http://www.indiatogether.org/2006/may/rgh-obits.htm
A managed media
Editors and columnists are
flattered into believing that
because of their proximity to
power, they somehow enjoy and
exercise power, too.
Ramachandra Guha finds the
seductions of power starkly
apparent in the media's
coverage of Pramod Mahajan's
passing.
20 May 2006 - Being an old-fashioned kind of guy, brought up
in an old-fashioned sort of home, I came to believe that the
duties of a newspaper were to inform, educate, and entertain.
It was about a decade ago that I first learnt that, for large
sections of the English-language media, these three duties
had been superseded by or subordinated to a fourth -- the
duty to titillate.
It happened this way. A man I knew slightly but admired a
great deal had died. His name was Krishnaswami Swaminathan,
and he had three careers. The first was as an inspirational
teacher of English literature at Presidency College, Madras.
The second was as the editor of the Sunday Standard, as the
highly regarded weekend edition of The Indian Express was
then known. The third was as the chief editor of the
Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, based in New Delhi. It was
in 1958 that Swaminathan assumed this post, after the first
editor had died and the second decided to take up a
governorship instead.
When he began the job, a mere two volumes had appeared; when
he left, thirty years later, a further 98 had been published.
His accomplishment was both mammoth as well as meticulous;
for thousands of letters had to be deciphered, and hundreds
of speeches dated and validated. References and
cross-references had to be provided, and indexes prepared for
individual volumes as well as for the series as a whole.
Luckily, Swaminathan had a dedicated team working with him;
still, the main job was his, and he executed it superbly.
When Swaminathan died, in 1994, I was living in New Delhi. I
knew that his career as a teacher and journalist would not
command much attention in that city, but I had hoped that his
work on Gandhi’s Collected Works would. I was mistaken.
No Delhi daily would carry on obituary of him, despite my
entreaties and those of the distinguished scholar, Rajmohan
Gandhi. This silence regarding Swaminathan was all the more
galling because these same papers had just carried multiple
obituaries of a fashion designer whose contributions to India
were a fraction of the teacher-editor's. However, the fashion
designer was young, he was glamorous, and he had died an
unnatural death, of AIDS -- reasons enough for the Delhi
newspapers to devote dozens of column inches to him while
failing to note the death of a far greater Indian.
It was striking that, first, the praise was so effusive, and
second, that it was generalized rather than specific. What
modern policies did this politician have to offer the Indian
public?
I was reminded of my failure to have K. Swaminathan honoured
in Delhi while watching the coverage of the shooting and
subsequent death of the Bharatiya Janata Party leader, Pramod
Mahajan.
On the day he was shot, I switched on the TV, where a
senior reporter, when asked to describe the incident,
spoke instead of his personal grief and the closeness of
his ties to the Mahajan family.
Through the long week that the politician hovered between
life and death, the media -- print as well as electronic --
focused with a fascinated obsession on the stream of rich and
famous visitors who flocked to the hospital. After Mahajan
died, the anchors on television waxed lyrical in their
tributes. On one channel I heard him being described as a man
of “kinetic energy”, on another as “one of the few
politicians with a modern mind”.
By the standards of Indian politics, Mahajan was young -- he
had achieved high office when he was still short of fifty. He
was, if not exactly glamorous himself, on first-name terms
with major film-stars and corporate titans. And he died a
bloody death -- at the hands of his own brother. These
factors go some way in explaining the hours spent on him on
television and the pages on him in print.
When writing or speaking of the lately deceased, one can
follow one of two models. The first is contained in the old
Latin saying, De mortuis nil nisi bonum - Speak only good of
the dead. The second is Voltaire’s injunction that while we
may flatter the living, the dead deserve nothing but the
truth. While Indians in general tend to follow the former,
one would expect (or at least hope) that professional
journalists would take heed of the latter.
Certainly, the decorum imposed by death precludes a brutal
frankness. One did not expect the journalists covering
Mahajan’s passing to describe him as, shall we say, a fixer.
Still, it was striking that, first, the praise was so
effusive, and second, that it was generalized rather than
specific.
What modern policies did this politician have to offer
the Indian public? Or was being a habitué of five-star
hotels enough to qualify as being ‘modern’? One knew of
Mahajan’s abilities as a networker and fund-raiser, but
in which concrete ways had his ‘kinetic energy’ helped
the people of India? Instead of substantive answers to
these questions, all one got by way of specifics was,
once again, anecdotes of this or that journalist's
intimacy with the departed politician.
Being on old-fashioned kind of guy, I could not but compare
the media’s treatment of Pramod Mahajan’s demise with the
reaction to the death some years ago of another senior Indian
politician, C. Subramaniam.
Now, "CS" was a leader of whom it could truly be said that he
had a modern mind. And his achievements were real. It was he
who reformed the system of agricultural science, to make it
an effective handmaiden in the Green Revolution that, in
turn, made India self-sufficient in food and thus also
independent of Western pressure and influence. After he
retired from public life, CS worked tirelessly (if in the
end, unsuccessfully) to reform the electoral system, hoping
to free it of money power and muscle power.
C. Subramaniam died a natural death, of old age. That said,
the neglect of his life and work by the press was shameful in
the extreme. The only decent obituary appeared, ironically,
in the London Economist, which saw, more clearly than our own
newspapers, what this Indian had done for his country. A
foreign paper understood that CS was a man of real
distinction and achievement. Our papers knew only that at the
moment when Subramaniam died, he was not a man of wealth,
power, or celebrity.
The only decent obituary of C Subramaniam appeared, in the
London Economist, which saw, more clearly than our own
newspapers what this Indian had done for his country.
Pramod Mahajan himself claimed that while in the early stages
of his career, a politician needed the media, once he had
achieved power it was the media which needed him more. His
own career certainly exemplified this.
While he began by cultivating journalists, in the end it
was journalists who were cultivating him. Of course, his
case was by no means exceptional. In Delhi, the
closeness of journalists to politicians is both
ubiquitous and legendary. Editors and columnists are
flattered into believing that because of their proximity
to power, they somehow enjoy and exercise power, too.
To be a journalist, and yet successfully escape the
corruptions of the Indian press today, one needs one of two
attributes. It helps if one is old enough to remember and be
influenced by a time when politicians were public-spirited,
and journalists themselves independent-minded.
In Delhi itself live two of my journalistic heroes, B.G.
Verghese and Ajit Bhattacharjea. Both are utterly honest,
non-partisan, and interested in the world beyond the hotels
and offices of the capital. Both, however, are close to
eighty years of age.
As for the other escape route, I must declare an interest—I
am a Tamil who grew up, in an intellectual sense, in Bengal,
while the two periodicals I regularly write for are printed
in Calcutta and Chennai respectively. That said, it does seem
that newspapers published in cities distant from Delhi have
succumbed somewhat less to the seductions of power or the
cult of celebrity.
Ramachandra Guha
20 May 2006
Ramachandra Guha is a historian, and a regular columnist with
The Telegraph of Calcutta. His writings are republished here
by arrangement.
• Write the author
• Post a comment on this article
• Ramachandra Guha
• Media Opinions
Comments (4)
* Posted by dp,
To some extent, we as readers, are also partly to blame. And
as a younger generation, our attention spans are getting
shorter. The mantra these days seem to be "out of sight, out
of mind." Infact, I got to know about "CS" only from this
column ... I guess, to bring in some excitement in the
mundanity of life, we need spectacular news stories and are
easily charmed by cricket and bollywood! Less than a decade
ago, I used to be a regular reader of ToI and even as
recently as a couple of years ago, their online version (I
stay abroad) was decent but now I hardly ever visit that site
as its quality seems to have been reduced to that of a
tabloid! Media now is a mega-bucks game with advertisement
revenue directly linked to a higher circulation ... it's all
a demand-supply cycle and till something happens to set right
that cycle, the conscientious reader can always rely on
non-MSM such as India Together to cover issues that the MSM
ignores for the sake of sending 500 reporters to a Lakme
fashion show! :-)
* Posted by SP,
I fully agree with Ramchandra Guha and DP. Even today's
frontline news publications and TV news channels have become
kind of sleazy. Even Indian finacial publications such as
Economic Times are not behind in encouraging sleaze.
Frontline news websites such as Indiatimes is also another
example of soft porn site to a large extent. It is all done
to get more and more eye balls and gain advertising revenues.
All the other 3 pillars of democracy have failed in India but
people still have some trust in Press/Media. It is time that
these institutions sets high moral standards for themselves
and work for betterment of Indian society.
* Posted by Vidya Venkat,
This was a much needed reaction to the manner in which the
Pramod Mahajan matter was covered by the media. I was tired
of seeing the same news clippings and listening to the same
words of praise being repeated over and again in all the news
channels. One wonders if the media has actually forgotten the
meaning of "objectivity"; of providing the viewers with news
that is unbiased and honest.
* Posted by R.Sajan,
Unlike the past, the media cannot and does not expect people
to listen to what they give out. The people listen only to
what they want; and if the media cannot give it to them, they
just refuse to listen. The media is business too and has to
survive.
The net result is that the media now churns out only what
they know the people would like. And people like gossip more
than anything else. If anyone is not good material for
gossip, the media can only ignore him. The Mahajan story took
a worse turn with the Rahul Mahajan developments recently.
The media ought to be more grateful to the family now.
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
Everything you need is one�click away.� Make Yahoo! your home page�now.
http://us.click.yahoo.com/AHchtC/4FxNAA/yQLSAA/uTGrlB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
--
Members of the ZESTMedia list exchange news and views about the media in
Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Maldives and Bhutan. Write to
[email protected]
If you got this mail as a forward, subscribe to ZESTMedia by sending a blank
mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR, if you have a Yahoo! ID, by visiting
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTMedia/join/
Get all ZESTMedia mails sent out in a span of 24 hours in a single mail.
Subscribe to the daily digest version by sending a blank mail to [EMAIL
PROTECTED], OR, if you have a Yahoo! Id, change your settings at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTMedia/join/
theZESTcommunity-------------------------------------------------
ZESTCurrent: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTCurrent/
ZESTEconomics: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTEconomics/
ZESTGlobal: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/
ZESTMedia: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTMedia/
ZESTPoets: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTPoets/
ZESTCaste: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTCaste/
ZESTAlternative: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTAlternative/
TalkZEST: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TalkZEST/
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTMedia/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
