‘You are the first journalist and you are the last journalist who will ever come here’: Nuclear secrets and media practices of access-trespass

Introduction

Journalist Pallava Bagla, who has for more than two decades covered strategic science stories in India, mentioned to me that a few years back when he was reporting from a space related to the nuclear sector, he was told, ‘you are the first journalist and you are the last journalist who will ever come here. First and the last, that’s a categorical distinction …’ (Personal Interview with Pallava Bagla, New Delhi, 8 October 2012). The particular space of reportage had never been made accessible to journalists before, and Bagla was the chosen one.

Strategic sciences related to space research and nuclear technologies are often kept shrouded in secrecy. Secrecy has been practiced by the Indian nuclear establishment, consisting of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), and Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL), not only with respect to the nuclear weaponization program but also in the arena of nuclear energy. Itty Abraham (1992) and M.V. Ramana (2009) have argued that the nuclear establishment has successfully been able to create a ‘nuclear enclave’ through practices of secrecy. Such a strategic enclave encompasses sectors of nuclear weapons, nuclear power, and space research (including intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM)), with each of these sectors overlapping in personnel and facilities. However, when the strategic sciences sector faces legitimacy crises owing to public perception about risks from nuclear reactors or rising concern about the disproportionately high funds allocated to the development of ICBMs, the establishment has to provide information selectively to win back public opinion in its favor. Thus, the process of publicizing information involves both revealing and concealing, something that Raminder Kaur (2009) evocatively terms ‘measured revelation’.

Science reporters in India covering strategic sectors depend on cultivating sources and pursuing contacts in the scientific establishment and exclusive bureaucratic circles. When a scientist gives access to spaces that are out of bounds for most journalists, the reporter’s level of dependency increases, but does that fully ensure that the news coverage will have a favorable slant toward pro-establishment scientific practices? Can journalists turn the opportunities of access given to them during times of crisis into tactical trespasses that critique the scientific establishment? What meditational role do journalists play in publicizing scientific information? How do media practices and scientific practices interlace with each other to perform the revealing and concealing of secrets? These are some of the questions I shall address in this article.

Through in-depth interviews with two journalists working in the strategic sector, Pallava Bagla and Latha Jishnu, and analysis of the news coverage they produced from those sites, I explore the interactional dynamics between journalists and scientists. These journalists discuss their experiences of visiting nuclear reactors, of being allowed to take pictures on some occasions and during other times, being asked to walk blindfolded through passages in the name of national interest. I draw on Stephen Hilgartner’s (2012) attempts to explore the ‘science-media coupling’ as ‘strategic interaction’ during the ‘staging of science’. To study these strategic interactions, I further borrow from the ‘media as practice’ paradigm in media anthropology (Rao, 2010) to analyze how such strategic interactions are subject to structured protocols and, at the same time, offer themselves to contingent lapses, disclosures, and potential disruptions. I argue that media practices and scientific practices cannot be comprehended separately, and that through studying their mutual entanglements, we can understand performative mediations of environmental controversies and their role in shaping public opinion.

My interviews with Bagla and Jishnu foreground the problem facing journalists reporting on nuclear issues. The central problem is of secrecy, and this problem is not specific to India or Indian journalists. According to Alexander Golts (2012), a similar veil of secrecy surrounds nuclear issues in Russia where President Vladimir Putin believes maintaining nuclear parity with the United States guarantees security to Russia. For him, nuclear issues are key to Russia’s standing in the world as a superpower. Such an association of nuclear technologies with national security and national pride exists in India as well, albeit within a postcolonial context. Soon after India’s independence, as citizens of a newly postcolonial developing nation, many Indians were in awe of the cutting edge nuclear technologies and believed that embracing nuclear science would make India a superpower in the future (Chaudhuri, 2012). The public euphoria in India that followed the successful testing of nuclear arsenals in 1998 was termed ‘nuclear nationalism’ by Bidwai and Vanaik (1999). The tests were touted as having led to resurgence of national pride in India’s sovereignty, development programs, and scientific capability. The problem of secrecy makes it difficult for journalists to rely completely on official experts who know the nuclear field from inside but want to preserve secrets.

I begin with a brief exposition of my theoretical framework and then traverse a set of contextual examples based on my interviews with Bagla and Jishnu. These two journalists elaborate on their experiences of covering on-site nuclear reactors: they have different positions on the nuclear issue, yet both insist that they practice objective journalism. Toward the end of the article, I discuss how science/environmental reporting from strategic sites differs from televised debates on environmental issues unfolding in news studios. In the latter case, news anchors direct and coordinate action from the television studio and are in a better position to ask experts tough questions. The anchors foster debate among the gathered stakeholders, who are distributed in allocated frames as part of a split-screen format. While eschewing spatial determinism, I am nonetheless interested in analyzing the dynamics of interactions in different spatio-cultural contexts of media practices.

Theoretical framework

Stuart Hall (Hall et al., 1982) argued that people occupying powerful institutional positions have privileged access to media and become ‘primary definers of topics’. Owing to such structured power relationships, the mediation of news often reproduces the perspectives of the primary definers (Hall et al., 1982: 58–59). In the Indian context, when questions of risk from nuclear reactors are brought to the public, experts from the nuclear establishment have an upper hand in defining the terms of the debate. Since a nuclear enclave is maintained, it is very difficult to find credible scientific voices from outside the establishment who genuinely know about the intricate technical designs of India-based atomic reactors: media practices of access and definition get related to scientific expertise and epistemological credibility. Such evaluations of credibility also depend on the news organization’s epistemological orientations – that is, whether they value scientific knowledge or ‘lay’ knowledge (see Cottle, 2013).

Within such structured relationships, I am interested in looking at particular encounters between scientists and journalists. Borrowing from Goffmanian dramaturgical analysis, Stephen Hilgartner has conceptualized how scientists choose to orient themselves toward the media. According to Hilgartner (2012), the interaction between journalists and scientists or scientists and different media forms and practices such as press conferences and television studio appearances involves ‘theatrical self-consciousness’. Media present themselves to scientists as audiences for their views as well as a stage for performing for wider media audiences, including newspaper readers or television spectators. Hilgartner (2012) adds that the strategic orientation of scientists as performers for the media requires them to practice self-reflexivity with regard to what information they choose to share with media audiences as well as how they conduct themselves during the media show.

Hilgartner (2012) admits that science communication in and through performative arenas also involves science journalists as performers since they are active creators of media content. However, his focus is mostly on scientists. Unlike Hilgartner, who begins with the science research community while examining interactions of scientists and media, my focus is on the science/environmental journalists. Journalists, in the cases I study, are active mediators of science-related strategic information. These journalists have to keep in mind the limited ability of their ‘lay’ audiences to comprehend dense technical information that scientists provide. Journalists have an input in how scientific experiments are to be showcased so that their audiences can follow them. The journalists also have to abide by the strict codes of conduct set by nuclear scientists and security experts that prohibit them to disclose information. In such power negotiations, media no longer seem to be covering experiments from outside, but are constitutive of such performative experiments.

Stuart Allan (2010) argues that news cannot be viewed as objectively reflecting a social reality, and that a media scholar must understand the socio-political conditions under which the news production and consumption were carried out. In looking closely at the spatial contexts of reporting from institutional spaces of nuclear reactor and space research centers, my effort is to offer an analysis of the operations of socio-political conditions on news coverage at a micro-level, that is, at the level of media practices.

In espousing the ‘media as practice’ paradigm, Nick Couldry (2010) has called for thinking of media ‘not as text or production economy, but first and foremost as practice’ (p. 35). This approach emphasizes how practices of media production, distribution, and reception are related to other societal practices, and how ‘media are embedded in the interlocking fabric of social and cultural life’ (Couldry 2010: 50). Media anthropologist Ursula Rao (2010) has offered post-structuralist elaborations on the ‘media as practice’ framework. She has suggested that media practices should be seen as operating within shifting political and cultural contexts to address questions of structure, power, and inequality, and that at the same time, media scholars should gain cognizance of ‘change, drama and contingency’ involved in the ‘doing of practice’ (Rao, 2010: 150). This interplay of structure and contingency is crucial in media coverage of strategic sites because they help to address the ‘what if’ questions: what if an experiment staged for ‘live’ media fails and what if a nuclear scientist practicing the utmost restraint during his long interview suddenly slips up and reveals information he is not supposed to.

Joseph Masco has written extensively about the historical relationship between atomic tests and official secrets in the American society. Following the work of Emile Durkheim and Georg Simmel, Masco (2010) presciently explains that secrecy draws its power not just from the content of what is kept secret but also the way in which the secret is managed and organized. Thus, the practice of secrecy matters as much as the content of the secret. Media practices, I argue, are not just practices of publicity but also practices of secrecy. This is particularly the case for the media coverage of strategic science where journalists pride themselves for being able to access erstwhile secret spaces and at the same time have to obey security protocols that limit their movement in those spaces. While participating in negotiating the insider–outsider and public–private status, journalists’ media practices of partially publicizing secret information could serve to empower the secret further, helping it retain its aura. I will now discuss how these concepts manifest in concrete examples.

Exclusive access: designing uncontrolled live experiments for media

Bagla is one of India’s most famous journalists reporting on strategic science sectors. He works across different media: he is the science editor of New Delhi Television (NDTV) and the South Asia Chief Correspondent for the famed Science magazine, for which he wrote a story on the Himalayan glaciers which won the David Perlman award for excellence in science journalism. Bagla began his professional career as an environmental activist. However, since the 1990s, he clarifies, ‘I am no longer an activist. I am no longer an ardent environmental reporter. I am more a middle-of-the-road science and technology person’ (Personal Interview with Pallava Bagla, New Delhi, 8 October 2012).

Bagla is always able to bag the ‘exclusives’, whether it is reporting about Chandrayan, India’s maiden mission to send a spacecraft to the moon from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota, or accessing the test site of ICBMs that carry nuclear war-heads, or gaining entry into the nuclear chamber of the Kudankulam atomic reactor. When I ask Bagla why he thinks he is the ‘chosen one’, he says that is for others to tell me, but he admits that the sectors he works on do not permit activism. He has to be steadfastly ‘middle-of-the-road’. In his own words, ‘I cannot take a side. I have to report facts’. Before looking closely at how Bagla covers a contested nuclear issue, I will provide a brief context.

Following the Fukushima catastrophe, amidst protests by nearby fishermen communities about the effects of increasing radiations levels on their lives and livelihood, construction work at the Kudankulam nuclear power plant in Tamil Nadu (South India) came to a halt in September 2011. The nation was facing an energy crisis, and the plant needed to be built as quickly as possible. And now another crisis: construction work was suspended from September 2011 to March 2012, and even after resumption of plant activities, the resilient protests continued. NPCIL faced a legitimacy crisis of not being transparent in its workings and providing journalists access to nuclear reactors was one way for the nuclear establishment to demonstrate openness. However, the timing of such gestures of openness raises suspicions of attempts to co-opt media.

In a television segment titled ‘Inside Koodankulam N-Plant: How safe are our N-reactors?’ Bagla comes unannounced to the protest site in Kudankulam and finds the protest grounds vacant, thus hinting that there is indeed no sustained or substantial resistance to the plant. Engaging in variants of immersive and investigative journalism, Bagla travels deep inside the nuclear plant and waxes eloquent about the safety systems, mentioning the thickness of hermitically sealed concrete walls that guarantee that no radiation would escape (See Figure 1). Noting that the Fukushima disaster occurred because of power failure, Bagla almost gifts a passing certificate to the Kudankulam plant by explaining that a 400% backup has been provided by four diesel generator sets – ‘one would have been enough, but why take the risk’.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Bagla inside Kudankulam Nuclear Plant (Snapshot from NDTV).

In another segment, ‘NDTV inside protest hit Kudankulam nuclear plant’, Bagla interviews the scientist S. A. Bhardwaj, second in command at NPCIL, on 9 November 2011. Bhardwaj equates the insignificant effect of nuclear radiation generation from the plant to negligible temperature differences between different regions in India. The scientists admit that, in retrospect, they should have done a better job of communicating safety features of the plant to the people. All this controversy and protest becomes about the lack of effective science communication, and one realizes that Bagla and NDTV’s role here is enabling that communication.

The voice of the scientist is often privileged in news coverage because the scientist represents the ‘expert’ who gives the ‘facts’, consequently setting the parameters under which the discussion of the problem can take place and eschewing other alternative views (Hall, 1978). Does not his dependency on the scientists who took him to, in his own words, ‘the heart of the nuclear plant’ influence this favorable coverage of the plant? When I pose this question to Bagla, he acknowledges that it is indeed a challenge but that the ‘editorial control’ has never been wrested away from him. With so much secrecy around the plants, his media coverage becomes for him a revelation that shows that there was no malicious secret in the first place.

Does not all this middle-of-the-road-ness and dependency on science experts for entry into strategic spaces make him a mere channel for their views? Bagla is quick to clarify:

It is very easy to fall in that trap. We need to have an extremely supportive editor who has a backbone.

You give access because you want the information put out. I get the access and I put out the information the way I want … that is the key point … It is a very big challenge … We dropped many stories because people have wanted editorial control. (Personal Interview with Pallava Bagla, New Delhi, 8 October 2012)

Assuring me that journalistic dependency cannot compromise journalistic ethics, Bagla stresses the particular contingencies of television reporting that make it almost impossible for scientists to dictate terms. As an example, Bagla recounts how he and his television crew traversed the space of the Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO), where India’s first ICBM, Agni-V, was being tested. This was a ‘national security issue’, so he and his team made compromises, but they still did not give up editorial control:

You may take us to a facility. You may want us to go blindfolded. We are willing to go blindfolded. But, end of the day, it is not my job to show you what I am going to write or what I am going to air … On live television, there is no way you can control. There is no control on that. What I am saying live is what I am saying … I can’t bounce it off anybody. But when I am being led into a facility if I am told that ‘please, on the left side of the room we have stuff which we don’t want to be shown, on the right side we want to be shown, so don’t shoot left because left is national security issue’, that boundary you respect, but editorial control … no way. (Personal Interview with Pallava Bagla, New Delhi, 8 October 2012)

The unwritten protocols of ‘national security’ continue to guide the travel itinerary of Bagla and his crew, making ‘right sides’ transparent and leaving ‘left sides’ opaque. Bagla’s argument: television’s ‘liveness’ not only guarantees transparency but helps to escape the nuclear establishment’s control – nobody can control the ‘live’ moment of his enunciation. Nonetheless, Dayan and Katz’s (1992) and Kember and Zylinska’s (2012) work on media events makes clear that such meditational strategies, more than highlighting their ‘liveness’, betray the fact that they are ‘performative’. From my exchanges with Bagla, it is apparent that there is a lot going on behind the scenes and that the media is not just representing the strategic space. Rather, they share a deeper connection: the space is being produced or enacted by the media. At this juncture, Bagla explains to me how he planned an experiment to test whether the nuclear war-heads were really safe. The experiment was televised as part of a segment titled ‘Inside the Agni-5 missile lab’ on 18 April 2012. Bagla’s explanation points to the particular tensions between liveness and performativity in mediating a scientific experiment.

A ballistic missile containing the nuclear war-head first goes into the upper atmosphere and then comes back in free fall. As it returns in a projectile motion, some parts keep dropping off the rocket and only the portion that carries the nuclear war-head comes down. When it re-enters the atmosphere, heat is generated by friction. The carbon composite fiber protects the nuclear bomb and the computing devices that control it from the heat generated. Therefore, the thin strip of fiber material has to be able to keep the temperature inside the vehicle (where the crucial equipment is) below 50 degrees even as the temperature outside may exceed 3000 degrees. Bagla wanted to test this material. He kept his hand on one side of the fiber, and the scientist held a welding torch on the other side (see Figure 2). Here is his account:

Testing is easy … you put a thermometer here and a thermometer there … but that is not the way average viewer will understand. So we were there in DRDO and I said I will design my own experiment. We did a very simple experiment. We took a heat shield, put it on a clamp. I said average people understand what a welding torch is … by and large people understand what a welding torch is. You touch a welding torch, use only to join metals and it is very hot. So you put a person with a welding torch on this side. I said I will sit on this side. There is only one opportunity … you put the welding torch this side and I will touch it here. So if my hand comes away, reflex action, I cannot control it, 100 degree, it will come away, I said very straightforward my hand will by reflex come away if it is very hot and we are doing this and we will air what is being done. I am not giving you the control – if my hand winces, it winces, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t, and I am trusting you because I have a blowtorch less than a feet away from my face. Television is all about showman, showmanship. So it is less than a feet away from my face. I said I am willing to do provided you are setting this up. I said while this is happening I will talk but if it fails, I will continue talking saying this has not worked and we would continue putting it on air. Obviously we are not doing it live, we are doing an experiment inside the facility. They said fine, lets go ahead. (Pallava Bagla, Personal Interview Excerpt, New Delhi, 8 October 2012).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Bagla conducting experiment inside Agni-V missile lab (Snapshot from NDTV).

Bagla’s elaborate analysis of his own journalistic practices inside the DRDO space is suggestive. He is at pains to underscore that, as a journalist, he is no ‘intermediary’ who just shifts information from a secretive, hyper-securitized space to the public domain. He is a ‘mediator’ who actively transforms such sensitive information. The experiment he devises is part of this process of mediation, which always lets potentialities of translation and modification emerge (Latour, 2005). I am not sure whether common people identify with a welding torch more than a thermometer, but Bagla’s two considerations were that the experiment should be understood by ordinary Indians, and that it should have an impact, and for that it should be, within moderation, a performative spectacle: television, according to Bagla, is about ‘showmanship’.

When Bagla says ‘there is only one opportunity’, he rules out any re-enactments; the experiment cannot be repeated if it fails. Even as Bagla concedes ‘Obviously we are not doing it live, we are doing an experiment inside the facility’, he is quick to emphasize, ‘if my hand winces, it winces, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t’. The reflex action of Bagla’s hand movement will attest to the truthfulness and liveness of the experiment. Perhaps, more than liveness, Bagla is hinting at the linkage between ‘transparency’ and ‘immediation’ (Mazzarella, 2006). The experiment is short and immediate; it lasts for less than 12 seconds, and this brevity goes a long way toward making it decisive. Within science journalistic practices, it might also be interpreted as ‘creation of facticity’ (Collins, 1987). The experiment is designed to lend itself to immediation more than mediation – it showcases immediacy and occludes the contingencies and complexities of the practices of mediation, including interactions between journalists and scientists in a secretive place. My interview suggests a lot of planning went into the experiment, which never found any space in the broadcast news. Bagla’s hypothetical pronouncement to scientists at the DRDO facility, ‘if it [the experiment] fails, I will continue talking, saying this has not worked and we would continue putting it on air’, seems to be a promise to his television audience that he will keep the spirit of liveness – or more accurately immediacy – alive even if the program is not technically live.

Even as Bagla promises his audience this immediacy, an experiment that held the potential of a tactical trespass within an authoritarian space becomes appropriated within strategic maneuvers. Access to this space research site was given to Bagla during the testing of Agni-V, India’s first ICBM. A successful launch would catapult India to the elite international nuclear club. The experiment becomes a technosocial ritual that gives favorable publicity to the Indian missile program. And yet, can one deny that the experiment held the promise, at least, of provisional transgressions, of risky outcomes? Did Bagla choose a really safe experiment? What would he have done if the experiment had really failed? I do not have answers to these questions, but had Bagla’s experiment failed and had he aired it, that could have jeopardized future funding of the missile program. Mediations of strategic technoscience spaces thus have a role to play in the ‘politics of knowledge’ (Beck, 1992).

Socio-technical entanglements: stories about nuclear reactors and people’s lifeworlds

Latha Jishnu came to reporting on issues related to science from a different path than Bagla. She wrote for financial papers like the Economic Times, Business Standard, and the business magazine Business World before arriving at the science and environment magazine Down to Earth (DTE). She tells me that journalists at financial papers called her a ‘bleeding heart’ because they felt she often took ‘the other’s side’. Her answer to them would always be ‘Do you take sides (in journalism)?’ – She explains that she is inquisitive: she often questioned Mahyco, the agricultural biotechnology corporation Monsanto’s Indian partner, but then she also debated with anti-genetically-modified-organisms (anti-GMO) activists – and so she views herself as a middle-of-the-road journalist. Her cover stories on the GM debate in India for Business World can be read as rigorous politico-economic analysis of the distribution of profits from the introduction of genetically modified crops in India. Not surprisingly, such an analysis is very much present in her work on the nuclear energy issue as well. In one of her earlier pieces on Kudankulam on 22 December 2007 titled ‘Running out of Options’, she begins by saying, ‘The fact that NPCIL is investing in both wind and hydropower is the most telling example of just where India’s nuclear power programme is going’. Here, Jishnu trespassed by including a slip up by a senior NPCIL official of investing in renewable energy (wind and hydropower) instead of nuclear energy, in her report, to suggest that the Indian nuclear power sector might have a vulnerable future. The official’s brief moment of carelessness within the structured conversational environment of the nuclear reactor becomes a moment of contingent opportunity for Jishnu.

Jishnu (2007) then relates NPCIL’s economic dependency on wind and hydropower to how the nuclear reactors are an aesthetic misfit in a place that is dotted with windmills along the coast:

Just a half-hour’s drive up the Tamil Nadu coast from Kanyakumari, the twin domes of the Kudankulam nuclear reactors brood over the brown scrubland, dwarfing everything in sight – even the tallest of the windmills in the vicinity. This is essentially windmill country, with mile upon mile of tall white columns spiking the Tirunelveli landscape in a showy endorsement of renewable energy. Juxtaposed with the windmills, the 80-metre high domes – these contain what are among the largest reactors in the world – bring into sharp relief the disquieting issues about India’s energy security and the role of nuclear power in it.

Acknowledging that the nuclear option is cleaner than coal in the short-term, Jishnu’s article highlights that nuclear power plants are nonetheless economically precarious. She got into trouble with the nuclear establishment soon afterwards. The scientists in India, Jishnu reflects, speak only to a select group of reporters. When she used to write the most neutral pieces, or what they thought to be neutral, she belonged to that exclusive list of pro-nuclear reporters who were asked to hold workshops for other journalists to train them about nuclear science. She was initially allowed to bring in a camera but then asked not to use the pictures she took while at the reactor site once her stories started being considered anti-nuclear. In her own words,

They actually took me on a special visit to Kudankulam in 2007 because at that time they thought it is going to generate power in December. So in June, they took me there. Showed me everything. I got to speak to Russian scientists, who were there … got to see everything. They even let me take pictures. Anyway, so after these stories came out on Kudankulam which were critical of the delays and the costs, they were not happy. They no longer responded to questions. It was very difficult to get an interview with the NPCIL chief … They do not seem to understand the basics of journalism: that you will question, that you will be critical of something. But that does not make you … anti-nuclear. In fact, I have got rather an open mind on nuclear. (Personal Interview with Latha Jishnu, New Delhi, 13 December 2012)

Jishnu’s predicament is that of a ‘middle-of-the-road’ journalist who questions both scientists and activists and then has difficulty finding the interviews she needs for her news stories. She explicates that the activists are not enough to write a proper science story – they say the same thing again and again. She wants to understand the science, but scientists are reluctant to talk to her, since they view her coverage of them as negatively biased. According to Jishnu, several scientists are like ‘babus’ (bureaucrats occupying high positions) in India who have a hierarchical mind-set – they need promotions, they don’t want controversies, and they can’t stand criticisms. She asks me whether I find her writings too ‘activisty’, but points out that when she criticizes the activists, they say ‘her heart is not in the right place’. Would a journalist who has dared to trespass be ostracized for life and denied further access to strategic sites? A pragmatic question to ask: what are the options left for such a journalist? Jishnu has not stopped writing; in fact, she has been more prolific than before on the nuclear energy issue.

In her later article ‘Kudankulam Meltdown’ published on 15 April 2012, Jishnu narrates stories of how the plant’s ‘hot run’ has become folklore in the villages close to the plant. The NPCIL officials working at the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant failed to give an advance warning to the villagers when they carried out the hot run test. The primary coolant water was heated to the reactor’s operating temperature of 280 degrees centigrade, which resulted in the release of a lot of steam. The screaming valves opened in the night and startled the villagers out of sleep. They had not been informed about the ramifications of the ‘hot run’. There is a touch of irony when Jishnu tells us that villagers watched the Fukushima catastrophe on television sets distributed by the Karunanidhi-headed state government as part of an electoral promise. Karunanidhi’s party Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam has been actively supporting the construction of the plant. Witnessing the Fukushima disaster unfold on their television sets and suffering the ramifications of the ‘hot run’ test made locals actively protest the nuclear reactor in Kudankulam.

In another article, ‘A Schoolgirl’s Nuclear Nightmare’, written for DTE magazine, Jishnu (2012) narrates her experience of debating with women protestors whether people living near nuclear reactors were indeed more prone to cancer. Just then, a 10-year-old girl named Varshini showed Jishnu her fifth standard Science and General Knowledge textbook prepared by the Tamil Nadu Education Department that said nuclear radiations can cause cancer. I ask Jishnu how she met this girl and Jishnu smiles. Jishnu had gone to a People’s Movement against Nuclear Energy (PMANE) rally. PMANE had organized an all-faith rally and were using it to whip up opposition. Jishnu listened for a while but then became a bit weary of the polemics, and then thought of taking a stroll. It was then that she found a group of women sitting together:

I found these women sitting there. As I kept talking to the women, I saw this little girl absolutely riveted by our conversation. I was asking these women why they had waited for so long … and they told me that it was I who had come late and that they were protesting for a long time. So, this little girl tells me ‘Media was not interested. Now they are talking’ … I decided I had to talk to her … It was evening … It was all dark in this open ground and they all went scurrying … and got this book. (Personal Interview with Latha Jishnu, New Delhi, 13 December 2012)

I argue that, in her later articles, Jishnu has chosen to write about technoscience and its entanglements with people’s lifeworlds, not so much by accessing or trespassing sites of power, but walking and meandering among ordinary people. Jishnu’s ability to talk with local communities, to seek out a young girl’s views, makes her news stories present perspectives often missing from mainstream accounts. Such writing shifts away from narrating polarized battles between scientists and activists, focusing instead on people’s problems and their perceptions of technology.

Power dynamics in televised debates

In this section, I want to shift the study of the media coverage of nuclear secrets from institutional spaces of strategic science to institutional spaces of media, that is, to televised debates in television studios and split-screens. After all, secrets are not just revealed by visiting nuclear reactors and ICBM test sites. They can be brought into public discourse through a column written by a dissident nuclear scientist in a national newspaper, which could then be taken up by a television show. I want now to examine one such show to argue that the television studio and split-screen management affords debate moderators and news anchors a strategic advantage in confronting politicians and science experts with questions about risk, safety, and responsibility – an advantage that is not equally available to them while accessing strategic sites.

The televised debate in contemporary India is now part of most news channels’ primetime news shows. The format of such shows includes going through news headlines and then a focused debate on one issue picked from the events of the day. This shared practice across channels indicates the popularity of televised argumentation in the country, and substantiates Nalin Mehta’s (2008) claim that Indian television’s basic feature is that it is ‘argumentative television’.

Now I must narrate the set of connected media events that led to the televised debate in the NDTV studio. It all began with a compelling article called ‘Resolve Koodankulam Issues’ that appeared in The New Indian Express on 19 April 2013, where former AERB chairman and a critic of the Kudankulam atomic power plant A. Gopalakrishnan argued that the defective valves in the Kudankulam nuclear reactor pointed to a bigger cover-up of the large amounts of sub-standard equipment supplied to NPCIL by ZiO-Podolsk, a subsidiary of Russian Atomic Energy Corporation. Based on research of Norwegian, Bulgarian, and Russian websites, Gopalakrishnan laid out the facts: the procurement director of ZiO-Podolsk, Segei Shutov, had been arrested by Russian Federal Security Service in February 2012 on charges of fraud and corruption. Shutov had been using low-cost raw materials for manufacturing reactor-related equipment and passing them off as high-quality technology. The materials supplied by ZiO-Podolsk had been used by Russian-enabled reactors in China, India, Iran, and Bulgaria. Following Shutov’s arrest, although China and Bulgaria had raised hundreds of queries about the specifics of materials supplied to them by ZiO-Podolsk, the trio of NPCIL, DAE, and AERB in India remained silent. This silence, according to Gopalakrishnan, was suspicious and conveyed a tendency toward making their practices (and dealings) opaque to the wider Indian public. To allay fears raised by Gopalakrishnan, NPCIL and AERB were compelled to hastily come up with press releases countering his views on the same day that the article appeared. As the newspaper article and press releases circulated, NDTV, which had been covering this issue, decided to dedicate its primetime television news segment to this recent controversy on 29 April 2013.

Sonia Singh, prominent anchor and editorial director of NDTV, hosted the debate, with the news channel’s science editor Pallava Bagla by her side in NDTV’s Delhi-based studio. Other prominent experts and personalities associated with the debate joined from various other locations of India. The debate included Gopalakrishnan himself, as well as Srikumar Banerjee, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and current professor at the Homi Bhabha Research Center. Banerjee was to a large extent defending NPCIL’s position.

Assuring the audience that safety, not energy generation, was the first priority, Narayanaswamy, Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s office, reiterated the NPCIL press release’s argument that there would be no compromise in the quality of components that had been supplied to the NPCIL from Russia. When Banerjee was asked by Singh to clarify the question of defective valves raised by Gopalakrishnan, he explained that when the part-by-part testing was conducted, these defects had not surfaced, but that irregularities showed up in the valves only when integration testing was done during the commissioning process. Banerjee’s reasoning was that the defects were not intrinsic to the four valves – their functioning within a larger system was the problem. This argument aligned well with the statement in AERB’s press release that the tests conducted during the commissioning process provide data about system level performances under actual conditions of temperature and pressure. The orientation of scientists toward the media does not operate only for one media event and program or at an actor level; to maintain consistency of positions across media events and programs, scientists in an organization have to collectively manage reputations. In their interactions with Gopalakrishnan and Singh on the NDTV show, Narayanaswamy and Banerjee strategically stuck to the earlier script established by AERB press release so that nobody could find inconsistencies in the nuclear establishment’s position.

The split-screen is a familiar device used in television news to depict action in two or multiple locations (often simultaneous) and for dialogue between newsmakers and newspersons spread across disparate locations (see Figure 3). The split-screen emphasizes the liveness of the televisual medium and its ability to manage contingency. At one point in the show, the screen is divided into four quadrants while Gopalakrishnan, The Hindu newspaper editor N. Ram, Singh, and Bagla participate in the conversation. As soon as Banerjee and Udaykumar, the leader of PMANE join, the screen division changes from four to six delineated boxes within the main screen frame. Udaykumar’s Skype connection seems to have a problem and the feed transitions to a combination of five embedded frames. Singh mentions the connectivity issues faced by Udaykumar, which again self-reflexively suggests that she is in constant touch with the program technicians, and confirms what Paddy Scannell (1991) has influentially contended about broadcast talk: ‘Talk on radio and television comes from many locations but there is one that is primary and that is the broadcasting studio’ (p. 2).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Sonia Singh with experts in Split-Screen News Debate (Snapshot from NDTV).

In transitioning from interrogating one expert to another, the television host gets an opportunity to shape the debate. Several times while moving from Gopalakrishnan to another expert on the program, Singh would emphasize Gopalakrishnan’s independence and qualifications and the significance of his fact-based argumentation, thereby making a case to take his statements seriously. At one point, while transitioning from Gopalakrishnan to Banerjee, Singh remarks to Banerjee, ‘you have heard very strong arguments, backed by texts, backed by research. Dr. Gopalakrishnan making his points very carefully about why this need for re-look’. At another instance, while questioning Bagla, Singh asks, ‘A person of Dr. Gopalakrishnan’s stature comes out so openly raising concern. Why is it that the government seems ready to dismiss them? Why is there not an independent panel?’ Here, we find the journalist, in mediating expertise, praising and legitimizing the expert. Furthermore, through her remark, Singh as journalist becomes an embedded voice of the media citizens watching the program, demanding accountability from the government (Livingstone and Lunt, 1994). Accountability in this debate is tied to transparency, to not keeping secrets for secrets here meant shady deals, corruption, and catastrophic futures.

Accountability here was translated as a suggestion that the government take another look and have an independent examination of its facilities by the Operational Safety Review Team of the International Atomic Energy Agency. This was the solution suggested on the debate by Bagla. He identified a lack of trust among the stakeholders as the main issue plaguing the reactor controversy: ‘there is a certain deficit of trust between people who are making the plant, people who are living near the plant, and people opposing the nuclear power plant’. This emphasis on trust suggests that the Indian nuclear establishment could still restore its reputation by being transparent. Bagla’s recommendation in no way contests the prominence of the ‘best expertise’ model where, as Alan Irwin (2006) has noted, ‘the central issue appears to be public trust in current mechanisms of science policy rather than a fundamental reappraisal of the relationship between science and social change’ (pp. 305–306). The belief in scientific expertise remained prominent because the debate was staged as being not between science and other knowledge systems, but between two different science experts. The livelihood concerns of people living near the reactor site, their knowledge of the environment around them, and their notions of fishing rights (and the rights of fish) were not validated. NDTV’s call for reducing secrecy falls short of addressing the asymmetrical evaluations of experts and laypersons’ viewpoints.

Conclusion

Communication of environmental risks to the general public occurs through a series of performance arenas ranging from conversations at nuclear reactor sites to interactions inside television studios. My intervention has been to ask journalists to reflect on their performances in particular arenas, to elaborate about their interactions with scientists, and shed light on how they imagine their audiences. Both media practices and communication sites are shaped by larger contexts: politics of nuclear energy, pragmatics of finding scientific experts as sources, and India’s postcolonial condition. Analyzing interactions between journalists and scientists in various meditated spaces, I have highlighted how power dynamics in these interactions differ between a nuclear reactor site and a news studio. I now want to put some of my research findings in conversation with media coverage of technological risks in a global context.

Analysis of Bagla and Jishnu’s interviews and reportage indicates concerns about how journalists should cover environmental risks from nuclear technologies. Here, the attempts made by scientists to inform the public through journalists, as well as the journalists’ understanding of their own mediating role between the scientists and their audience, are crucial.

Friedman (2011) explains that during the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, information flow from scientists and bureaucrats toward the general public through the mediation of journalists suffered because they did not share a common language of nuclear science. Reporters complained that scientists used incomprehensible technical language during press briefings. Friedman (2011) further notes, ‘Part of the blame lay with officials who were not giving out radiation information regularly, but the reporters did not know enough to ask the right questions’ (p. 58). With 70,000 newspapers and 500 television channels, the Indian media market is hyper-competitive. Indian media organizations, driven by short-term concerns, are unable to nurture correspondents who can dedicatedly work on science-related issues (Chaudhuri, 2012). While the Indian media market might be suffering from symptoms similar to those that Friedman mentions, Bagla is precisely the exception. Technical language did not become a barrier for Bagla. Because of his many years of experience as a reporter covering strategic sciences in India, Bagla seemed confident about co-designing a technical experiment with DRDO scientists so that his general audiences would easily comprehend the role of the carbon composite fiber in a ballistic missile and assess the fiber’s efficacy.

Doing a survey of research on mass media coverage of technological risks in United States and Germany, Dunwoody and Peters (1992: 210–211) note that in a situation where there is technical and political uncertainty and there exist many competing claims, journalists are unable to determine the truth, and thus, they decide to give their audiences and readers access to a broad set of opinions. Jishnu does something similar, and she executes it creatively. She sees scientists and activists as occupying two extreme positions about safety issues related to the Kudankulam nuclear reactor, and to nuance her story, she starts gathering opinions of common people who live close to the reactor, attempting to foreground their imaginations of what the future holds for them.

Bagla and Jishnu emphatically declared they were middle-of-the-road journalists. However, the news stories they produced were very different – the spaces they entered, the people they met, and the nature of their interactions seemed to differ. Both Bagla and Jishnu want to hold on to facts and objectivity, but these terms cannot be considered in an absolute sense.

During the Fukushima disaster, Japanese mainstream media was under attack for being part of the exclusive press club system and allegedly funneling information from government sources and the Tokyo Electric Power Co (operating company of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors) to reassure Japanese citizens that there was no danger instead of informing them about potential risks of radiation exposure. Having a symbiotic relationship with official sources prevented influential Japanese journalists from carrying out independent reporting (McNeill, 2012). Thus, providing journalists access to strategically selected nuclear secrets in moments of crisis raises suspicions of attempts to co-opt media not only in India but also in Japan. The discussion needs to move beyond co-opting methods of nuclear establishments and journalists’ strategies to resist such appropriations. I wanted to know what kind of experiences journalists undergo while inside strategic technoscience sites, what decisions journalists make while spending time in such spaces, and finally, analyze and understand the meanings they attach to those experiences and decisions. In addition to textual analysis and frame analysis, my anthropologically informed in-depth interviews enabled me to examine such questions. Through a focus on arenas of interactions between media persons and scientific experts, this article posits a grounded approach toward conceptualizing how subjective perceptions of journalists are manifested in their media practices of writing stories and staging television interviews.