Indian journalism needs quality wars, not ad wars
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Bloomberg news service on Feb. 1 carried a trenchant analysis by Chandrahas Choudhury of the ad war being prosecuted by The Hindu and The Times of India, which kicked off when the former mounted a print and TV campaign that wittily accused the latter of being low-brow. Choudhury, a novelist and literary critic who is also fiction and poetry editor of The Caravan, deftly skewered the vanities of both newspapers and shone a cruel light on the shortcomings of Indian print journalism. His article prompted a hugely positive online response, with users of Twitter and Facebook describing it as “fantastic,” “great,” “brilliant,” and “amazing,” to name a few of the superlatives that were bandied about. IIJNM students and an IIJNM alumnus interviewed him by email about the TOI-Hindu set-to and the state of Indian journalism. Following are excerpts of the interview.
Rutvick Mehta: What is your view on the mudslinging “trying to put the other down” campaigns started by The Times of India and The Hindu? The ads by The Hindu really surprised me. It reminded me of the famous cola wars that were so similar to these. Aren’t the newspapers diverting from doing their main job—providing news? Isn’t The Hindu guilty of doing that, too, by making such ads?
Chandrahas Choudhury: You’ll have to explain why the ads by The Hindu surprised you, and also why you think that this is a diversion from the newspaper’s main task. The ad campaign is devised by an ad agency, not by the newspaper’s journalists. Both ad campaigns have an element of truth about the criticisms they make.
RM: The print industry world over is on the decline. While the scenario is not that bad in India, you recently had a couple of bureaus shutting down in some cities. Going by your articles, one assumes that you are completely against the use of PR and advertisements and mixing them with news. So how will these papers survive if they do not resort to such practices? What is your solution?
What strikes me about your question is the very loose connection made between “a couple of bureaus shutting down in some cities” and the legitimacy of PR-based “journalism,” if one can even call it that. Even so, there is a point to your question: “How will these papers survive if they do not resort to such practices”? The answer is: They will survive when the climate of legitimacy that has appeared around such practices is interrogated, and these things are rooted out. If news, advertising and PR were to be in the same mix, then you could get your journalism degree from an advertising school. Also, you’ll note that the print industry in India is not in decline, but in a period of boom. So you’re offering one explanation for such practices around the world, and precisely the opposite reason for them in India.
RM: I agree TOI’s form of journalism is more commercialized, but just to play the devil’s advocate, TOI has some good aspects too. For example, I love TOI’s sports section. Along with news, it also has special columns by various eminent ex-sportsmen and experts of various sports. So you have the likes of Sunil Gavaskar, Ravi Shastri, Viv Richards, Steve Waugh, Viren Rasquinha and many more enlightening the readers with their views and analysis. As a sports lover and a reader, I love to read what such people have to say about the various happenings in sport. Wouldn’t you give TOI credit for that? Don’t you think they have some good facets too?
Of course. It would be very immature of me to say that everything about something was bad, and that would invalidate the entire work of criticizing something. The idea is for you as a reader to make up your own mind about what you want to read, after considering all the facts in front of you. I merely offer my own ideas; I don’t at all wish for you to change your own preferences unless you want to.
Dipal Desai: How do you think this approach of The Times of India, as described in your article, affects its readers?
I suppose some readers don’t think there’s any problem with the Times; others think so but don’t care enough to change their preference; others focus on the good things about the paper; and some just like its feel-good air.
DD: After TOI being so open about their approach of treating news as a product and being materialistic, why do you think it still has a huge readership?
The Times does some things extremely well. Most of its editions have a strong local component to them. It also addresses the consumer needs of readers effectively. To think more closely about your question, the Times is sometimes not really open about its methods. As I pointed out, often news in the paper that has been sponsored is not prominently marked as such.
DD: You started the article by calling it a battle between TOI and Hindu, but eventually you attacked only TOI. Do you prefer The Hindu?
I started the article by describing the recent war of words, through advertisements, between The Hindu and the TOI. I further explain in the piece why I think some of the TOI’s journalistic practices are especially reprehensible. Given a choice between the two, I would of course prefer The Hindu. I find it hard to see how my piece could be interpreted merely as “preferring The Hindu.”
Priyanka Maheshwari: Can journalism in India be trusted on its word?
“Journalism in India” includes hundreds of newspapers, magazines and TV channels and over 100,000 journalists. So obviously there’s no simple yes or no answer to your question. Some houses and periodicals are more trustworthy than others. There are hundreds of journalists in this country doing fantastic work. What we should question are structures and patterns of production and consumption that disincentivize quality journalism and make for cynical editors and readers. In a democracy, citizens have no option but to trust journalists because it is journalism that sets the agenda for the public sphere.
PM: Do international media perform better than Indian media because they focus on journalism rather than engage in petty fights?
The best international newspapers set higher standards for themselves than the big Indian newspapers. I’d say they measure themselves not just against the competition, but against their own ideals.
Apoorva Sripathi: The recent Salman Rushdie-Jaipur Literature Festival episode was a taint on free-speech liberalism. What did you make of it?
The issue is a very complex one and can be approached in a dozen ways. My own interpretation of it is that there is very little support for free speech in the public sphere in India because there is very little practice of free speech in the private sphere. Between caste and class hierarchies, patriarchy, religious dogma, and what I call “ageism”—the assumption that in any argument the older person must be automatically deferred to—it’s very hard to be an individual in the fullest sense in India. This attitude of “let’s not rock the boat” then becomes transmitted to the workings of the state.
AS: Your first novel, Arzee the Dwarf, has an unusual name. How did that come about?
There’s nothing unusual about it. To my mind about the simplest, clearest title possible—the name of the protagonist, and some reference to a condition or problem that troubles him and makes him interesting. If you’d like to know more about the book and the thinking behind the way it is written, I’ve talked about these things in detail here.
AS: What are the books that you think young writers and journalists should read?
When I was 22 I read the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinkski’s dispatches from Africa, The Shadow of the Sun. The writer’s involvement with his subject was so acute that for a whole year I wanted nothing more than to be an African correspondent. David Remnick’s massive book about the fall of the Soviet Union, Lenin’s Tomb, is a great example of a massive subject being sketched out in great detail by a very gifted observer. M.G. Vassanji’s book about India A Place Within shows us the many ways available to us of looking at our history. Many years ago I read Bill Walsh’s very entertaining Lapsing Into a Comma: A Curmudgeon’s Guide to the Many Things That Can Go Wrong in Print—and How to Avoid Them. This is a book about the importance of spelling, syntax and punctuation to clarity of thought and elegance of style—areas in which Indian journalists often score badly, even if their reportorial instincts are sound.
Uzmi Athar: How much time did it take you to research for your article “India’s Top Newspapers Battle for Readers’ Hearts and Souls”?
As you can tell, the views expressed in the piece are not really “researched” (although they mention many stories that I had to look up on the Internet) but were built up over the course of years of looking at these newspapers. I remembered particular stories I’d come across in these newspapers that I then looked up in their archives.
UA: What improvement do you think Indian newspapers should make to come up to the standard of newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal?
You’re asking this to a person whose main worry is what improvements he should make to his own work to get it up to the standards he wants of it! But, very quickly, I’d say from personal experience that there is very little mentoring and editorial quality control at most Indian newspapers. You never have someone sitting down with you and pointing out the little things you can do to improve, particularly once you have reached middle age and have acquired a small ego to go along with some flab around the middle. Most journalists either improve dramatically in the first five years of their career, or not at all. Newspaper managements could try to break this culture of complacency, or at least be aware of it.
UA: Generally, when young journalists join the media industry, they are forced to cover a particular type of news that their paper supports. How can these new interns do what they like to cover—development issues, for example?
I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing to cover areas from outside the range of one’s interests and sympathies in one’s early years in journalism. Sometimes these things have a lot to teach you. No matter what your beat, it requires of you the same thing: to write about the subject intelligently, to bring out its nuances and complexities. Admittedly this can be difficult if your editor is obsessed, for example, with a star’s boob job or who slapped whom at a party. Give it a little while and then make up your own mind.
Prajwala Hegde (alumnus): As journalists, we are constantly told or made to believe that our audience is highly intelligent. But the fact that TOI enjoys such a wide readership in our country (which worries me), makes me think otherwise, considering the kind of “news” it feeds its readers. What is your view on this?
I recommend you read Kaushik Basu’s recent book Beyond The Invisible Hand: Groundwork For a New Economics. Among the really striking insights of this book is that matters don’t always have to be either/or. Readers aren’t either intelligent or stupid. Any situation—even one as stable as the Times’s readership today—is created by a number of factors, which cumulatively create an equilibrium point. But this is just one of many possible equilibrium points on a line; readers can remain as intelligent, or stupid, as they are today, and yet something else may happen that would change their preferences. What the Times has worked out is that India is a very price-sensitive market, and that if it can subsidize newspaper costs through advertising it can generate enough readers to then ask a high price for advertisements, thereby creating a self-sustaining economic model. No other newspaper in India today is so remarkable in terms of quality to disrupt this equilibrium. But what is true today may not be true tomorrow—or so one hopes. Equally, the Times could be pressured to weed out its worst practices and in that way become more deserving of its No. 1 spot.
PH: Aren't readers intelligent enough to decide what they should be reading or viewing? I fear that they form their opinions based on the kind of news they are exposed to. How can we change this trend—apart from resorting to ad wars?
We can resort to quality wars. And wars on cynicism and corruption.
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