The veteran British TV journalist Tim Sebastian, better known for Hardtalk and ‘The Doha Debates’ has been in-and-out of India for his latest show 'The Outsider' on Bloomberg TV India. In an interview with Gaurav Laghate, Sebastian spoke about his experience in journalism and why he think there should not be any government regulation on media.
Edited excerpts..
What are your views on regulation in media?
I think the more self-regulation there is the better. We have the Leveson Inquiry now in Britain, which everybody fears will bring in statutory regulation for the Press and I think this will be a huge step backwards. There has been no statutory regulation of the Press in England for 300 years and if that started I think it will be a major step backwards.
Freedom of the press means the freedom to get it wrong, freedom is the freedom to abuse freedom, it always is. Some people are always going to abuse freedom. Some people are always going to get it wrong but that’s the price you pay for freedom and to me it’s a worthwhile price. Some people will get it wrong, some people will abuse it, ok. But I rather have freedom than anything else.
So you mean self-regulation is better than government regulation?
Absolutely. In the end it is upto society to regulate itself. Government pass laws, if people don’t obey them there is no point passing them. You can’t make everybody in the country obey a law. Some people will choose to and some people won’t but the reason that you have a functioning society is that most people accept to abide by the law. I think leave it to the press, leave it to public, leave it to society to decide what kind of media they want.
Some time back the chairman of the Press Council of India said that media cannot regulate itself. Your comments...
Anybody can say anything about the press. People can say what they want, let people have variety of different opinions. I’m not saying I’m right; I’m just giving you what my opinion is about regulation. I can’t decide for India, I can’t decide for Great Britain either. I just have an opinion that’s all. But I would prefer to see less regulation of the press than more. It doesn’t mean the press doesn’t do terrible things. If the press breaks the law they should go to court and if they are found guilty go to jail, pay a fine whatever. There are laws, press has to obey them like anybody else.
There are two big countries, one where there is no freedom of Press, and second, like India, where there is no control over it... how do you see the two scenarios? Where would you like to be?
It is as simple as do you want to live in a zoo or a jungle? It’s up to society to decide. Unfortunately, I think a lot of people in the world today would choose the zoo. You get your meals fed through the bar, so protected to a certain extent…. But I would rather survive in a jungle and rather have the choices the jungle offers as well as the dangers, as well as the risks.
Freedom is all about having risks; dictatorship is all about having your meals fed through the bars to you. You have to serve the state rather than the state serving you but you don’t get to choose who the keepers are in the zoo whereas in the jungle you can choose your community. People have to make a choice.
Today we have so many 24-hour news channels without new content. Do you think the 24 hour news format is viable? And should it be there or shouldn’t be there at all?
I don’t think 24 hour news has done much for journalism anywhere in the world. I am not just talking about India, I’m talking about anywhere. Personally also I don’t think much of 24 hour news because the priority becomes filling a hole that stretches from 24 hours to the next week, to the next year. Anything gets on air because of that 24-hour black hole has to be filled.
The days when I began news in television, we had three bulletins a day and one really had to fight for a place. So news judgments were made, ‘is this new?’, ‘is this different?’ and if it wasn’t it didn’t get on the air. If it wasn’t as good as the other story it didn’t get on the air.
But has it affected the quality of journalism? Channels have become personality or anchor driven rather than news driven. Most of them show studio discussions than news which should be covered on the field. Do you call it news?
That is cheap television. But budgets are squeezed and it’s cheap to have people in the studio. It’s much more expensive to send people out to find things out and take their crew with them and to film it. That’s expensive. The problem with cheap television is that it looks like cheap television and I think the public is beginning to realise that. But at the end, the public gets what it pays for.
How was your experience working in India on 'The Outsider'? What differences you see from when you were in Russia or the debates in Doha?
There wasn’t a great difference actually. It’s a globalised world and people are interested in the same things...they want honest politicians, they are interested in having jobs and earning a decent wage, people are interested in feeding their families. Those things aren’t different here.
People here are incredibly ambitious. They are ambitious for themselves personally; they are ambitious for the country. Why not? Why shouldn’t they be? That’s how you get on. Just to give you an example. The services that you can get here which you can’t get in London for instance. My computer which is six years old, the charger broke.
I get on the internet, within three hours somebody delivers the charger to me. For a six year old computer, in the west I would have had to throw it away. Here I have a new charger in three hours. My glasses break, I go to the shopping mall. 24 hours later on the eve of a holiday, my glasses are delivered to my hotel. These are services I can’t get in London. So people deserve the success here. They work hard. I’m impressed with what you can get done here. The speed at which you can get it done.
How much importance is of research in your preparation before the interview?
You have to remember that you are interviewing people that live and breathe their subject. They are experts in their subject so if you are going to challenge them you have to be pretty precise about what you challenge them on.
So you have to be very precise about what you are going for in these interviews, you have to target the areas of concern. This is a court of public opinion and you are the case for the prosecution. You are not looking to find things that they have done right, you are looking to find things that have gone wrong. So again, you need to make sure you have your ammunition, to have it correct because if you have no ammunition, you have nothing to fire.
What is the main importance of the press in today's time? And do you think there is a future for journalism?
Well if there isn’t a future for journalism, then we are really in trouble. We are in big trouble because journalism and news have connects of different levels of society with each other and if you don’t know what rest of the society is doing, you are not going to care about it either and there will not be any properly functioning society.
In areas where you have rigid state control of the Press, like in the Arab world you have dysfunctional societies. The press allows people to communicate with each other, allows people to find out what others’ difficulties are, about their triumphs, hopes, aspirations, what their burdens are, how they deal with it whether we are talking about health problems or society problems or not getting along with your neighbours, or people being murdered on the streets or police abuses or whatever.
If we don’t have the press to act as watchdogs in society where they need to act as watchdogs, then you are going to have a pretty terrible society. Here you have a big choice in India and you need to have that choice because it’s a question on the safety of the individual. Journalists have to serve the public they have to act as watchdogs for the public. They have to try to keep the politicians honest and to try to keep the police within the boundaries of the law. They have to protect the rights of the individuals, all that is what journalists need to be doing in the society. If they don’t do it, as I said you are really in trouble.
You have been a journalist for 38 years. Today you are seeing the new breed of journalists...so what is your advice or one caution that you would want to give to journalists today?
I will go back to the point, never forget what is it that you are supposed to be doing. To act as the watchdogs in the society, to try and keep society functioning properly, to make sure people in public service do the jobs they are supposed to be doing, to make sure they don’t steal your money, to make sure they make your trains run on time, to make sure they don’t lie to you about what it is they are doing or what they have done. Get to the cover ups, get to the cruelty and get to the violence in the society. Try and make the world a better place. Shine light in some dark places.
There was a US judge who said once that sunlight is a great disinfectant, shine some sunlight. That would be my advice. You know it’s a huge privilege to serve the public, a huge responsibility as well. And you need to be accurate and you need to be fair and you need to keep asking the questions that matter. Not for you, not for yourself, but on behalf of the people out there who need to have those answers. And make sure the politicians serve the society well and not the other way around, they seem to forget they live in public houses, they seem to forget who pays for it.
