Sunday, July 2, 2000		Speaking generally

Paper panthers, rubber teeth
By Chanchal Sarkar

ALL the world over newspapers are losing out to the electronic media. To television, of course, and now to the Internet as well. In India a handful of papers are doing very well in circulation and profits, it’s the smaller papers which are being pushed to the wall. Even in a country where literacy (in a highly watered down definition) does not touch 400 million people , some papers are flourishing and opening up new editions, but that’s because of fast urbanisation, not because of a growing thirst for information.

The Press Council of India, self-confessedly powerless against papers which choose to ignore it, recently held a discussion about the future of the print media. The Council’s jurisdiction covers only print (how farcical not to have the burgeoning other media under the same or another council) but inevitably television and the Internet came into the picture.

What we were treated to was gallons of self-praise. How newspapers were meant for higher values not profits, how they, singlehandedly propped up the country’s ‘Fourth Estate’, how they were honest as the day and as independent as the soaring eagle and so on. It was said that within newspapers, editors should remain rock-like in courage and integrity. And so it went.

It is this exercise in self- delusion that rubbed away much of the value of the discussion. There was no self-criticism, no taking a long, hard look at reality. Newspapers have moved into an oligopolostic situation, editors are, most of them, paper panthers with rubber teeth. At the Centre and in the states many journalists accept loads of perquisites and also money from governments, in housing, for instance, and other benefits. Gifts are also forthcoming from business houses. They and governments help to construct press clubs and equip them.

In other countries, too, including the advanced democratic countries there is a great deal of worry about the waning of newspapers readership and the falling number of newspapers. There are three kinds of worries (a) Trying to keep up with television, some newspapers are fast becoming entertainment packages, (b) The disappearance of papers means a decline in the variety of views that the public can get and (c) How endangered newspapers are trying hard to figure out what other services they can render the community besides printing a paper. Nothing of this has been attempted in India, mainly because the successful papers, riding the wave of urbanisation are not interested. In beleaguered countries , the best newspapers are attempting to supply the public with some holes of quality oxygen which the intelligent readers can breathe through. Not so in our case where the papers are much of a muchness. There is little freshness.

To survive proudly in the future ,a medium like the Indian Press must construct and maintain socially worthwhile institutions. Where are they in India? Do the unions have substantial funds for widows and orphans or funds to help the seriously ill journalists. Is there even a museum of the Indian Press set up to commemorate a Press supposed to be one of the biggest and best in the world? Journalists leave all this to the "government" and yet in the last 25 years the pay, working conditions, and lifestyle of the journalists have improved enormously and the big newspaper owners have never had it so good.

What is the state of high-quality training? Is there even one journal that monitors and criticises the Press thoroughly? There are several such in democratic countries.

And what about the organisation that wants to compete with the American Newspaper Publishers Association or the counterpart bodies in Germany, France, Japan or Britain? What is their concern about quality, training and the welfare of the public? Mr Sawant, the Chairman of the Press Council, asked again and again if the Indian Newspapers Society would stand up and ask its members to print the adjudications of the Council. All he got was an elegant string of evasions. Finally the spokesman said that it would have to be put before the INS Managing Committee. That was an interesting statement because in 1975 when the members of INS were asked to bend they decided that it was better to crawl.

The INS spokesman also said that it was the people who must decide what the content of papers and the electronic media should be. But they have decided already — they want the most lewd and lurid programmes of entertainment. School teachers are horrified by the effect of television on Indian children. So long as the profits come pouring in newspapers are little concerned about the social effects of newspapers on the electronic media.

All in all , it was a bleak discussion, The Press Council will have to wait many years before it gets the power to punish newspapers for contempt of the Council. And the public will have to wait aeons before, acors in their "esteem list", journalists rise from the bottom where they rub shoulders with drug-traffickers and pornographers.