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The Indian Media
The many facets of the print and electronic media are all there for anyone to see, but the book gives a clear impression that somehow the Indian media seems to have greyed prematurely, obsessed as it often is with illusions of its own grandeur and influence in affecting not only the daily lives of the Indian people but also the course of the history of the nation. In broadening its reach considerably in the present-day market-driven times, has our media focused on all segments of society that need its attention, or has its editorial content been in any way stymied by "proprietorial assertiveness" is the question that all well-meaning readers, proprietors, trustees and editors need to be very honestly asking themselves. The contributors have covered various aspects of the media. Veteran journalist Inder Malhotra writes about how "civilised Jawaharlal Nehru’s rule" was. The way cartoonist Shankar Pillai poked fun at Nehru only showed how free the Press was at that time. Compare this with the period of the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi, when many editors who not only bent but also grovelled before the censor. There are always those who do not bend. Sucheta Dalal writes about Harshad Mehta who wished that his column be carried in The Times of India. The matter finally went to the Press Council, which was against this move. Here is Dalal in her own words: "The move had the full support of the newspaper’s high profile managers and it needed all of H. K. Dua’s skills to persuade the proprietor not to open the pages to the scamster." T. C. A. Srinivasa-Raghavan talks about the business of the editorial and the Editor’s page. According to him, a survey done in the 1990s showed that only 2 per cent of the readers read the latter page—so much so that one editor even abolished the Editor’s page during his time. One only hopes that we do not have such editors around today because the Edit and OPED are the only pages where analysis and opinion should be the real priorities. Manoj Joshi has touched upon war reporting and the inadequacies of defence public relation efforts. To improve the quality of reporting during conflicts, newspapers should have trained professionals on the staff, preferably from the service veterans, who know the forces well. Soli Sorabjee (Freedom of press), Rafiq Zakaria (on Indian Muslims), Raj Chengappa (on the need to get the reader to relate to the story that is written), Mark Telly (who rightly advocates a reliable public service broadcasting system free of the Information Ministry to earn credibility of news), K.Subrahmanyam (on media and strategy in the global world), S. Nihal Singh (on diplomacy) and a host of other writers have contributed to this definitive work. What shakes one up is the contribution of E. P. Unny on the Indian cartoon industry, and how this art is shrinking, from our days of yore in the Shankar’s Weekly, when many of us wrote rather irreverently and cartoonists like Kutty, Abu Abraham and O. V. Vijayan drew without fear. Is the dilution of cartoon culture a sign of the changing times? Do we need to do something about it before many of today’s newspapers become flat, tasteless and subservient pieces of official handouts, which no one wishes to read? On the whole, this is a delightful bit of reading that has drawn inspiration from the role model of a former Chief Editor of The Tribune, Prem Bhatia, who slogged on in his profession till the very end, and had opined in all truth that there was "no retirement age for politicians, journalists and donkeys". |
IN honouring the memory of
the late outstanding journalist Prem Bhatia, Asha Rani Mathur’s
collection of essays by a string of writers has not only succeeded in
paying a handsome tribute to a man who came to be identified with
accuracy in writing, but also centre staged in all its dimensions the
state of the media in India in the present times.