Abstract
In recent years, India’s media landscape has witnessed rapid and expansive growth, marked by the emergence of numerous print and electronic news outlets. Concomitantly, India’s numerous news organizations have cast their role in celebratory terms as being free, vibrant and responsible for exposing political corruption and abuses of power. Such positive assertions about the state of the Indian news media have also come from observers outside the country. Tina Brown, editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast and Newsweek, for example, commented that Indian journalism is ‘vibrant, rich, and healthy’, in contrast with journalism in the West, which ‘is believed to be in the grip of an existential and financial crisis’ (quoted in Elliott, 2010).
These positive perceptions were, however, significantly undermined by the publication in November 2010 of transcripts and audio files of damaging phone conversations between several leading Indian journalists and a lobbyist for some of the country’s top business interests. In this scandal, variously termed Radiagate (after Niira Radia, the lobbyist in question) or Barkhagate (after Barkha Dutt, one of the journalists on tape), some of India’s best-known print and broadcast journalists could be heard on tape, offering the lobbyist’s clients scripted interviews and favorable columns, giving advice on how to place stories in media outlets, and even seemingly acting as intermediaries between political interests close to the lobbyist and the ruling Congress Party (Wax, 2010).
The scandal initially came to light when Open magazine, an English-language news weekly established in 2009, along with the better known magazine, Outlook, posted transcripts of, as well as audio links to, conversations between a leading Indian lobbyist, Niira Radia, and leading Indian journalists on its website on 18 November 2010. These tapes arose out of a wire-tap placed on Radia’s cellular phone by the Indian Income Tax Department in 2009 in response to a complaint that she had evaded taxes. The tapes were leaked by an unknown whistleblower to various mainstream media outlets. While only a small fraction of the Radia conversations were initially available online, they not only seemed to reveal the existence of a complex and disturbing web of interactions between the worlds of business, politics and journalism, but they also ‘reeked of an unseemly proximity’ between journalist, lobbyist and corporate interests (Vardarajan, 2010).
In one of the more widely cited conversations, Radia is heard attempting to reach the ruling Congress Party leadership on behalf of a regional political party, through Barkha Dutt, a leading broadcast journalist and anchor of the popular prime-time public affairs talk show, We the People. In the conversation, Dutt appears to be serving as an intermediary who has the ear of the Congress leadership and is in a position to convey messages back and forth. In another, far more damaging conversation, Radia is heard speaking to Vir Sanghvi, well-known columnist and then editorial director of The Hindustan Times (India’s second most widely circulated paper), about how a Mumbai High Court decision unfavorable to her client, India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, could be portrayed as against the national interest. In discussing Mukesh Ambani’s reluctance to speak publicly about the case, Sanghvi proposes a ‘scripted’ interview and also asks Radia what angle he should take in his column regarding her client. Radia is also heard in conversation with MK Venu, then opinion editor of the leading financial paper, The Economic Times. In this conversation, after pointing to the prominent placement of a story supporting her client in his paper, Venu goes on to advise her on which news outlets to approach with a story favorable to her client. In addition, he suggests ways for her client to approach his boss, Samir Jain, the co-owner of Bennett Coleman and Co. Ltd (India’s largest media conglomerate), whose properties include The Times of India and The Economic Times. He also responds to her questions about the potential alignments of particular journalists and informs her that they are being paid by the group opposed to her client.
In other tapes, Radia is heard ‘briefing’ other prominent journalists such as Rajdeep Sardesai of the television channel, CNN-IBN, about her clients’ positions on various issues and getting a senior editor (Rahul Joshi of The Economic Times) to promise that his paper would continue to be ‘sensitive’ to her clients’ needs and ‘not go over the top’. The tapes also reveal Radia referring to stories that she has managed to get killed at the behest of her clients and openly identifying the ones that she succeeded in getting presented from her clients’ perspective. Taken together, these conversations not only challenge conventional norms about the relationships between lobbyists and journalists in India, but the much-vaunted independence of the Indian news media.
Despite the nature of the revelations, however, India’s generally hyper-competitive and shrill news media made virtually no mention of the story. In fact, almost a week after the tapes became public on 18 November 2010, a survey of India’s leading English-language newspapers revealed only two stories. A brief item about the leaked tapes, commenting that they contained conversations between Niira Radia and various journalists (but using no names), appeared in the tabloid daily, Mail Today (a single edition English-language paper published from New Delhi), on 23 November 2010. A more detailed story appeared on 24 November in the well-respected Chennai-based newspaper, The Hindu, but on the Opinion pages and not as a news story. And for the dominant broadcast media, the story did not seem to exist at all.
As Prashant Agrawal (2010), writing on The Wall Street Journal’s Real Time India blog put it, even a week after the story had been broken by Open and Outlook, there was ‘silence on Indian TV and near silence in print’. Similarly, media critic Sevanti Ninan (of the Indian media-watch website, The Hoot) commented in a blog post titled, ‘Oh what a lovely blackout’, that ‘the list of those who did not take note is long and illustrious’ (Ninan, 2010).
But unlike in the past, when the lack of mainstream media coverage would likely have resulted in the death of the issue, the situational calculus was radically altered by the existence of social media. In this context, Twitter users were widely identified as not only articulating a critique of journalism in India (where journalists rarely turn the lens on themselves or their peers), but also as playing a significant role in compelling mainstream media acknowledgment of the story (Kalbag, 2010; Sampath, 2010). Indeed, within hours of the Radia tapes being placed on the Open magazine website, the Indian Twitterverse seemed to be on fire, with hashtags such as: #barkhagate, #Radiagate, #firevirbarkha, #firevir, #mediamafia, #cleanmedia, #shamemedia, #medialies #corruptmedia, #radiatapes, #dalamedia, #paidmedia proliferating rapidly. The most active of these was #barkhagate, which garnered about 57,000 tweets within days, and became the most popular or top trending topic on Twitter India for six days.
The discourse that emerged around this hashtag revealed a deep sense of anger and frustration at the failure of the mainstream media to cover the story, as well as a critique of the state of contemporary journalism in India. Typically, the tweets questioned what denizens of Twitter perceived to be the media’s ‘blackout’ of the story and argued that this was part of a deliberate and calculated effort on the part of leading news organizations to engage in a cover-up and thus keep Indian citizens in the dark. As one trenchant and frequently re-tweeted comment put it, ‘India is the first country in the world, where the media censors the news’.
Users seemed especially outraged at the fact that while Indian media were quick to cover even the most minor issues related to celebrities, they had failed to report on an issue with significant implications for public debate and democracy. Deeply skeptical of the defense adopted by many media organizations that they had not covered the Barkhagate issue (as it was dubbed on Twitter) because they were unable to confirm the authenticity of the tapes, citizens made unfavorable comparisons between what they saw as the courage of Open and Outlook magazines, which had broken the story, and other news organizations, which, in their view, seemed to be more concerned with ‘protecting’ members of their fraternity. Indeed, numerous Twitter users made the case that not only did the scandal call into question the credibility of specific journalists, it was also reflective of a larger malaise afflicting Indian journalism – the existence of a questionable nexus between journalists, business and political interests, which made it impossible for the consumer to discern what was true and what had been ‘scripted’.
This wide-ranging criticism of mainstream media was accompanied by attempts by members of the Twitterverse to highlight a secondary layer of alternative media sources, including Wikipedia, India’s leading media criticism site The Hoot, Facebook, YouTube and blogs, which collectively constituted an ever-expanding space for the dissemination of information and continued debate about the issue.
Finally, after a week of continued attacks in the realm of social media, and even calls for ‘dharnas’ or sit-ins at media company headquarters, the Radia tapes story began to make its way into the mainstream media. On 25 November 2010, more than a week after the story had broken, India’s largest circulation English-language daily, The Times of India, finally carried a news item about the scandal in which it not only covered the issue, but also acknowledged the power of the Internet and the role India’s netizens had played in keeping the issue alive. On 29 November 2010, a prominent columnist for the same paper wrote:
The blanket silence that was achieved on mainstream media was undone by the noisy roar of outrage on Twitter. In another day and age, the story would have been effectively killed, but there was no chance of this happening, given the availability of this [Twitter] direct pipeline from and into the consciousness of the public. (Desai, 2010)
Similarly, writing for Mail Today, an English-language tabloid that reaches more than four million readers, Sachin Kalbag commented that the mainstream media would have maintained their ‘deathly silence … if Twitter [had] not entered the picture and forced, quite literally, top media houses to follow a story that had the potential to damage one of the strongest pillars of India’s democracy’.
In the weeks that followed, a few broadcast channels (including Barkha Dutt’s employer, NDTV) aired programs in which some of the journalists caught on the Radia tapes were asked to explain their conduct. The Indian chapter of the South Asian Media Commission issued a statement saying that it ‘viewed with shock and anguish contents of the taped conversations of high-profile lobbyists seeking to manipulate media coverage to serve the interests of sections of the corporate sector’ and asked journalists figuring in the tapes to express their regrets. Vir Sanghvi, who seemed to have participated in some of the more damaging exchanges with Radia, gave up his position as editorial director of The Hindustan Times, though the publication did not link his departure to his involvement in the Radia scandal.
To many observers, these events pointed to the emergence of a ‘watch dog role’ for the Indian Twitterverse, pressure from which had compelled mainstream Indian media to cover the Radia tapes scandal, which had otherwise been subject to a ‘seemingly orchestrated blackout’ (Wax, 2010). But while Twitter’s ability to influence public debate by putting an item on the media’s agenda in the specific context of this scandal was widely cited, an equally significant question is just how did the mainstream Indian media deal with the Radia scandal once it was clear that the issue could no longer be ignored?
From an analysis of the subsequent reporting, it would seem that although mainstream news organizations did eventually acknowledge both the existence of the scandal as well as the role of social media users in drawing their attention to it, their coverage nevertheless continued to be deeply limited in scope. Media outlets made little attempt to explain the decision-making process underlying their initial lack of coverage, beyond the standard defense that they could not verify the ‘authenticity’ of the tapes. Nor did they comment even in general terms on what steps they had taken to do so. While it could have been argued that they had defensible editorial reasons for not carrying the story, they made no effort to articulate these or to explain how they dealt with whistleblowers or anonymous information generally. Similarly, there was little substantive discussion by media organizations regarding the ethical guidelines by which their employees were expected to abide, or how the Radia case might cause them to reflect on the relationships between journalists and sources. The Hindustan Times, whose columnist, Vir Sanghvi, was involved in some of the most troubling exchanges, sought to distance itself from the scandal by issuing a statement that Sanghvi alone was responsible for the content of his column. Most other outlets whose journalists were heard on the tapes, simply remained silent. And even when media organizations did address the issue directly, as for instance in the single show aired by NDTV, in which Barkha Dutt was questioned by a panel of editors, the show began with a declaration that the channel ‘rejected’ the allegations against Dutt.
In fact, in the handful of televised discussions that took place, while some journalists certainly sought to question the account given by those caught on the Radia tapes, others (including some anchors) tried to defend the journalists and make the case that conversations between lobbyists and journalists represented ‘routine’ exercises in information gathering and could not be automatically viewed as ‘suspect’. They also said that there was no proof that the journalists on the tapes had actually ‘done’ any of the things that they had promised Radia, or that they had personally benefitted financially from their relationship with the lobbyist in question. Arguing that the taped conversations did not reveal the existence of a quid pro quo, they made the case that Open and Outlook had been unfair to the journalists on the Radia tapes by not giving them a chance to respond to the charges before publishing the story.
There were also calls for the need to avoid ‘sensationalism’ and ‘hype’, the otherwise stable markers of Indian television coverage, and expressions of concern about the violation of the privacy of those heard on the tapes, but virtually no references to the need for a deeper investigation into the story. Moreover, both the print and electronic coverage that focused specifically on the journalists implicated in the Radia scandal was hardly sustained and was soon subsumed by a larger narrative that examined the rapid and meteoric rise of Niira Radia as India’s leading lobbyist, as well as her connections with some of India’s leading business leaders and politicians, with the focus on the journalists and their role in the scandal becoming marginal.
In fact, virtually all the other senior journalists (other than Sanghvi) implicated in the scandal continue to retain their positions. Even the release of a parliamentary committee report, which contained testimony from a senior journalist conceding that the conversations he and others had engaged in with Radia were ‘unprofessional’, did not seem to revive the discussion about journalistic norms and ethics in the Indian context.
Indeed, it would seem that the entire coverage of the Radia incident was framed in episodic, rather than thematic terms. Whether this resulted from the widely recognized media tendency to define ‘news’ as an ‘event’, or a desire to avoid further embarrassment, or, perhaps, some combination of both of these, Indian news organizations, for the most part, failed to examine the Radia scandal in relation to deeper structural issues within Indian journalism that merited deeper investigation – a point frequently made by the members of the country’s Twitterverse. There were, for instance, no attempts to contextualize the story in relation to the ‘marketized’ nature of Indian news media, the declining trust of Indian audiences in the news media as indicated by various surveys, including the Edelman Trust Barometer, or the increasingly blurred relationships between politicians, business interests and media organizations that it revealed.
Yet, such limitations in coverage, although disappointing, are hardly surprising, given the Indian press’s inadequate coverage of issues ranging from ‘paid news’ and ‘advertorials’ to growing media consolidation and the emergence of editor-owners who oversee both the editorial and business sides of media entities – all of which have significant implications for Indian journalism as well as democracy. In one of the more recent examples of this trend, industrial magnate Mukesh Ambani’s move to purchase a stake in TV18 Broadcast Ltd has been framed primarily as a ‘business story’, with almost no focus on the larger issue of what a stake in a media company by India’s largest industrial conglomerate, which owns two of India’s leading business news channels, might mean for journalism, particularly given the potential for conflicts of interest between the channels and a major investor in their parent company.
Indeed, one could argue that the Radia scandal notwithstanding, a tradition of media criticism continues to remain underdeveloped in the Indian context. As a result, while a social media platform like Twitter can undoubtedly highlight an issue and play an agenda-setting role in relation to mainstream news outlets, its ability to impact their longstanding patterns is by no means a given. Consequently, even as this case offers insights into the role a platform such as Twitter can play as a watch-dog, it also points to the fact that however powerful and potentially disruptive technologies may be, they do not ‘determine’ social practice, which, instead, remains contingent on the complex interplay of varied ‘structural’ factors and influences. In the case of India, these clearly include the absence of a culture of transparency and media accountability.