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Reading The Reader

There will always be a market for analysis. But will marketers see that in the inkblot?

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Reading The Reader
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There never was a golden age of journalism. In the late 19th century, with the spread of colonial wealth and the invention of new technology like the telegram during the Victorian era, correspondents could report on exciting happenings around the globe. London was full of newspapers and magazines which told readers about the workings of the world. It appeared to be a time when journalism was at its best and fullest. Yet, reading these accounts a century or so later, they are remarkable for their limited perception and their willingness to propagate a vision of humanity which upheld the blind imperial ideology of the time. Reports of the 1903-04 British Indian invasion of Tibet, for instance in the Times or the Pall Mall Gazette, are notable for their shallow endorsement of a pointless military escapade, and for their abhorrence of Tibet’s religion, which with its baffling and gaudy ceremony they compared to Roman Catholicism. It is only in small, ‘seditious’ Indian newspapers, most of them published in Bengal, that you can find a clear-headed analysis of the invasion—describing it as a war that was unlikely to bring India any real strategic benefit.

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In the decades immediately after independence, which might have been expected to herald a flowering of Indian journalism, the reporting was haphazard and the comment often unimpressive. Leading politicians were rarely placed in any sort of biographical context, which gave the impression that their actions could only be understood by those who were inside the loop. It is not hard to open a paper from that period and find a forest of acronyms and an exchange of sentiment that reveals almost nothing. In retrospect, it is the 1980s and ’90s that appear to be the high point of the Indian press, when journalists like Chitra Subramaniam and Arun Shourie went to enormous lengths with their investigative work, unravelling the paperwork behind Bofors and other stories of corruption. Although the hidden camera operations of the last 10 years have been entertaining, the impact of such ‘stings’ has been limited. When Tehelka filmed senior bureaucrats and army officers taking money on defence deals, the reporters themselves became the story and the government’s target.

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Fingers In The Grease: The Tehelka stings, in the end, became stories about the reporters themselves

Today, the media is in crisis; but that is not unusual, and it may not be a bad thing. The churning marks a moment of creativity. Anxiety about the state of the press indicates that people in India care about what newspapers, magazines, TV channels and websites are doing and thinking, which is not the case in countries with a less vigorous public debate. Now, Indians face further problems—trivialised reporting, predatory press owners and stories that are paid for by politicians and others.

Reading the press and watching TV today can be an uneven experience. Political analysis of considerable depth and intelligence sits alongside banality, much of it coming from reporters who are inadequately trained and paid, and unable to make reliable news judgements. If a story comes from an establishment source, it is given weight. For example, during the recent Commonwealth Games fiasco, Paul Henry, a host on a private TV channel in New Zealand, offered an offensive rendering of the Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit’s surname. There were two ways the MEA might have responded. The first was with silence, deducing that insults from a racist loudmouth on an island inhabited by four million people and even more sheep were not worthy of a response from a country of India’s stature. The second was by turning it into a big diplomatic incident, summoning the Kiwi’s high commissioner and having the foreign minister, S.M. Krishna, make a statement. Rather than conclude that Krishna was overreacting, news channels reported hour by hour just how ‘aghast’ MEA officials were over the C-list shock jock. More objective and confident news editors would have seen this for what it was: a misjudgement by India’s foreign ministry. If Hillary Clinton opened her mouth every time a senior colleague was insulted by an obscure TV or radio host, she would never get a chance to shut it.

The ability of readers or viewers to decode stories depends on their canniness, and to an extent on their education. My own feeling is that people are more astute at this than is generally recognized. Take the case of paid news. When I started to watch Indian elections in the 1990s, it was apparent that much of the coverage of candidates and local parties was bought. State-level correspondents often found it difficult to remain clean, even when they wanted to. As the years have gone by, and the amount of money sloshing around in the political system has increased, parts of the media have started to offer coverage using something like an advertising rate card. Campaign managers have told me that newspapers in Indian languages—which are sometimes held up in the English language press as more ‘authentic’—are often the worst offenders.

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But does this really sway voters? Or do they, as I suspect, often match one politician’s paid story to another, and ignore them? Does the whole process cancel itself out, and line the pockets of newspaper owners? Paid news is certainly a problem in India, but it may be less influential in winning votes than those who shell out the money imagine. In its total effect it may be no worse than a TV channel employing a swathe of commentators from one party, as has happened with Fox News in the US: countless eminent Republican politicians are well-paid contributors to Fox.

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As the world’s media becomes constantly more diffuse with changes in technology, knowledge reaches us in different ways. India currently has more purchased daily newspapers in print than any other country, and is one of the only places on earth where advertising in papers and magazines is still growing. Even newspapers with a high global reputation like the New York Times are losing money. At the moment, everything is in an intermediate stage, and nobody is certain how the future media economy might work. The expectation is that things will change fairly quickly as more people start taking in information from smart phones and other hand-held devices.

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In India, the picture is cloudy but potentially encouraging. A tiny proportion of the population visits online news sites; most prefer to read low-priced papers in their own language. New print publications are starting all the time, some of them with serious business backing. Debate and cross-fertilisation between blogs is vigorous, and social media is a source of constant activity. The technology writer Sree Sreenivasan has suggested that Indians approach social media sites ‘with great passion’ because they allow them ‘to do two things they love: Tell everyone what they are doing; and stick their noses into other people’s business’. In the meantime, publications with an established brand name and well-known writers are in a defining position. In the upmarket foreign media, the handful of Indian contributors are distinguished principally by their homogeneity—their views run the gamut of ideas from hard left to liberal left.

Although just about everybody, even the most high-minded, enjoys the spray of gossip and trash that courses around television and the internet, there is a thirst for intelligent analysis that has been underestimated by marketing executives in India. People want to read articles and books and to watch TV shows that can make sense of an ever more complex and fluid world, even though the conventional thinking is that everything has to be dumbed down. As the digital revolution speeds up and alters over the coming years, and gallops off in directions we cannot yet imagine, there will be a growing demand for quality. Somebody will always have to write good journalism.

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