why i quit the media

8/8/2019 Why I Quit the Media

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BCCL and TOI have laughed all the way to the bank ever since. Awestruck and lemming-like,

Samir’s generation of proprietors has aped his every move, so that today the Indian media

industry has unapologetic clarity about the nature of its business: it sells the media platform to

commercial clients, not news to readers.

With proprietors not interested in selling what good journalists produce, the crisis in India is not

one of the media industry, but of the profession of journalism. This is the reverse of the West,

where proprietor, journalist and recipients all agree on the relevance of the journalistic product,

but the existential challenge before t raditional media houses is how to take—in an economically

viable manner—that product to the electronic spaces and mobile devices where today’s

generations prefer to receive and interact with it.

India’s media barons are no longer in the news business, but news is unavoidable: after all, you

do need something to fill the space between the ads, and must dupe enough consumers into

picking up your ‘newspaper’ (or tuning in to your ‘news’ channel), else your real customers

—advertisers—will not be interested. So ‘news’ today is sleight of hand: paid news by

politicians, private treaties with advertisers, celebrity coverage for a fee, PR feeds

masquerading as reportage, the business story slanted to serve the stockmarket, the deserving

story not done. Alongside, since the Sensex must never fall, the tone is frothy, jingoistic and

feelgood so as to keep the middle classes in permanent chest-thumping and optimistic mode.

When—surprise, surprise—reality strikes and an inconvenient aspect of India shows up, then

news coverage either reduces it to political sensation or morphs to orchestrate middle-class

outrage. Investigation and expose, when it happens, is because someone had a score to settle.

Instead of agenda-setters, journalists have become handymen, well-paid but increasingly adrift

from the craft and ethics of their trade.

So where does that leave news as we knew it—you know, the story followed for its objective

worth? The one based on verified fact and authentic source? That required legwork,

questioning and research? That explored the human condition outside of the middle-class

consumer bubble? That connected citizen with state?

Such a vision wasn’t so implausible in 1982. That year, while Samir was taking over TOI in

Mumbai, the Telegraph was launching in Calcutta. I was 20 and all set to change the world. I

had done some thinking, and had concluded that journalism was the most noble calling there

could be. If you were intensely curious, concerned about what ailed your country, wanted to

make a difference, were intrigued by why things happened and people behaved as they did,

preferred to see things for yourself, and revelled in the elegance of connecting word with fact,

passion and thought, then journalism alone was it. And in 1982 there were genuine

heroes—Arun Shourie, M.J. Akbar, Aroon Purie, Vinod Mehta and S.P. Singh comprised a new

generation of editors who had been blooded during the Emergency, and were now shaking the

Indian press out of its stodginess with a new investigative, irreverent, attractively packaged

ournalism.

His Dancing Shoes: M.J. as editor of the Telegraph in his room at the ABP House in Calcutta, 1983.

(Photograph by Anand Bazar Patrika)

Akbar launched the Telegraph with a handful of experienced colleagues and 40 wide-eyed kids.

With breathtaking audacity, we took on the venerable Statesman, a newspaper generations of

Calcuttans had grown up on and which was basking in the afterglow of its heroic stand during

he Emergency. And what heady days those were. Akbar—choleric, foul-mouthed, intimidating,

inspirational, genius—enabled those of us who could survive his high-stress style to live every

ideal. Pursuing the story because it was a story and with no other interest, we investigated

crime mafias, exposed government wrongdoing, travelled to fields and slums, and reported in a

vivid, urgent manner the big events of the time: terrorism and separatism in Punjab, civil war in

Sri Lanka, Indira Gandhi’s cynical politics, elections, riots, excesses by the state, assassination.

The Telegraph was India’s first modern newspaper, speaking to its readers with a refreshing

modular design, a strong emphasis on features, coverage of topics beyond politics, and a

willingness to defy convention. Who can forget Akbar’s immortal headline: “Indira Gandhi Shot

Dead, Nation Wounded”.

It was too good to last. Carried away by his own stardom and political ambition, Akbar

subverted the paper to ingratiate himself with Rajiv Gandhi. Meanwhile, Samir was luring

ournalists to TOI (in Delhi) where he needed fresh blood to dislodge the editors he had

inherited. I spent a desultory year there, observing from the middle ranks the big changes under

way at BCCL.

The senior editorial team had an air of impotence, its discussions infused with second-guessing

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what management might want. Marketing managers clearly had more clout—each one’s worth

could be measured in revenue numbers, but other than cartoonist R.K. Laxman, not even the

most famous byline among the journalists could directly be linked to circulation figures. BCCL’s

corporate interests tailored and constituted news. While company-sponsored cultural events got

coverage, there were explicit instructions, for instance, to underplay the death of a famed

classical musician. Nostalgia and a sense of community were out, you see, because there was

no longer a reader with whom you had a psychological connection, only a statistic.

I reported from Ayodhya in 1990 on a storming of the Babri Masjid, the police firing, the many

deaths, the mayhem. After filing my story, I called my wife to let her know I was safe. While

BCCL was raking in record profits, the accounts department refused to reimburse me the few

rupees for that call. The expense statement went all the way up to the general manager, whodid not approve. On another occasion, a colleague covering an election in a sprawling

constituency had his taxi bill turned down on the ground that he could have used a rickshaw.

That epitomised the contempt for the newsgathering process of a paper that the BBC

mysteriously certified as one of the world’s six greatest.

As a tribe we were still self-deluded. “How can you leave the best address in Indian

ournalism?” senior colleagues asked in surprise when I quit TOI for the uncertainties of the

Pioneer . There, Vinod Mehta bravely created a space where we could still practise professional

ournalism. It was a welcome prolonging of innocence.

Gentleman-businessman: Aveek Sarkar, the proprietor of the Telegraph, had a reputation of being an editor

first. (Photograph by Indiatoday Images)

Aveek Sarkar, proprietor of the Telegraph, persuaded me to return to Calcutta in late 1993

as his deputy editor. Aveek had the reputation of being the best proprietor to work for because

of his endearing self-image, at least in those days; that he was an editor first and businessman

second. The Telegraph was just over 10 years old, and was now nipping at the heels of the

Statesman. It needed a final push. And there was a potential threat: Akbar was back in town,

launching his own paper, the Asian Age. In a great example of how I think editorial and

marketing teams can work together, Aveek, the ABP’s senior managers and I revamped the

paper with a new set of daily feature sections focused on assessed reader needs, expanded

pagination, a redesign, technology upgrade, and yes, investment in the training of our younger

ournalists. The Asian Age never took off, and in 1995, the Telegraph went past the Statesman.

It is safe to say that the Telegraph defeated the Statesman with its editorial package—unlike the

fierce battle in Delhi, where TOI took on the Hindustan Times (HT) on the basis of a price war

and marketing gimmicks. But Samir’s mouthwatering commercial success made his formula

contagious. Aveek at ABP, Shobhana at HT , and a savvy new generation of regional media

proprietors all adopted his model.


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Instead of looking at

the many aspects of

an unequal nation in

transition, the media

indulged in petty

deceit.

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To Market, To Market: Faced with a ruthless onslaught from TOI, HT ’ S Shobhana Bhartia replicated her

adversary. (Photograph by Jitender Gupta)

Through the mid-’90s, I observed the ABP management’s snobbery about Samir’s methods turn

o grudging admiration, then sheer awe. The Telegraph now went in for the kill. Pandering to the

new dictum that news must only entertain, I colluded in trivialising the front page. My greatest

day of regret was one of the Telegraph’s best days of sale: a front-page banner headline I wrote

during the 1996 cricket World Cup that screamed, “India Forces Pak to Surrender”. The

headline could not have been any different or any bigger had it been a story on an actual war.

The internal equations quickly shifted. The marketing department, represented by an

empowered executive, was now directly advising Aveek on editorial strategy, while he reduced

he stature of the editorial side by slicing the paper into sections to be managed bydepartmental editors. Branding events replaced newsroom initiatives as the means to expand

readership, and advertiser imperatives routinely trumped over editorial sensitivities.

Shobhana had offered me the executive editorship of HT in

1996, which I had turned down for no other reason than

Calcutta hubris. Now, in 1998, she asked me to edit her Sunday

edition. Shobhana faced a ruthless onslaught from TOI even

while contending with an entrenched bureaucracy, active

unions, and much else internally. Her response was to replicate

whatever TOI did, editorially or marketing-wise, so that very

quickly there was little to differentiate the two papers except that

TOI moved first. Shobhana, however, was gentler on her

journalists and lacked, at the time, a well-oiled marketing

department; this meant that I could push the envelope with the Sunday paper as long as I kept

clear of the family’s traditional holy cows.

Say Cheese: Vir Sanghvi, left, with Samir Jain of TOI at the 75th anniversary celebrations of HT in 1999.

(Photograph by Gireesh G.V.)

Then she brought in Vir Sanghvi as chief. Not a newspaperman, his career had been built

around his access to Delhi and Mumbai’s A-listers, his celebrity talk show, and his column that

delectably celebrated wines, cheeses, fine food, glamour and power. This was possibly

Shobhana’s counter to the BCCL’s marketing arsenal, and her hope presumably was that Vir

would attract high-end readers for high-end advertisers.

By now I was marking time. The space to practise genuine journalism depended too much on

quirk of circumstance—a momentarily benevolent proprietor, or refuge in a niche not yet in the

sights of the marketers. The choices were to swim with the tide, go guerrilla like Tarun Tejpal of

Tehelka, or opt out. When an opportunity came, I withdrew—from the Indian media, but not

from the attributes that made me a journalist. I am now more deeply immersed than before in

he intersection of development, public policy and current issues, but free of the tyranny of the

500-word limit and the shrill headline. I am still the journalist, using my skills to assess political

risk and stakeholder concerns in order to help improve the quality of development projects.

The Indian media has expanded exponentially—newspapers have opened editions all over, TV

and cable have taken off, the web and social media are in. In a booming sector of a blossoming

economy, proprietors would have made their money anyway. All the more tragic then that they

had the most exciting, saleable story on their hands, but have missed it entirely: this unique

historical moment when India is at once a rising power and a poor, misgoverned country.

Instead of examining, probing and deliberating on the many fascinating aspects of an unequal

nation in bold transition, they indulged in petty deceit of their public. (‘Consumers’, I firmly

believe, never ceased being citizens, and have craved credible explanation and context; just

load those market surveys with the right questions!) Nifty marketing of quality journalism—what

a winner that would have been.

FILED IN:

AUTHORS: SUMIR LAL

TAGS: MEDIA

SECTION: SOCIETY

SUBSECTION: ESSAYS


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