Abstract
After nearly four decades in journalism, including a decade researching and teaching journalism at a British university, the statement posed for this issue brings to mind a list of challenges: the viability of journalism as a profession; its ability to maintain standards, training and mentoring; technological changes; near-obsolescence of the traditional business model of news organizations; increasing threats to journalists from politics and business; attempts to curb transparency, and so forth. The landscape of journalism in democracies presents a picture of stark contrasts: There has never been such a vast audience, but the credibility of journalism has never been so tested; the technology that produces journalism has never been better, but the public can see that its ethical foundations has plumbed new depths (the Leveson Inquiry in Britain at best offered a snapshot of the state of affairs); the impact of the news media on public discourse has never been so instant and its reach so pervasive, but many wonder whether the impact has been for good or ill. It is unquestionably the best of times, and it is also, unfortunately, the worst of times for journalism.
Having been on both sides of the divide – practicing journalism and researching and teaching journalism – one challenge that stands out for me as the biggest is the dwindling trust and the consequent loss of esteem in which the public holds journalism and its practitioners. Degrees may vary, but this is as much true in western democracies as it is in India, the world’s largest democracy, where I began my career in the early 1980s and followed the traditional career path of desk-to-reporting and went on to cover several defining issues and events in south Asia, before reporting out of Britain and Europe since 1999. The experience of bearing witness has included the changes in journalism over the decades, changes in technology and the newsroom culture, as well as in the definition of what counts as news. There never was a golden era in journalism, but the progressive decline in the public’s trust in journalism, the esteem in which it is held, and the news media’s ability to make an impact, or to perform its agenda-setting role, is evident. Academic research and critiques of journalism may often lag behind the fast-moving world of journalism, but the trope of political economy espoused by scholars such as Schiller, Herman and Chomsky, and Tunstall may be reaching an extreme at global and national levels. The limitations of the old media may have been overcome with information overload of the new media, and new technology may provide new spaces to the margins and the marginalized, but the contemporary architecture of journalism also faces challenges on its ability to make a difference.
I have elsewhere explored recent changes in Indian journalism (see below), but a significant event in May 2018 makes it easy to identify trust – or the public’s distrust – as the biggest challenge facing journalism in the country; the situation is similar elsewhere too. The distrust marks a new low as the consequence of the march of ‘Murdochization’ that was first developed in Australia, United States and Britain by Rupert Murdoch and adopted in India since the early 1990s. A series of sting operations in May 2018 revealed that some of the most influential news organizations such as The Times of India Group are happy to consider ‘packages’ to further a particular ideology, defame a set of politicians, and create a religious atmosphere to help a certain political party in the build-up to the 2019 general elections – for a price (Rowlatt, 2018). The revelations disappointed and spread cynicism among many inside and outside the profession and fueled the growing distrust with which the public views journalism in India; one leading commentator saw the news media – long hailed as one of the country’s strengths – as a ‘principal threat’ to its famed democracy (Mehta, 2018).
The revelations were the latest manifestations of the idea of ‘Murdochization’, which is a useful term to unpack the role of corporate culture in journalism, where readers and viewers are treated as consumers instead of citizens. It is based on the corporate culture devised by Murdoch to drive profits and involves privileging the ‘marketing’ or ‘business’ side of journalism over the ‘editorial’, which takes the form of catering to the lowest common denominator, tabloidization, pricing wars, non-unionized workforce, journalists employed on short-term contracts, censorship to suppress negative news about business partners or advertisers or political parties. Commentator Praful Bidwai (1996) in India and journalist-academic Granville Williams (1998) in Britain were among the first to use the term to describe the state of journalism in their countries.
Blurring the lines between advertising and news in the form of advertorials and stating it as such is a common practice, but Murdochization has spawned a unique phenomenon in India: ‘paid news’, which refers to political advertising passing off as news for a price during elections. Identical ‘news’ reports plugging a candidate or party appearing in various newspapers on the same day is one of its manifestations; television news channels have their versions. In the context of feverish competition for revenue, ‘paid news’ has become a source of income for news organizations, even if it is seen as a threat to the democratic process. Laws are yet to be framed to stop it, and given the dividends it brings, no political party has shown enthusiasm to curb it. By the 2014 general election, ‘paid news’ had ceased to be a surprise. Parties, candidates, and news organizations devised ingenuous ways to push claims to electoral success and power. Given the vast news media infrastructure in the country, ‘paid news’ became one of the key ways of influence voters.
The phenomenon is part of an increasingly corporate-driven news mosaic that has seen the obliteration of beats considered down-market such as health, education, and rural development in a country that faces major challenges, and the domination of news content about celebrities, crime, cricket, and Bollywood. Journalists and media groups seen to be critical of the party in power face raids by official agencies, threats to life and employment, or lack of access to sources of news, while news content has increasingly turned anodyne and investigative journalism is almost non-existent. The role of the editor has been downgraded since the early 1990s as owners of news media organizations place a premium on proximity to the party in power. The discourse of manufacturing consent espoused by Herman and Chomsky may have reached its extreme point in India. In 2017, Arun Shourie, one of India’s best-known editors, compared sections of democratic India’s news media to that in North Korea.
Print journalism began in India in 1780, aided the freedom struggle and after independence in 1947, effectively played the role of encouraging development and holding the government of the day to account. Several governments sought to curb its freedom; it faced repression during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in the mid-1970s, but it fought back, often exposing leading politicians and corrupt practices that influenced several elections. But the contribution to journalism of the Narendra Modi government, which has been in office in New Delhi since 2014, has been significant in the history of media–government relations in the country. It fueled public distrust in journalism when leading lights introduced terms such as ‘presstitutes’ and ‘news traders’ to refer to journalists, restricting access to news sources and forcing journalists and news organizations to self-censor news that may be considered critical of the government (the 2018 World Press Freedom Index ranked India at 138). Prime Minister Modi’s unstated media policy includes not addressing press conferences, preferring scripted interviews, and addressing the people directly through twitter and the state-owned media.
The text and the context are significant: there has been a proliferation in the last 25 years in India of what I call the ‘hardware’ of journalism (enabling factors such as technology, capital, rising literacy, training centers), which offers new potential and opportunities for the ‘software’ of journalism – the quality of editorial content that empowers citizens, holds those in power to account, and strengthens democratic institutions – to flourish. Online journalism is increasingly making its presence felt in the public sphere, opening new spaces, but as the now embedded idea of ‘Murdochization’ acquires extreme forms, the still-influential mainstream news media face a serious crisis of credibility. The low esteem with which Indian journalism is held is also reflected in recent Bollywood films.
It is easy to address the first part of this issue’s statement (identify the biggest challenge to journalism), but not so the second part: ‘… how its impact could be resolved and/or minimized’. Journalism does not exist in isolation but is part of a complex matrix of politics, economy and socio-cultural environment in a democratic society. The obvious response to the second part would be for the idea, ideology, and idealism of journalism to be allowed to go back to the basics so that it can diligently perform its traditional role. But to what extent it can do so when powerful political, business, and cultural forces steer it to partisan extremes is open to debate.
For more on the themes mentioned above, see the ‘References’ section below.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.