radia, who is to tell how much media organisations themselves are compromised, and how many hidden strings are in operation? Consider, for instance, the growing number of newspaper publishers who have found their way to membership of the Rajya Sabha.

And yet, the media guns do boom, and in 2010 they scored direct hits more than in most years. System security also lies only in the multiplicity of news media. The growing tribe of bloggers can today challenge what they call the corporate media if it looks compromised or compliant; and surfers who post comments can be as blunt as any opinionated TV anchor, and as abusive as the Paris gutter press. As the population of web-surfers grows, India could see the birth of its own Drudge Report (which first reported on Monica Lewinsky). Suffice it to say that the media story in India just now is as multi-faceted, as chaotic, as compromised, as cacophonic and occasionally even as magnificent as Indian democracy itself.