Truth to power

Predictably, American talk show hosts had a field day over Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace’s interview with Donald Trump that aired on July 19. Any interview, press briefing or address by the reliably maverick 45th president of the United States offers plenty of grist for liberal mills, and this one — 40 minutes long — did not disappoint. Any Indian, though, would be struck by something that would not occur to an American viewer. The US president agreed to an interview with a Fox News anchor who is not noticeably a fan of the president, has frequently fact-checked him on his programme and has been at the receiving end of his mean tweets. The crudely right wing Fox News is, of course, unabashedly pro-Trump but the Chris Wallace interview was roughly equivalent to Nidhi Razdan or Srinivasan Jain interviewing Narendra Modi for Republic TV.

Perish that thought immediately, if only because Republic is unlikely to allow the nation to know the kind of stuff on which Mr Wallace quizzed the leader of the free world. And also because Mr Modi is unlikely to agree to the terms on which the Trump-Wallace interview took place. Not only did Mr Trump sit down (or rather rant, argue and dissemble) with Mr Wallace but he agreed that no subject was off limits. Both took that condition to heart. Mr Wallace asked the president tough questions on his handling of the pandemic, parrying flawed White House facts with his own research; corrected him on accusations he made against his Democratic rival Joe Biden; mocked the president’s pride in passing a cognitive test (which Mr Wallace also took and said was dead easy); and put him on the mat on the latest Fox News poll that showed him trailing Mr Biden. He even obliquely poked fun at the world’s most powerful man by asking him if he was feeling the heat. It was a dig both at the nature of his questions and the fact that the president was visibly dripping bronzer in the sultry environs of the presidential patio, where he had deemed this encounter would be recorded. 

Now, Mr Trump is famously thin skinned about the media. He’s openly expressed his disillusionment with serial Fox News polls that favour Mr Biden and has created a cottage industry in abusing the liberal/left news media. Yet he meets (and abuses) the media —including the hated CNN — regularly. His daily pandemic briefings became so embarrassing that his advisors eventually put a stop to them (though I suspect Mr Trump enjoys these media jousts, so there’s a plan to revive them).  Incredibly (at least for an Indian journalist), reporters he criticises as “fake news” (his favourite term) openly answer back — but he still takes their questions (one early effort to ban a White House reporter was struck down by the courts). It may be argued that there is little to be gleaned from this media circus but it offers the electorate an unvarnished view of their leader, at the very least. 

Contrast this with Mr Modi. He has never held a press conference in the six years of his prime ministership (even the low-profile Dr Manmohan Singh held three national press conferences during his ten-year tenure and had many interactions with large groups of journalists both in India and abroad), and the few interviews he has given are to friendly media houses with pre-approved forgettable lollipop questions. The only memorable one (that generated giggles, at any rate) was his Q&A to News Nation soon after the Balakot air-strikes. There the tech-savvy PM “revealed” to two bemused anchors that he had ordered the attacks to take place when there was heavy cloud cover so that the bombers would avoid radar detection. It is worth noting that Mr Trump took a press conference in Delhi where he laboriously performed to script (not without a couple of snarky digs at the CNN reporter). Though the US relationship is critical for India and the meeting took place against the backdrop of some of the worst riots of recent years just kilometres from Lutyens’ Delhi, nobody got to hear from India’s chief executive. 

Likewise, no journalist has been able to question the prime minister on the handling of the national lockdown, the nature of the revival package, the China incursions, the future of jobs and economy. We hear his pronouncements on these subjects but no one yet has been able to actually question him, as Mr Wallace did with Mr Trump, on any of these issues — and there are certainly questions to be asked. 

This state of affairs is of a piece with almost every Indian politicians’ approach to the media (chief ministers are scarcely different). Witnessing journalists being arrested, lynched or raided for criticising the government, as Yogi Adityanath recently did, has become the new normal. The Washington Post  owned by Jeff Bezos is an aggressive critic of the president. But neither he nor Amazon have been subject to tax raids or FIRs, which an equivalent Indian honcho would have expected (which is why India does not have a Bezos counterpart). Even this Republican-dominated US Supreme Court would not dream of telling journalists to follow only the official line in reporting as the Indian apex court did during the migrant crisis. 

Many Americans on both sides of the political divide despair at Mr Trump’s attempt to trample on their institutions. But for all that, the media remains a fighting presence in a way that Indians can only envy.   

This article was corrected to show that Dr Manmohan Singh held three national press conferences (not two) and many interactions with journalists during his tenure as prime minister