NO-SPIN ZONE:TRUTH-TELLING AND IDEOLOGY

The year 2002 witnessed a communal carnage in the western Indian state of Gujarat that stunned the world. The state government claimed that reportage of violence against minority Muslims spiralled the violence. A post-incident survey revealed that the public sentiment on both sides of the communal divide (Hindu and Muslim) uniformly reflects antipathy about what they called sensationalist reporting (Nanjundaiah, 2002). In the same report, reporters lamented the lack of proper training in riot and crisis journalism.

The Gujarat study is an eye-opener of the dire need for a) the media to consider new values arising from a new kind of independence of choice, and b) educators to take the lead in better defining the roles and responsibilities for future journalists.

Indian media policies are among the most liberal in the world—and yet in some ways among the most ambivalent. In a participatory democracy such as India where the practice of any occupation is a constitutional right (Venkateswaran, 1993, p. 26), there is a need for constant updating of existing laws and regulations, so that the legal guarantees, provisions and liberties match social, cultural, economic and technological developments. Yet such updates are mostly restricted to regulations on ownership and public morals, rather than on use of new applications and technologies, or codes for new roles and responsibilities.

Indeed, the real problem seems to be a lack of sight of the problem, and most governments are trying to brush it aside with a few ad hoc measures. Predictably, even as libertarian a media-nation as the USA and as participatory a democracy as Britain have been facing this predicament. A well-known case in point is the variance in reporting between American and British media over the same event in September 2001—the attack by terrorists on New York’s World Trade Centre. At that time, President George Bush had appealed to the media to exercise restraint in airing a taped version of Osama Bin Laden’s speech. Bush’s advisors feared that the tapes contained codes that might trigger terrorist attacks elsewhere. Both pro-establishment channels such as Fox, as well as every other channel that was less so, put the nation before their “rights”, and showed remarkable restraint. However, their efforts were somewhat thwarted when the same appeal by the British allies went unheeded, and the speech was freely available (Jukes, 2002). Perhaps because Britain was removed from the scene of action, the immediate impact of such reporting in Britain was hardly catastrophic—indeed, it is sometimes assumed to have added to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s political mileage.

Today’s mediaperson is stuck between responsibility toward “truth”, a k a freedom of speech, and responsibility toward a nation, or more broadly, human welfare. “Today’s”, because in the 21st century, s/he finds a dizzying array of new technology that simplifies dissemination of truth beyond all barriers. Such is the power and complexity of new-age media. Truth-telling and gatekeeping have been pitted against each other in an ideological way. But traditionally, technology itself barred news from reaching the audiences before it went through a screening process. Today, that difference is more functional than ideological, as live reporting becomes an enabler of a competitive edge, and as newspapers take on the responsibility to “expose” truth rather than tell it.

What should be the responsibility—and more so—the role of this decade’s journalist? What is the role of an educator in evolving an effective set of media responsibilities?[1]

ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITY
A “role” needs to be semantically differentiated from a “responsibility” in our context. One such distinction we can make is in the temporality of action. For example, the responsibility of a nation’s media, under the Social Responsibility model, would be “to assist in inculcating and transmitting ‘proper values’ “ (Price & Krug, 2000, p. 8). The role of media, under the same model, would be to participate in the democratic process of a nation by permitting a fair opportunity to each election candidate to broadcast his/her party’s agenda.

Another distinction is in the situationality. While responsibility is a mix of a set of duties and functions to be performed actively, a role is a more situational function toward the furtherance of a broader goal in what Price & King (2000) term an “enabling environment” (p. 13). Hence, the responsibility of accomplishing a goal is supported by the role in the process of accomplishing that goal. For example, while it is the media’s responsibility to inform its society and the world community about the events that matter, its role in a communal riot would be to report fairly, yet using the power of discretion. In that sense, the role of the media contributes to its overall responsibility.

The two terms also differ in their functionality; while a responsibility is one side of the freedom-responsibility coin, a role is a functional representation of that coin encompassing both freedom and responsibility. Responsibility may be a factor that is embedded in the definition of the media; a role is an adaptive function. Toward that end, therefore, a role is a positive contribution; a responsibility is to ensure the contribution is made.

THE MIXED MODEL
India’s tryst with the European Mixed Model in mediated communication was interrupted by that commercialisation. The Mixed Model, appropriately started for the British Broadcasting Service in England, defines the role of television in a nation’s communication policy. Yet, it can be, as it has been, mapped onto other media industries as well. The features of the Mixed Model include a) Public Service, giving room for diverse tastes, interests and subcultures of the nation, b) Monopoly, where the government licenses one corporation (private or publicly owned), c) National Scope, whereby national interests, national language and culture would be protected, d) Non-commercialism, reinforcing the socialistic thought that development would be hampered by search for profit.

Subsequent to the communicative impacts of the self-proclaimed function of the traditionally independent Indian print media, and with the taste of power through state-owned radio, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the 1960’s targeted television as an instrument of development. From 1959 until 1982, the development model was communicated successfully but not effectively. On the other hand, in 1982, when Minister of Information and Broadcasting Vasant Sathe announced the advent of colour television, and in 1984, when television went commercial, the scope of television grew exponentially.

The Press Council of India, which was born in 1966 through an Act of Parliament, purported to uphold standards of newspapers and news agencies, and ensure freedom of the press (MacBride Commission, 1982, p. 245). The Indian media system appears to have favoured the criteria method to influence journalistic roles and responsibilities, and hence media schools in India has conformed to a structured yet somewhat archaic definitions based on guiding principles recommended by the Press Council of India. Clayman & Reisner (1996) argue that gatekeeping, the main function of a journalist, should depend on considerations, not criteria, reinforcing a social-practices approach to determining the role of a journalist in pluralistic societies. It is arguable whether the Press Council recommendations have taken into account our socio-economic factors or whether they have toed the Western line, much as the Mixed Model.

NEW-AGE MEDIA
New-age media, which may be described as a media system emerging from an era of economic openness and technological power, have traced their own path of operation and future.

The operational patterns of new-age media may be summed up as follows:

a) They function and cater to a global or globalizing economy, and to a globalizing cultural world. This connotes that even though a news item may be local, it must have larger implications. For example, a bride-burning incident in rural North India may be framed as a social ill that international communities must take note of.
b) They function in a competitive, therefore commercial, environment. Each news channel, for example, is constantly on the vigil to be the fastest to deliver the news, and to reach the news location.
c) They promote the economic values of consumerism. The more obvious part of this pattern is that newspapers, news channels and news portals are driven by advertising revenues. The less evident part is that news stories are more “consumable-oriented” than ever before, constantly focusing on private enterprises, new products and services. Brand names are part of news now.
d) They define our framework of reality, setting the agenda of what constitutes news for the news-consumer differently from before. Although news channels purportedly operate 24 hours a day, their bulletins are typically 20-23 minutes long, and most news stories are repeated by rotation through the day. Even when stories are not repeated, they tend to be updates on the same issues as reported before, hence setting a narrow set of issues that viewers must receive. Newspapers present a wider range of topics.
e) They create innovative content and employ innovative methods of truth-telling in order to offer a differentiating factor over competitors. “News-as-entertainment” is a new mantra for both channels and newspapers. The new technique of seamlessly blending advertisements into news space is common in forerunners of this trend, such as The Times of India. News presentation is more aggressive, with catchy “on-air look”. News presenters expertly debate and analyse current issues.
f) The role of gatekeeping is much less pronounced in the era of live reporting. Reporters and news presenters are often projected as informed representatives of the public, passionately raising issues of public interest. Live reportage from the scene of action, rather than public trust, ensures credibility.
g) Competition and research are driving newspapers and news channels more and more toward localized coverage, thus deepening the amount of coverage penetration. “Cultural osmosis” has never been as effective before in India, where nationally broadcast news channels have enough time on air to show local stories.
h) Editorial policies and marketing goals work more in tandem with each other. Zee News’ 1999 editorial policy, on the lines of the BBC, prohibited the channel from obtaining title sponsorships for news bulletins, on the principle that advertisers should not be seen as endorsers (therefore influencers) of news. Today, its bulletins are replete with sponsors for headlines and various segments. The Times of India’s internal memo in 2003 clearly outlines the active role of a marketing representative in daily editorial meetings.

Kenneth Burke’s treatise on communication-as-strategy is especially relevant to new-age journalism. In many ways, these patterns would reflect the hypothesis that communication is a result of strategy. In a “humanitarian” model, the media assume new frameworks of operation, new issues emerge from what the media spotlight (Lule, 1997). If the Burkean analysis is applicable today, the new-age media must pay special attention to the interpretations they weave out for their audiences, and for policymakers.

This is perhaps a good time to revisit the Mixed Model, since a uniformly adopted post-liberalization policy paper has not emerged in India to examine new roles and responsibilities of the media, except in technological or regulatory terms. It is this ambiguity that has resulted, for better or worse, in various interpretations of journalistic roles and responsibilities.

Newspapers have traditionally positioned themselves on the basis of political ideologies. Therefore, there are “right-of-centre” newspapers and “left-of-centre” newspapers. Recently, The Times of India may have heralded the evolution of a more “democratic” newspaper model. Although this managerial policy is clearly governed by marketing, it is interesting that the effort by the news colossus has marked an ideological shift in the way newspapers have positioned themselves.

News channels on television, though, are still grappling with branding themselves on commercial lines, segmenting their markets through choice of perceived newsworthiness, both through choice of stories as well as through the semantic, structural and presenting styles. The positioning appears to be on the basis of the level of urbanity of the audience, apart from the basis of more accessible data such as language and socio-economic classification.

It is this kind of commercialism that calls for a more careful, yet practical, approach to media’s responsibility to the society, and their role in neo-capitalistic democracy. What are the new roles and responsibilities of our media, and how can the media educator help define these roles for the new-generation journalist? The predicament before an educator today, therefore, is in training budding mediapersons for the real world.

Scholars and media owners have hurried to define the functioning of new journalism variously, but the most widely favourite is one grounded in the philosophy, methodology and non-linearity of new technology (Grossman, 1994, Powell, 2000, Middleberg & Ross, 2000, Pavlik, 2001, et al). Nonetheless, the excitement of technological determinism has somewhat silenced the emergence of new definitions in a new capitalistic nation. This trend could result in technological dependence at least temporarily replacing the need for new values, and a critical look at revisiting media roles in the burgeoning media markets in India is warranted.

Which society does a new-age journalist serve? The distinction between role and responsibility is in no way unique to the media. If there is novelty it is in the recognition of a set of definitive and structured functions, in addition to the accepted ones. Yet it is critical to us in that it is those adaptive functions of the media that add up to the overall goals. This is where a tricky question arises. Whose goals? As a corollary to that question surfaces another more contemporary challenge: Who sets the jurisdictional boundaries for the media? In other words, is it possible for the media to adapt its role effectively to be responsible to a larger society, which we may call a global community?

Indeed, pioneers in the media have been taking experimental steps toward answering those very goals. Cable News Network (CNN) could not have gone international without consciously reengineering its definition of which society it serves—as opposed to which economy it reports to. Therefore, the answer could be lurking in the very factors that define globalization: unless an internationally available news (or even other) channel is responsible to its audiences around the world, the content and indeed, the channel itself, is unlikely to be accepted by those audiences. This thinking may have resulted in the fact that CNN International’s U.S.-focused content has diminished from 70 percent in 1996 to a mere 8 percent in 2003 (Business India, 2003, p. 8).

In the written codes, of course, the goals are purely social and developmental. The US system allows freedom of the press under what is symbolically the First Amendment of the Constitution. As early as in the 1940’s, the Hutchins Commission studied the criteria for assessment of press performance. The press, according to the study, could perform one or more of the following: a) provide a truthful, comprehensive and intelligent account of the day’s events in a context that gives them meaning, b) be a forum for the exchange of comment and criticism, therefore of public opinion, c) project a representative picture of the constituent groups in the society, i.e., reflect democratic plurality, d) present and clarify the goals and values of the society, i.e., be a spokesperson for the society it serves, and e) provide full access to the day’s intelligence (enable the right to information). In the United States, the media have adopted a system that may be best likened to the Libertarian Model, where the media serve as checks and balances of an accepted democratic system. The social responsibility is embedded in that apparatus.

As in the United States, there are no binding codes on the media operations in the Indian system; the democratic system allows for a fair amount of freedom to express (Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution), albeit with a set of “reasonable restrictions” (Article 19(2)) in the interest of national sovereignty, security, public order, friendly relations with neighbouring nations, decency or morality, plus incitement of offence.

GUJARAT AND THE "CNN EFFECT"
There are models and principles in which media roles and responsibilities are embedded. Many policy scholars agree that foreign media coverage, for example, has traditionally been governed by political policies (e.g., Lule, 1997). In other words, most media agencies serve the nations they belong to. This historical trend is the genesis of the entire debate surrounding the Indian government’s long-drawn reluctance to grant more autonomy and editorial powers to foreign media, as the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting fears that foreign players might exercise “slants” contradictory to the Government of India’s ideologies.

The embedded powers of the media are reinforced in a deterministic way in what is fast becoming a new buzzword—“the CNN Effect”. The term, according to Piers Robinson (2003), suggests that the impact of continuous coverage by major media of a crisis can cause a shift in policy toward intervention. Robinson’s longitudinal study, which covered several crises and conflicts that eventually involved the United States, reveals that the (delayed) air-power interventions in Bosnia in 1994 and 1995 revealed a "strong" CNN effect.

The CNN Effect may be seen in a more general connotation. Continuous coverage of the 2002 Gujarat carnage by Aaj Tak, Zee News and Star News led to public activism, and many scholars claim that it fuelled and helped spread and escalate the violence across Gujarat and other states.
The absence of an ideological precedent, therefore, can provide new arenas for the media to expose. Perhaps one of the most fascinating, albeit theoretical, cases in this regard is made on why new-age mediapersons are finding their bearings in truth-telling as they (or their editorial policies) see it, rather than as their policymakers or governments see it. Lule (1997) argues that the end of the Cold War led to a “vacuum of values”, created because of a lack of a clear ideological backdrop. The foreign editor of the New York Times, Bernard Gwertzman (1993), circulated a memo in 1993 which postulated the need for new thinking and a new set of values among news disseminators post-Cold War. While not delving into details of what these values should be, Gwertzman recognized the predicament that the new-age mediaperson would be confronted with.

This leads us to the argument that new-age media must often take the responsibility of distinguishing between truth-telling and ideological discourse. Indeed, this seems to be the new mantra of most news channels today. Take the tagline for Zee News, for example: Jaisi haqeeqat, waisi khabar—As the reality, so the news. Seemingly holding a defiant mirror to the society and policymakers in the wake of post-Gujarat criticism, news channels in India have created truths far beyond the imagination of pre-liberalization policymakers. Rising ratings for news are perhaps the closest endorsements to this trend.

TRUTH-TELLING AND RESPONSIBILITY.
Are the media seeking to take the responsibility of truth-telling, or are they seeking to take the freedom of truth-telling? This is perhaps a good time to start a discussion (and leave it at that for now) on what the role of good education could be in the “new-environment media”, and in particular, in the new framework that a journalist needs to operate within. McDevitt (2003) argues that argues that public journalism as a reform movement has failed to appreciate the complexity of professional autonomy and the occupational benefits it affords to practitioners. McDevitt describes how the dynamics of professional socialization predispose journalists to guardedly protect their independence. This independence is, according to several scholars, is a prerequisite for disseminating the truth. The question, is truth-telling an all-encompassing, all-overriding responsibility of the media, or is it an understated sense of freedom that the media seek to maintain for themselves?

Christians, Ferre and Fackler (1993) affirm that "under the notion that justice itself -- and not merely haphazard public enlightenment -- is a telos of the press, the news-media system stands under obligation to tell the stories that justice requires" (p. 93). Today, it seems that truth can be defined variously—with special help, of course, from aiding tools such as statistics, lensed visuals, etc. For example, the scholar Charles Berger (2001) laments that there is an increasing trend among news channels and newspapers of “making [crime and health] worse than it is” by using drama and manipulating the type of research graph shown.

It is perhaps to the advantage of the 21st-century mediaperson and media educator to distinguish between truth-telling as freedom of speech, and truth-telling as responsibility. Either way, however, the role of the media in serving public trust cannot be forgotten.

NEWS AS EDUCATOR.
Papa, et al (2000) argue that education through mediated entertainment has a major bearing on the learner’s parasocial interactions and understanding of the social world. As competition increasingly blurs the wall between news and entertainment, it may be argued that a news-learner is influenced, powerfully or weakly, by the learning processes through news. The problem, however, lies in the fact that while the learner in an entertainment situation structures his or her learning within the narrow and well-defined contextual reference frame, one in a news situation opens his or her mind to the expanse of news, believing, therefore, that the information thus obtained is all-pervasive and objective.

What is “new-age” about modern day media education? When in 1892 Joseph Pulitzer, who deserves to be called the father of media education, wanted to help Columbia University establish the world’s first journalism school, he sparked off a debate that persists even today.

Pulitzer’s dogged pursuit of journalism education met with much skepticism since journalism was seen as a craft, and nothing more. It was only in 1912, after Pulitzer’s death, did Columbia condescend to start a journalism school (it was not the first, however). Today, more than 40,000 media graduates or postgraduates receive their degrees each year; 83 percent of practising journalists in the United States have formal education in journalism (Woo, 2003). More than 80 percent of the journalists in India reported some formal media education (AMIC, 2002).

The role of the educator, by corollary of Pulitzer’s argument, was to further the availability, openness and independence of information. Pulitzer, in his groundbreaking article, “The College of Journalism”, published in 1904 in The North American Review, wrote:

“Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery, A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.”

The validity of both sides of his argument is striking even a century later. Stanford University’s visiting scholar William Woo (2003), in support of Pulitzer, advocates that journalism education should nurture the pursuit of independent presentation of news as a method of serving public trust. “The purpose of journalism is more than reporting and writing stories, though as with surgery, skill and competence are essential. Its purpose has to do with something more fundamental, which I think of as serving the public trust” (ibid). He analyses the post-World War II history of U.S. journalism education and concludes that “competitors offered not only new ways of getting information, they also gave the public different points of view. Fewer people could say, ‘I only know what I read in the papers.’ Public trust in journalism declined” (ibid.) How should we define “public trust” in 21st century India? Perhaps we could look at how U.S. journalism traced public trust over the past few decades of commercial competition. Arguably, a decade after liberalization of media ownership and as Rupert Murdoch battles it out with the government for editorial rights to his news channel in India, the way audiences perceive journalism is in a similar flux. Whether growing scepticism about our media could lead to a more mature audience is unclear now, although in the U.S. it may have resulted in audiences who can make informed choices.

REFERENCES

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[1] Keeping in mind the surfacing of converging media, this paper does not distinguish between journalists in different media. The roles that emerge endogenously out of the new-age media are assumed to be as convergent.