How a newspaper gave an 11-year-old a future

The newspaper world has found its own Kalawati.

On April 25, at a traffic light in Bhopal, Kaushal Shakya, an 11-year-old newspaper boy, had a life-changing experience when his potential buyer turned out to be Rahul Gandhi.

Writes Rasheed Kidwai in The Telegraph:

“Akhbar kyon bechte ho? (Why are you selling newspapers?) Do you go to school?” the Congress vice-president asked the boy holding out a newspaper.

Kaushal, who has been selling newspapers at traffic signals for two years now, said he went to a government school and wanted to be a doctor. He said he sold newspapers in his spare time to help out his family of five, including his parents and two sisters. “My father is a labourer and there are days he doesn’t work,” the boy said, asking the VVIP in jeans and kurta to buy the paper.

“Akhbar le leejye. Aap hi ki khabar hai (Please buy the newspaper, you are news),” he told Rahul.

“Those who were accompanying Rahul that day said he was moved. He took out his wallet and extracted a crisp 1,000-rupee note. A baffled Kaushal handed over the newspaper to Rahul without taking the note. “I don’t have change,” he said.

“Rahul handed over the note. “Please keep it,” he told the boy. “Become a doctor. Never let your dream die.”

One more incontrovertible piece of evidence of what television and the internet can’t do?

Image: courtesy Hindustan Times

Did news TV twist Rahul 99% line on terrorism?

BASUDEV MAHAPATRA writes from Bhubaneshwar: The manner in which AICC general secretary Rahul Gandhi’s statement on stopping terror attacks before they occur was reported by TV journalists last week, and the way it was presented by news channels, hardly fulfilled any purpose of journalism.

On the contrary, it exposed news television’s passion for tabloid journalism.

As someone who was present at the Rahul Gandhi press meet where he made the statement attributed to him, I was shocked at how the statement was first reported by news channels, and even more shocked that no news channel tried to convey the true sentiment of the statement.

With one channel sparking the controversy by manipulating the statement, every other channel just wanted to do the same to steal the show. On some channels, the statement was spliced into pieces and carried one after another in different bulletins through the day.

Soon after Rahul’s session with media representatives in Bhubaneswar was over, the first piece of his statement that appeared on some news channels was:

“…terrorism is something that is impossible to stop.”

I, being the representative of a 24X7 Hindi news channel, was immediately asked by my desk whether Rahul Gandhi had made such a statement.

My reply was obviously, ‘No’.

Even though I tried to clarify saying, “Rahul never said that, but what he meant was that it’s not possible always to stop a terror attack before it happens”, I felt I was not believed to be telling the truth. However, I maintained my stand in the live “phono” I was asked to give instantly.

I soon crosschecked the the video of the Rahul’s session with media and found that the piece carried by some channels was an engineered one and unfaithful to what Rahul Gandhi meant.

Here’s what happened: replying to a question on whether terror attacks could be stopped before they happen (the question came after Rahul had broached the issue of corruption and insisted that strong measures should be initiated to stop corruption before it takes place), Rahul said:

“It’s very difficult to stop every single terrorist attack. The steps that have been taken by our government over the last couple of years are quite profound steps – the improvement in our intelligence, the way we did about fighting terrorism, the ideas that we have to fight terrorism at the local level, we have improved in lips and mouth.

“But terrorism is something that is impossible to stop all the time.

“There is an attack on Bombay that has taken place. But you will not have heard of all the attacks that will be stopped. So, it is something that we will fight, it is something that we will defeat, and it is something that we work towards. But, it is very very difficult to stop every single attack.”

Further to clarify, Rahul said that he didn’t mean it impossible but difficult to stop.

The complete statement hardly found a space in any of the bulletins of the TV channels. But the piece that was used in bulletins did plenty to negate the true intent of the statement, which I found was completely a wrong way of using anybody’s statement and an unethical practice of journalism as well.

While the whole statement in its complete form was never shown, reactions on the manipulated piece were taken from leaders of different parties to create a political controversy and add more life to the news item.

We may edit or engineer somebody’s statement or sound bite in order to make it fit to our space or time. But, in every case, as a display of the journalist’s obligation to the truth, the intent of the statement must be intact and clear from the part that is used.

This very first principle of a journalist was openly sacrificed by most TV news channels just to make a sensational item out of a portion of the statement.

Such a practice will never help in creating a healthy environment for the media to grow and exercise its freedom. It may bring some instant TRPs and momentary business but, on the other hand, it may also increase the risk of losing the credibility and trust of the general public permanently.

Jawaharlal Nehru: 24 ads, 11 pages in 12 papers

A week is a long time in politics, especially if you are a dead Congressman.

On May 21, the 20th death anniversary of the assassination of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, various ministries, departments and State governments unleashed an advertising blitzkrieg in the media.

Result: 69 ads totalling 41 pages in 12 newspapers.

Today, on the 47th anniversary of the death of his grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, the sycophancy deficit is palpable: Just 24 ads amounting to 10¾ published pages in the the same 12 newspapers surveyed last week.

Meaning: India’s first and longest-serving prime minister gets 45 fewer ads (amounting to 30¼ pages) than his grandson who was in office for five years against Nehru’s 17.

Hindustan Times: 22-page issue; 4 JN ads amounting to 1¾ broadsheet pages

The Times of India: 30-page issue; 3 ads amounting to 1¼ broadsheet pages

Indian Express: 20-page issue; 5 ads amounting to 2 broadsheet pages

Mail Today (compact): 42-page issue; 4 ads amounting to 2 compact pages

The Hindu: 20-page issue; 3 ads amounting to 1¾ broadsheet pages

The Pioneer: 16-page issue; 3 ads amounting to 1 broadsheet page

The Statesman: 16-page isuse; 1 ad amounting to half a broadsheet page

The Telegraph: 16-page issue; 1 ad amounting to half a broadsheet page

***

The Economic Times: 32-page issue; 0 ads

Business Standard: 20-page issue; 1 ad amouning to half a broadsheet page

Financial Express: 24-page issue; 0 ads

Mint (Berliner): 32-page issue; 0 ads

Also, unlike dozen or so ministries and departments that were falling over each other to remind the nation of Rajiv Gandhi last week, just four ministries—information and broadcasting, women and child welfare, steel and power—and one State government (Delhi) seem to have taken up Nehru’s cause.

Also read: Rajiv Gandhi: 69 ads over 41 pages in 12 newspapers

Straight drives from the man behind Seedhi Baat

Former India Today editor Prabhu Chawla has taken his interactive “Ask Prabhu” column to The New Indian Express, which he recently joined as editorial director, answering questions on this, that and the other with earthy candour.

Many of the media questions directed at Chawla and his responses are illuminating. Chawla confirms market rumours  that the New Indian Express is on the verge of reviving the Sunday Standard title owned by the group.

Here’s a sample.

Q: Why were you fired from an outstanding media like India Today? Did your poor knowledge in journalism particularly about current affairs and useless questions in Seedhi Baat make you go? Have courage to answer.

A: You have already answered your own question. Be happy with it.

Q: You had a great platform with the “other“ media company? Why take a position with The New Indian Express, which caters mainly to the southern region?

A: I hugely enjoyed my previous job which gave me recognition. But I was missing the challenges of a daily newspaper.

Q: Is there any possibility of the New Indian Express and the Indian Express coming together to make a wider national presence ?

A: It is not within my purview or authority to answer such a question.

Q: How should I book my copy for Sunday Standard from Delhi? Will it be available in all the shops? Please do give a good advertising campaign for this new endeavour sir.

A: You don’t have to book. Just order your newspaper hawker to drop Sunday Standard along with your other papers. We will be promoting it as well.

Q: Persons like you, Arun Purie, Rajdeep Sardesai and Arun Goswami are loved by us. Why don’t you join openly with Baba Ramdev in his pursuit of a political career? Instead, you openly discourage him?

A: I can speak for myself only. I am not interested in joining politics. I support Baba’s cause but not his politics. I have interviewed him nine times.

Q: Why is media being called the fourth pillar of democracy although it is only doing business here?

A: I haven’t understood your question. Media is not just a pillar it is mirror for everyone to see his or her face.

Q: In England, even the monarch is under media scrutiny and the royal heirs and other family members are hounded by the UK media for juicy stories. Why is the Indian media being shy of doing investigative stories on Priyanka and Robert Vadra?

A: Media can’t chase a mirage. It was media which exposed Bofors. And it is the media which has exposed series of scams. We chase scandals without thinking about individuals.

Q: Forgive me for asking you about your fellow journalist Vinod Sharma of the Hindustan Times. He appears to be brazenly pro-UPA in his appearance as a panelist in the Times Now TV. He makes no bones to show his admiration for Manmohan Singh.

A: He is entitled to hold an opinion. It is for the viewers to accept or reject it.

Q: Why don’t we see interviews in any media with Sonia Gandhi or Rahul Gandhi for the last 2 to 3 months during the scams and price rise? Media are happy to give them titles like Woman of the Year, Young Face of India etc.

A: Media can’t force them or anyone else to give interviews.

Also read: Should Prabhu Chawla edit The New Indian Express?

Lessons for Vir & Barkha from Prem & Nikhilda

By T.J.S. GEORGE

Journalism started going astray with the birth of financial dailies in the 1960s. With full-fledged newspapers devoted exclusively to business, corporate houses became hyperactive. The next thing we knew was press conferences ending with gifts of expensive sarees and suitlengths to reporters.

That was innocent child play compared to what has hit the headlines now: charges of celebrity journalists working hand in hand with a professional lobbyist to fix things like cabinet appointments and big-ticket business deals.

Excerpts from taped conversations between the star journalists and corporate lobbyist Niira Radia have been published. Radia was promoting the prospects of some DMK personalities as well as the gas interests of one Ambani brother and the spectrum interests of the Tatas.

The journalists became her tools.

Lobbying is a recognised activity in democracies. But it is a tricky line of work because sometimes unconventional methods might become necessary to secure the case of a client. Given Niira Radia’s experience and efficiency, acknowledged by companies like Tatas, we must assume that she took care not to cross the line. Anyway we can leave it to the enforcement directorate which is looking into the matter.

Journalism is as different from lobbying as nariel paani is from singlemalt. Any crossing of the line may be a tribute to the power of singlemalt, but never justifiable.

Unfortunately the journalists show themselves as amenable to doing the unjustifiable. They agree to convey messages favouring A.Raja to the Congress bosses. They agree to take the side of the Ambani brother Radia was promoting as against the other brother.

The moment the tapes were published, the journalists mentioned in it rushed to rebut all insinuations. The arguments were that journalists had to talk to all sorts of people, that “stringing” along with a source was no crime, that promises had to be made sometimes to get information from a source. The employer of one journalist said that it was preposterous to “caricature the professional sourcing of information to ‘lobbying’”.

The question is whether the journalists carry credibility. Of course drunks and murderers have been among the valued contacts of journalists. And of course journalists have moved very closely with political leaders.

Few people were closer to Jawaharlal Nehru than B. Shiva Rao of The Hindu. Prem Bhatia of The Statesman used to walk the corridors of Delhi as if he owned them. The hardest nuts in the power circle cracked happily before Nikhil Chakravartty on his morning rounds.

Not once did these men ask for a favour or recommend a businessman friend. They were not social celebrities, but they did their profession proud by keeping the highest possible credibility level.

Today’s celebrities assume they can win credibility by simply saying that they talked to Radia only as a source and that they never kept promises made to her anyway. Is a veteran networker like Radia so easily fooled? Obviously she is close to her journalist contacts and must have had promises from them before. She wouldn’t waste her time if she knew that they were promises not meant to be followed up.

At one point she actually tells another contact that “I made [the journalist] call up Congress and get a statement”. This is Radia speaking, not a naïve greenhorn. To say that this kind of work on behalf of a lobbyist is legitimate journalism is like B.S. Yediyurappa saying that all he has ever done is development work.

To say that they promised to talk to the likes of Sonia and Rahul only to outsmart a war-horse is like the BJP high command saying it has outsmarted Yeddyurappa.

The glamour of celebrityhood has a way of going to one’s head. Delusions of grandeur are never a journalistic virtue. The real virtue is the mind’s ability to maintain a degree of detachment. When the game is played at the 5-star level, one can never be sure of who is fooling whom.

It will be good for everyone to remember that there is one lot that can never be fooled: The people.

External reading: The Niira Radia tapes and transcripts

Why Manmohan should talk to the media more

B.V. RAO writes from New Delhi: Today, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will address a press conference in New Delhi to unveil the report card of his government’s performance in its first year.

The press conference is going to be unlike any other before it.

It will not be limited to Delhi journalists. Reporters from Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Lucknow will be present by video to pose questions to the prime minister. Maybe a few questions will be taken from foreign capitals too.

According to Harish Khare, the information adviser to PM, about 250 news channels and 1,500 print journalists will cram Vigyan Bhawan, the venue.

Admittedly, to use a common television phrase, it doesn’t get bigger than this. This is quite the manna from heaven for any journalist, so why is it that you sense a lack of admiration or gratefulness in our mood?

Because this will be the first time in three long years and only the second in his six longer years in office that the prime minister will have deigned to subject himself to open scrutiny by the media. His interviews to Indian media have been few and far between while he has been generous with foreign media.

So we have effectively had a prime minister who is not only thought to be a puppet but a puppet on mute.

For a government that boasts of ushering in the Right to Information era in this country, that’s a dismal record.

World over heads of government have well established and structured interactions with their peoples through the media. The president of the United States talks every day to the nation through the White House spokesperson and comes on himself regularly to face the media.

These interactions only increase, not decrease, when in the midst of a national emergency, controversy or crucial debate.

These leaders talk to the media not to help it fill space but because it is their duty to reach the people on whose behalf they govern. We love to refer to the iron curtain of China, but ask any reporter assigned the PMO beat what opaqueness in administration means. For most part covering the prime minister means waiting out on the road outside his residence or office looking desperately for a byte like a hungry dog looks for a bone.

Of course, prime ministers are busy people and can’t be talking to the press all the time. That is why they have press advisors, mostly senior journalists from the print media. Their job is ordinarily understood as having to facilitate the media’s interaction with the prime minister or establish a routine for giving out information on his/her behalf.

On the contrary, they busy themselves exclusively with planting favourable stories in a media that is hungry for any crumbs from the PMO. The media advisors themselves become the great wall of China between the media and the prime minister. They think nothing of the instant metamorphosis from journalists seeking information to information advisors blocking information.

There are three people who matter most in the country and all three of them hardly speak. They do not allow themselves to be questioned on their beliefs, their core concerns, their crucial decisions, how and why they arrived at those decisions, etc.

Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi are politicians and can at least claim they talk to people directly and don’t need the media as middleman. But the prime minister is duty-bound to tell the nation why, for example, he decided to sack Shashi Tharoor or decided not to sack Jairam Ramesh or why he dare not touch A. Raja or reprimand Mamata Banerjee. Or why in three years his government has not written to the Swiss authorities asking for the details of the billions of billions of slush money stashed away there.

In the absence of first hand information from his office, all reportage of his work and thinking is hearsay. Right to Information does not mean the people of this country come in with their RTI queries only after the event is dead and done with.

A crucial component of right to information is the duty to reveal, duty to be answerable, sometimes even as things are unfolding.

So when on Monday and later you are told that this government has done something out of the ordinary by presenting its report card, don’t be swayed. Accountability is not a once-in-three-years media jamboree. It is being open every day of every year in office.

Sorry prime minister, we cannot be grateful for the crumbs that you throw at us.

Please talk to us more, prime minister.

Talk to us a damned lot more.

B.V. Rao is the editor of Governance Now, where this column originally appeared

Also read: Does Manmohan Singh not trust the Indian media?

Who wins, who loses when it’s Gandhi vs Gandhi

When the Mail Today juxtaposes the Congress scion Rahul Gandhi with the father of the nation Mahatma Gandhi, who should feel more offended, Gandhi junior or Gandhi senior?

The Guardian‘s media critic, Roy Greenslade, sees the promo in conjunction with Mont Blanc trying to sell pens in the name of Gandhi and Telecom Italia trying to sell phones in the name of Gandhi.

The Congress party sees it the other way round, according to a gossip item in the Indian Express.

Image: courtesy The Indian Express

Also read: Gandhi for the goose ain’t Gandhi for the gander?

Gandhi for the goose ain’t Gandhi for the gander?

Mail Today, the tabloid newspaper published by the India Today group, has launched a smart print and outdoor campaign in New Delhi.

With the tagline “The world has changed”, the campaign pits the past with the present. Kapil Dev, in his classic bowling action, but with cheer girls in the background. The new maharaja of the air, not the Air-India one but the king of good times, Vijay Mallya. And so on.

But it’s the ad featuring Mahatma Gandhi with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi that has set tongues wagging.

Reason: only last week, editor-at-large S. Prasannarajan had nibbled at the styluses of “professional panegyrists” and “sundry mythmakers from the media” who had canonised the new Mrs G (Sonia Gandhi) as better and brighter than the old Mrs G (Indira Gandhi), a barely disguised barb at competitor Outlook* which had a recent cover on Sonia titled “Smarter than Indira“.

So, juxtaposing Mr G with the real Mr G is OK, but juxtaposing Mrs G with Mrs G is not?

Image: courtesy Mail Today

* Disclosures apply!

‘Indian media’s bias ominous for democracy’

New York City-based human rights and media activist Partha Banerjee, in Counter Currents, detects an eerie similarity behind “the media-supported rise of Rahul Gandhi” as the next potential prime minister of India and the rise of Rajiv Gandhi and his brother Sanjay:

“I must say I’m frustrated to see the rampant bias in favour of the ruling party [in the Indian media]….

“The role of government as well as private media such as Zee TV, NDTV, Star-Ananda, CNN-IBN, The Times of India, etc., along with their many local and regional offshoots, to show extreme bias for parties and candidates of their choice is gravely ominous for democracy.

“”Contrary to the much-touted American media doctrine of a fair and objective reporting—doctrine they always preach but seldom practice—the new Indian media have resorted to an unrestricted, one-sided coverage of the Congress Party and its leaders.

“Sadly, even now during the election times, voters can find nearly no reporting of the fact that a vast majority of Indians still have no access to health care, education, drinking water or electricity. One wouldn’t know that in India, a world-record number of farmers committed suicide because of economic desperation and multinational companies’ forced seed-bank replacements.

“We don’t hear about the destruction of Indian environment and massive pollution and energy crisis. We don’t hear about the extreme lack of women’s rights (sure, we now have more fashion shows and jewelry models on the catwalk!). We don’t hear that India is now the fastest-growing AIDS country (and contrary to Thailand or USA, talking AIDS is still very much a taboo).

“We don’t know that police brutality and abuses on social and religious minorities are abysmal. We’re never told that international organizations have called India as one of the worst countries to protect human rights and promote equality. We’re not reminded that India has seen a massive number of communal riots, big and small, in recent years: not just in Gujarat, Ayodhya or Mumbai. And that our governments have failed miserably to protect us from terrorism.

“And that is why Indian media’s suppression of truth and generous donation to ruling class’s rampant lies are even more worrisome. In their election coverage today, opposition parties find minimal amount of time and importance. Third parties and especially those who have mass support to boycott elections are not given any time at all. Big media have belittled opposition alliances, and brought them to ridicule.”

Read the full article: Incredible India (Elections): Jay Ho!

Also read: How the media misses the woods for the trees

It’s not enough if you are just what you eat

On Aaj Tak, India’s leading Hindi news channel, a moment of stunning simplicity in an era of conspicuous consumption. Rahul Gandhi, the crown prince of the Congress party, has his dietary habits broken over live TV.

Link via Chetan Krishnaswamy

Also read: Cold is gold for the unwashed unmillions

After Big B’s cold, small screen catches a…