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Accountability and Media: A Murky
tale
Pratap Bhanu Mehta
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The CPI(M)'s Prakash Karat has expressed
strong views on the entry of FDI into Indian media. WSN
columnist Prof Jagmohan Singh takes him on through an Open
Letter on Page 13 of this edition, and focusses on the issue
through the perspective of ethnic minorities. In this excerpt
from an article published in The Indian Express today, i.e.,
January 23, 2008,
Pratap Bhanu Mehta takes on a strong section of the Indian media
on the question of cross ownership. |
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It is a great
pity that the CPM is the only party that has raised an important set
of issues concerning
India’s
democracy: the state of our media. But the CPM has gone a step
beyond the usual pantomime of media and politics. The CPM’s advocacy
of these issues is a great pity in a double sense. The CPM has very
little locus standi on the issue. The CPM is vulnerable on these
issues and the media will predictably, jump all over it, obscuring
some real issues, like the ways in which cross-ownership promotes
unhealthy concentration in the media. But this would be a shame. For
the blunt truth is that there is a quiet crisis of credibility
facing the Indian media.
Competition, we
assume, produces accountability. But competition alone does not work
on many dimensions. Running a newspaper is a financially complicated
business. But competition for advertising revenues is not the same
thing as competition for the needs of readers. Both have different
logics.
The really
important place competition has failed is in accountability of the
media itself. It is a measure of the declining credibility of the
media that almost no paper is widely regarded as a journal of
record. When was the last time media had a competition over holding
each other accountable? They are all living in glass houses.
This point has
come home in a story that should be a frontline scandal in any
democracy. A couple of newspapers have been reporting on an open
secret of the media, the existence of private treaties. Under these,
media houses invest in companies, which then receive favourable
media treatment in turn, including column inches favourable to these
companies. Bennett and Coleman pioneered this, but many other major
institutions have followed. These deals are worth hundreds of crores.
Not to put too fine a point on it, the Indian media has crossed into
deeply murky ethical territory without even minimal public debate,
self-reflection and media outrage. How deep conflicts of interest
run in the Indian media, who is involved, what forms of advocacy or
self-censorship these impose, ought to be a matter of grave concern.
But what is astonishing is how little space there is in the media to
acknowledge that there are serious issues here.
The media is
caught between a CPM that wants the state to have more powers than
it should, and a market structure that thinks literally everything
should be for sale. If these are the only choices available to us,
God help the fourth estate and Indian democracy.
23 January 2008
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