‘The media should function on the template of truth-telling, independence, justice and humanness'

N. Ram, Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu, has called for “bold and radical” ways to check the ethical failings of the media.

Inaugurating a seminar ‘Whither Media,' organised as part of the three-day Third International Congress on Kerala Studies, which concluded here on Monday, Mr. Ram said that while the Indian media were on a strong footing, insofar as growth prospects were concerned, there were many things that were wrong when it came to quality and ethical issues.

Mr. Ram, who was commenting on the recent Niira Radia tape disclosures and the ‘paid news' phenomenon, said mechanisms such as the Press Council of India had proved to be inadequate to meet the challenge, as had been shown by the manner in which the council was unable to publish its own inquiry report on ‘paid news' on account of internal divisions.

He said it was thanks largely to the Election Commission of India that some solution for the menace was on the horizon. The Commission had taken up the issue fairly seriously despite having no jurisdiction over the media, he pointed out.

Surveying the global media scene, Mr. Ram pointed out that while the media in mature markets were faced with a meltdown and several of them downing their shutters, the media in India and the rest of the developing world were poised for further growth.

Future media

The crisis of the traditional media was also being accompanied by the Internet gaining centrality in developed markets. However, in the developing world, the Internet had much catching up to do. Thus, digital media was the future, but they would gain wide acceptance only after a sustainable revenue model emerged.

He said that regardless of the platform used, the media's primary functions and guiding principles would remain the same. Primary among these are the credible information function, the investigative/adversarial function, and the educational function.

Mr. Ram said one major criticism about the media in India, voiced by prominent academics such as economist Prabhat Patnaik, was that the media had fallen prey to the hegemony of the global financial capital and that its moral universe had shrunk. The media should function on the template of truth-telling, independence, justice and humanness, he said.

For the Indian media, the key question was one of covering mass deprivation. It should not be a case, as Professor Patnaik had pointed out, of the media seeming to be powerful when covering the financial capital and powerless when speaking for the poor, he said, adding that there was also the need to protect journalists against intimidation by the state.

Speaking on the occasion, Sashi Kumar, chairman of the Media Development Foundation, Chennai, said it was time to rediscover the concept of freedom of the press in Marxist terms.

He said the criticism that socialist systems were intrinsically hostile to freedom of the press was born out of a combination of exaggeration and lack of understanding about the reality. Karl Marx was passionate about freedom of the press, and the distortions of later times were an aberration.

In the 1840s, Marx used to say that censorship could never be legal even if it were the law.

For him, the press was “the realisation of human freedom” and that the first freedom was “not to be a business,” Mr. Kumar said, and regretted that in current times, the need for regulation of the press was being sought partly because of the irresponsibility of the media.

Silence on ‘paid news'

P. Sainath, Rural Affairs Editor, The Hindu, said the media had been keeping a “conspiratorial silence” on ‘paid news' despite the Election Commission holding hearings to decide whether the former Maharashtra Chief Minister, Ashok Chavan, should be disqualified over the issue, and despite the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) issuing stringent guidelines following disclosures about the happenings in connection with the last Maharashtra elections.

Mr. Sainath said the time had come for a concerted effort to retrieve the media as a public space, to expand public interest, clean up the public broadcaster, introduce courses on media literacy, initiate anti-monopoly legislation, launch a small journal movement, strengthen journalist unions, fight the contract system, and assert that while “media are business, journalism is a calling.”

Fredrik Laurin, Swedish Public Broadcasting, Prabha Varma, resident editor of Deshabhimani, and R. Parvathi Devi, media coordinator of Kudumbashree, spoke.