Who should a journalist serve?

Dona Suri

Over the last three decades, generations of journalists got their first lessons in journalism from Dona Suri at India Today, The Indian Express, The Tribune, the Hindustan Times and now at the Day & Night News. She was the first woman journalist of The Tribune. Journalists for Society requested Dona to write a preface for the book ‘When Media Becomes The Message’. She always taught many like us how ‘to tell it like it is’. Here we reproduce the preface of the book.

Vis a vis journalism, the central issue that emerges is one of service: Who should a journalist serve?
This question can have several answers … but which answer should be ranked Number One on the list?
The most idealist answer is: a journalist should serve the truth.
A somewhat less idealist answer is: a journalist should serve readers/viewers. This involves an assessment of what sort of truth, or how much truth, readers/viewers want or can tolerate.
An answer that is idealistic in a sense is: a journalist should serve some particular entity (the nation, society, a party, a religious group, a caste group, an economic class, a gender). A journalist who makes this answer can easily slide into another category: propagandist.
An pragmatic answer is: a journalist should serve his employer. He occupies a place in the hierarchy of his organization and carries out the instructions he receives.
An equally pragmatic answer is: a journalist should serve himself. Whatsoever he must do to get ahead – to win power, material reward and acclaim in his profession, he will do.
How one react to the conversations of famous journalists with a PR agent depends on how one ranks those answers.
Serving the truth is a noble ideal but definitely difficult in practice. Those who favour of ‘serve the truth’ – meaning that a journalist’s highest duty is to convey the most objective possible account of an event – should ask themselves a few more questions:
How much of the truth is it ever possible to know?
Is one man’s truth the same as another’s?
Is there anyone who can remain absolutely neutral and erase every trace of bias from their mind, both conscious and unconscious?
Can we guess how the journalists whom Radia spoke ranked those answers?
They were all powerful people (It would make no sense for a PR agent so speak someone with no influence and far down in the hierarchy.)
The uproar that has followed the publication of the Radia tapes has focused exclusively on the journalists involved and there is very little discussion of Radia herself or her corporate clients, or politicians. Therefore the uproar appears to derive from an impression that the journalists ranked ‘serve themselves’ at the top of their personal list, with ‘serve the truth’ coming much farther down.
Personal note: In my long career as a lowly sub-editor I have often gawped in wonder at the ‘principles’ and ‘specials’. These lofty intellectuals were occasionally patronizing, occasionally contemptuous or – most often – oblivious. Their gaze was at a much higher level. They stood eye to eye with political leaders, senior bureacrats, heads of this or that institution and the ‘high and mighty’ in general. They were no less high-and-mighty themselves and if more humble colleagues were under the impression that they were enjoying ‘corresponding rewards’ they did not bother to deny it. Also, if the politicians and senior bureaucrats were trying to manipulate those journalists, they bore it stoically and one never heard them complain about vile attempts on their chastity. Could it be assumed that they too were influence-peddlers? One suspects that the transgressions (if any) of Dutt and Sanghvi are nothing new nor are they localized in New Delhi.
Would there be so much uproar if the journalists involved were not the Mighty Dutt and the Splendid Sanghvi?
Partly we may be seeing that old devil schadenfreud
Partly we might be seeing the ferocity of journalistic competition – when the top cats are reeling, move in and finish them off
Partly we might be seeing the resentment of the journalists who have had to mould their work to the commercial interests of their employers at the cost of their own values
If Dutt and Sanghvi are a case of ‘the taller they come, the harder they fall’ how did they grow so tall in the first place? Did they single-handedly create stature for themselves or were there interests that pushed them up?
It is worth pointing out that there is some difference between print and electronic media. Newspapers are news-papers. News is at the heart of what they do. The bulk of newspaper revenue may come from advertisers but they also have subscribers and they are ranked according to their circulation and not their advertising revenue. TV is in the mass-appeal business and wants to reach the largest number of viewers but it has only advertisers, no subscribers. Television companies tend to be owned by companies whose primary business is not news. Entertainment yes, news no. Editors and newspaper managers 'get a charge' out of producing high quality news. This is not necessarily the case for an executive whose career has been in marketing or some other field. They are more likely to look at the account book: 'it cost us this much to gather and broadcast x-hours of news and the profit on it was 'X'. it cost us much less to buy a daytime serial that ran x-hours and it made us X.' If a news slot can survive only if it brings in revenue then the search for viewer-pulling elements is going to lead to 'star' quality. The presenter becomes the brand. Barkha Dutt and Genelia Desuza are in the same business – pulling in viewers.
Contrast: For generations The Hindu has been one of India’s most respected newspaper. For years and years the only byline that appeared in Hindu was that of G.K. Reddy. The most thorough examples of reportage were nevertheless ‘by our correspondent’. The very people who came into personal contact with a Hindu reporter might have high personal regard for them, but as far as the readers were concerned, it was all anonymous. There were no stars. Reportorial invisibility was part of the pursuit of journalistic objectivity, and it was assumed that readers above all wanted objective news, written by objective journalists and unsullied by reportorial bias as it passed from the event to the newspaper pages. Who cared what the reporter looked like or who they are. Why should a reader even want to know their name?
Certainly in electronic media the line between entertainment and journalism is very thin. Selling personalities instead of focusing on professional qualities and objective reporting is, from an old-time perspective, an unfortunate characteristic of TV (and maybe print media too). The interests of the electronic media push certain people to the front, and increasingly print media has started following the same practice for the same reason – ‘brand-building’, ‘reader/advertiser-pulling.
Again, from an old-time perspective, there’s trouble when a channel promo focus on pictures of a news team and declares "People You Know. News You Trust." Why? Why should someone trust me (or anyone) just because the incessant promotional pieces have made the face more familiar to the viewer than those of his next-door neighbor? That’s not promoting professionalism, it’s only promoting personalities.
How long can anyone exist as a ‘star’ or a ‘brand’ before they start getting a very warped view of themselves in the larger scheme of things?
Quite possibly, by now viewers are conditioned to seeing Dutt, Sanghvi, Chawla, Subramaniam, Venu, et al, as stars enacting the role of idealistic journalist. When taped conversations are published that throw a bit of shadow over the idealism the viewers may not be overly shaken. After all, when Shah Rukh Khan dies in Kal Ho Na Ho, viewers may feel a little sad over the fate of the character but know very well that he’s not dead. When the curtain goes up again, Dutt, Sanghvi, Chawla, Subramaniam, Venu, will all be back in front of the footlights, sharp as ever. How can the viewers lose faith in the stars’s credibility when it was never credibility that pulled the viewers in in the first place. They are only human, any star can flub a line or make a little gaffe.
Of course, the competition may try to keep up the uproar as long as possible but for how long? Grinding the same old chutney day in and day out will eventually bore the public and they dare not risk that.
Another reason why competing publications will find it wise to dampen the uproar sooner rather than later is expressed in the phrase ‘there but for the grace of God go I’. How many big-name journalists are actually in a position to throw the first stone? Some have been taped and some have not been taped. That may be the only difference.
So long as the advertisers still love the stars, the media will love them – and probably the public will love them too. Where is the question of them becoming liabilities to their papers, magazines or channels?
Lessons:
1) The journalists involved can fairly be called leaders in their profession. At its core, leadership is all about power and influence. Leaders use their power to get things done. When a leader uses his power for personal gain we say 'power corrupts'. When a journalist at the pinnacle of his profession puts a personal equation before commitment to, or at the expense of, a higher ideal, for instance, truth/objectivity, they risk getting the 'corruption' tag. However, given the fact that old-fashioned media houses are in a minority now, this may not actually be much of a risk. Media houses may rather bask in the exposure showing high-power corporate interests wooing their editors.
2) When a journalist becomes a 'star' and is constantly marketed as the 'definer' of what is and is not news, maintaining a sobering degree of humility is not easy. To the extent that humility is weakened, perspective gets warped. The inner voice asking 'is what i'm doing right?' is never very loud and it gets easily drowned out by the music that goes with the montage. Nobody ever made much money or gained much clout by listening to their inner voice.
3) Most important lesson: never say anything over a telephone that you would not want to see published in a magazine.

(Dona Suri is Editor-at-Large at Day & Night News, Chandigarh)