3RD WORLD COUNTRIES have similar issue..even in media operations.!!

zia bugvi · #1 Tuesday, December 21, 2010

this article gives a fair overview of media exploitation n challenges towards objective reporting..... our media as well needs to tackle these issue to establish its effectiveness in true sense....i believe our media is goin though a critical phase... from here it can move to become a reliable element to strengthen country or it may become a source of despondence and threat to national integrity!

[B]ARTICLE BY AN INDIAN JOURNALIST ON INDIAN MEDIA[/B] :

I SHALL start on a personal note, since it is relevant to this column. The incident took place 30 years ago. I had just been appointed by Ramnath Goenka, the doughty owner of the Indian Express, as editor of the Bombay edition of his paper.
My general manager wanted me to pay a courtesy call on Dhirubhai Ambani, whose office was close by. I naturally agreed. Dhirubhai’s two sons, Mukesh and Anil, are now familiar names in India and abroad, with huge business empires. They figure among the wealthiest individuals in the world.

At that time, however, Dhirubhai was the Indian entrepreneur everybody was talking about. A rags-to-riches story (he had started as a simple textile salesman) he had realised that the only way to prosper in India then was to exploit the corrupt ‘licence-permit-Raj’ that prevailed. Which meant bribing government officials and politicians, even senior journalists.

After the usual pleasantries, Dhirubhai asked me, “Do you have any Reliance (the name of his company) shares?” Being relatively innocent of the stock market, I was a little taken aback but had the presence of mind to answer ‘no’. He immediately summoned his personal assistant and ordered him to arrange for me to be issued some “directors’ quota shares”.

Though as I said I knew little about stocks and shares, I knew enough to recognise that this was nothing less than an outright bribe: The “directors’ quota shares” were Rs10 a share, whereas in the market they were quoted at over 10 times that amount. If I had taken them and sold them the next day, I could have made a sizeable profit.

As soon as I left Dhirubhai’s office, I typed out a letter to him, thanking him for his offer, but declining it. I still have a copy of that letter.

A far more senior journalist, the editor-in-chief of India’s most powerful newspaper, the Times of India, no less, sadly succumbed to Dhirubhai’s enticement (the wily businessman even arranged for a bank loan to pay for the editor’s shares, since the editor did not have that kind of money). Another newspaper ex posed this much later and the shamefaced editor, his reputation in tatters, returned the shares.

So bribing, or influencing, journalists by business houses or by the government is nothing new. Indian chief ministers have ‘discretionary quotas’ of plots of land — sold at much below the market rate — which they hand out liberally to their favourites, or those they want to influence, which includes judges and journalists.

Which brings me to the cur rent and ongoing furore centring around an intriguing and obviously persuasive young lady, Niira Radia. Nee Nira Sharma, a Punjabi, she was brought up in Kenya and migrated to London, where she married a Gujarati. Divorced, with three daughters, she currently holds a British passport.

After unsuccessful forays into the Indian aviation sector, she set up a public relations company and became what is termed as a ‘lobbyist’. She was hugely successful. In just nine years, she made Rs300 crore, which is roughly $65m.

Among her clients were the Tatas, India’s premier business house, and Mukesh Ambani. She was also at the heart of what is referred to here as the ‘2G Spectrum’ scam, which recently led to the resignation of a cabinet minister, A. Raja, and which is still being probed.

Claiming that she may have evaded income tax and might even have been a spy, the Indian government got hold of the transcripts of her phone conversations with business leaders like Ratan Tata, senior politicians — and media bigwigs, including Barkha Dutt, who anchors a TV news channel, and Vir Sanghvi, editorial adviser and columnist in the Hindustan Times, one of India’s top newspapers. Radia was clearly trying to influence them to favour her clients.

Somehow, those transcripts were leaked to two Indian publications which published the most damaging conversations and also put them on their websites.

In one of the transcripts, Sanghvi virtually agreed to mould his influential column to suit her (his column has since been discontinued and Barkha Dutt has admitted that she made an ‘error of judgment’ in talking to Radia).

Clearly, the credibility and the standing of the Indian media, print and electronic, has plummeted. A recent survey also showed that those the Indian public least respect are politicians and journalists, in that order.

I think that is being somewhat unfair to the Indian media, particularly the press. With a couple of exceptions, India’s leading editors have been honest and crusading. Indian newspapers have over the years exposed malfeasance and kept whichever government that has been in power on its toes.

However, with the advent of television, some media figures have become larger than life and their celebrity status has gone to their heads. So much so that a few of them imagine that they exert a major influence on governance, even in the formation of cabinets.

It was that vanity, hubris really, that Radia, the skilful lobbyist, cleverly exploited. And some editors succumbed.

In earlier times, again with a few exceptions, Indian editors were faceless. They kept a discreet distance from politicians and from big business. I believe this is what enabled them to be truly objective. They weren’t cronies of capitalists or ministers. Which is mainly why they were trusted by their readers. That trust has been eroded and needs to be restored. ¦ The writer is a former editor of The Reader’s Digest and The Indian Express.
EMAIL
singh.84@hotmail.com

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