DOES INDIA NEED NEW REGULATION IN EDUCATION?

QUALITY CONTROL IN EDUCATION AND THE NEED FOR A
NEW REGULATORY MECHANISM
Shashidhar Nanjundaiah

This article, some important portions edited for space, appeared as an OpEd in The Indian Express and The New Indian Express, dated May 22, 2006: http://www.indianexpress.com/story/4867.html

The Planning Commission’s recent concept paper for the Eleventh Plan recommends to the government the establishment of a “grading system” for private, unaided educational institutions – institutions that it calls “education companies”. It is a relief to see government agencies talking a language about education that does not demean the commercial value embedded in its business. It is time the government also took notice of the ambiguity and lacunae in each of the committees and independent monitoring bodies it has created so far. While, as the Commission says, strict regulations are needed, the key issues to address are application of uniform standards, flexibility in translation of institutional vision and values, and ensuring implementation of the claimed vision and values.

Our private education system today is an evidence of the kind of diversity in quality we have in our country. If, on the one hand, this is in keeping with the principles of democracy, on the other, the situation is vintage Chaotic India. Because of government funding aid, a small percentage of the educational institutions can afford to offer good education at a reasonable cost. An increasingly large majority of the institutes – the “non-aided” ones – depend solely on student fees for sustenance, resource development and working capital. In effect, the government has created an inherent quota system for the rich. If these disparities have to be removed, and if the business of education has to be limited to serious players with objectives and means, here is the alternative: re-regulate.

A November 2005 “ruling” by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) resonates that thought. It summarily (and with not much explanation either) mandates, among other things, that no technical course can be started or even renewed without AICTE’s prior approval. On the surface, the AICTE’s notification (and subsequent “public notice” to aspiring students to warn them of dubious claims by institutions) makes sense.

However, there are at least two problems with the AICTE as it exists today: One, the AICTE supervises technical and management programmes alone. This inherent restriction leaves out a number of professional programmes such as mass communication and several newer ones that AICTE did not bring under its umbrella. There is no mechanism to regulate those programmes in a similar way. As a result, there has been a spurt in such programmes across the country. Many of these lack basic resources, infrastructure and faculty.

The second problem is that AICTE does not supervise non-affiliated programmes (i.e., non-university programmes). The government must clearly distinguish between a university affiliation and quality control. If the government decides to give more teeth for quality control to universities, that decision would be welcome so long as universities are provided with standardized criteria, resources and information to do so. Ideally, however, a centralized committee such as the AICTE has proved more effective in going beyond mountains of cumbersome paperwork and in translating to institutions the vision for compliance and even initiative. A centralized committee can also ensure uniform application of required standards across the country.

But at a deeper level, the government requires to radically rethink the existence of AICTE, and the key to this rethink is “effectiveness”. The AICTE places too much importance on the input, as opposed to the output. The number of computers in a lab is less important than the number of CEOs (or editors, or heads of organizations) that the institution is capable of producing. The vision of AICTE in that direction is restrictive, and indeed, this vision must be coupled with the institution’s own, in its depth of understanding of the needs and values of the marketplace which the graduating professional will enter. We need a regulator that can standardize and control quality, because we need institutions to be effective in their delivery of professionals who can carry our nation forward.

What we need today, therefore, is a regulatory-accrediting commission that can take care of a broader set of institutions as well as a broader set of criteria. Infrastructure and resources alone are not enough: Many of the AICTE-compliant institutions do not deliver as effectively as they are expected to. Last week, the Planning Commission recommended the establishment of a “grading authority” that would categorize institutions on the basis of what they offer on a variety of criteria, rather than continue with compliance with threshold criteria that institutions must meet. The Commission hopes to bring the issue up at an appropriate time with the government. The concept is similar to what the National Assessment and Accreditation Council, or NAAC, follows. NAAC is an independent body under the UGC, and grades institutions on seven criteria that it believes are essential to education: a) Curricular aspects, b) Teaching-learning-evaluation, c) Research, consultancy and extension, d) Infrastructure and resources, e) Student support and progression, f) Organization and management, and g) Healthy practices. At the moment, NAAC only assesses affiliated institutes and universities (although there have been inexplicable exceptions), and uses a methodology that is mostly mathematical, rather than qualitative. A number of changes are still warranted.

The government needs to proactively (and hastily) mandate a system for all, not just affiliated or aided, institutions. A combination of ensuring compliance and monitoring application of professed concepts and norms is the answer. The combination would ensure that minimum standards are followed, but not in a way that seals the approval with compliance of those standards alone. The method of “due diligence” inspects and approves existing standards and methods, typically for an inter-organizational collaboration. Applied to education for its compatibility with agreed educational goals, this process of validation would entail assessing how effectively an institution is translating its own professed philosophies, rather than follow the somewhat convenient standard of benchmarking. For example, the curricular structure of one institution may differ from another. But the key question that a regulatory authority must ask is: how is the institution able to deliver quality professionals stemming from these policies? The individual institutions then have the responsibility of presenting evidence how. Because it believes that educators can think for themselves, this process, through its flexibility, ensures a healthy mutual respect between regulators and educators.

Regulation must entail applicability of curricular content and methods of delivery in the industry, career counselling, inclusion of ethical practice as mandatory curricular input, student access to books, journals, computers and other resources as required for individual programmes, disability access, etc. Validation processes could stem from the professed policies of individual institutions. For example, an institute may claim to train its students for the industry, and in doing so, recruits faculty with high levels of industry experience. Rather than counting the number of doctorates on campus, the committee then proceeds to evaluate how the faculty accomplishes what they claim to.

Concurrent with due diligence are in-built checks and balances. For example, if an institute believes in keeping its students busy through the day in simulation of a workplace, then how is the balance maintained between classroom input and out-of-class input? For example, what daypart is spent on assimilating classroom learning through, say, assignments? Since students spend a major part of the day on campus, what resources are available to them outside the classroom? The mandate must go further for educational institutions in terms of transparency: Each institution must declare the grade in each of their public announcements, and in its literature and on its website. Once this is made the norm, aspiring students know where to apply. Evidently, this grade must be subject to periodic revision.

In a liberalized marketplace, education is business. (Big business, mostly!) Delivery of education must therefore be treated at par with delivery of products and services, with regulatory mechanisms in place that are like those for other industries. The products are the professionals that institutions churn out, and in order to control the quality of that output, it is necessary to control the quality of input (methods to ensure learning, quality of faculty, resources, and infrastructure). The sooner our government and its regulatory agencies recognize that education can be delivered in a professional way, the quicker will we witness efforts and processes at institutional levels to ensure effectiveness of education.

THE MTV-IZATION OF URBAN INDIAN YOUTH

THE MTV-IZATION OF URBAN INDIAN YOUTH:
A MULTICULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON MEDIA GLOCALIZATION

Shashidhar Nanjundaiah

This paper attempts to apply the concept of multicultural communication to the context of post-liberalization India. The paper defines the concepts of culture, multiculturalism and multicultural communication from a perspective that has been discussed but not fully integrated into the scheme of studies on the subject: the idea that cultures, as a collective consciousness of meaning, are ever-expanding from the influence of other cultures. This growth (a term I prefer to “change,” which does not necessarily encompass expansion) ensues through the processes of 1) interpretation, 2) selective borrowing, and 3) internalization. It analyzes how Music Television (MTV) India has been a factor of influence on urban Indian youth. By interviewing a select group of young men and women from four large cities, the research finds that the Indian youth is at the stage of internalizing the elements of American culture through foreign media such as MTV India.

First, the paper synthesizes the definition of culture and popular culture through an analysis of available sociological and anthropological theories, borrowing from Ulf Hannerz the interpretive meaning of culture. Second, it ties together research and discourse available on multiculturalism, and integrates these into a meaning definition of multiculturalism. Third, it applies these definitions to multicultural communication and analyzes how media messages from a foreign culture impact a culture through the diachronic and progressive processes of interpretation, selective borrowing and internalization (mentioned above). The paper follows a discourse pattern in its analysis, rather than the empirical, since the theoretical synthesis is the key here. The critical approach in the paper allows for some theory-forming, and the paper proposes a model whereby culture impacts another in three stages: individual, group, and cultural.

Culture and popular culture in the new world. Culture may be seen as a set of rituals of socialization based on commonality. These constantly changing rituals and common mindsets drive culture to interact, sift, adapt and borrow from outside the culture. The latest catalyst of change has been the media.

Popular culture has been described as a homogenizing force, “compromising a whole set of processes in social life” (Kaarsholm & James, 2000). In the context of several African cultures, for example, popular culture practitioners have “merged into a kind of syncretic blend the mainly oral ‘traditional’ cultures thought of as deriving from the precolonial past and the mainly written élite cultures of the emerging middle classes” (ibid.). Indeed, as Kaarsholm & James (2000) argue, although the media are “central to the definition of popular culture,” the fact that “access to mass media products and discourses is so unevenly distributed means that their impact can never be uniform or hegemonic.”

Postmodern critical theorists have lamented the advent of foreign culture in “native” cultures. Scholars of “reflexive modernism,” such as Beck, et al. (1994) and Tismaneanu (1998) have traced how popular resistance to globalization in these neo-democratic nations has spurred a new sense of nationalism. Several of the studies on Eastern Europe have described the cultural change there from a hybridization perspective (e.g., Nederveen Pieterse, 1995). A few take a nationalism angle (e.g., Tismaneanu, 1998). The dualism of homogeneity/heterogeneity that the new globalized economy has precipitated (Robertson, 1995) should be of particular interest here, although the dynamic interrelationship between homogeneity and heterogeneity in a society needs to be underscored. This dialectic between homogeneity and heterogeneity is termed as Glocalization.

Urban cultural resilience. The above general and encompassing definition is particularly applicable in Indian city cultures. (We shall contain ourselves to urban culture—although, clearly, a similar definition may easily apply to India’s village folk.) While many scholars treat popular culture as semantically similar to the erstwhile “folk culture,” in many ways, popular culture may be linked to urbanity. Primarily, it is in the urban centres that culture—whether as the arts or as a way of life—has endured in all its layers (Featherstone, 1991, p. 95). Secondly, because of their cosmopolitan nature, cities have been preservers of traditional arts as well (e.g., Bhabha, 1994). Thirdly, and most relevantly, cities have been the most receptive to outside cultures, arguably because of their easier accessibility by outside influences. This multicultural meaning to urban culture is important because this paper attempts to show that cultural practice may be seen as roles that people adopt in various situations.

It is a foregone conclusion that culture is susceptible to influence from outside forces, although the idea is not always welcome in both political as well as scholarly circles. The idea that satellite television is an “invasion from the sky” (Sahay, 1993) holds the essential claim that outside cultures corrupt native ones. Tomlinson (1991), in a deconstruction of cultural imperialism, recognizes four factors embedded in the concept: 1) media imperialism, 2) cultural imperialism and the discourse of nationality, 3) the discourse of the culture of capitalism, and 4) the discourse of modernity, development and cultural fate. Postmodern scholars and popular culturalists see cultural imperialism as restrictive. van Elteren (1998) argues that cultural imperialists have largely ignored the effects of “cultural accommodation,” the continual process of a culture’s borrowing and internalization of elements from other cultures. He contends that cultural imperialism is “insensitive to the process of accommodation taking place, unable to account for the intricate transformation of values and symbols when they appear in a different cultural context.”

The psychogenetic approach, too, contrasts with the notion of cultural imperialism. Featherstone (1995) maintains that rather than looking at the cultural process as a mode of consumption as several critical theorists do, it is possible to view the phenomenon from a “psychogenetic” perspective. This approach argues that individuals have innate cultural “demands” which precede the “supply” of cultural material.

The preceding arguments suggest that as an approach to transnational communication, cultural imperialism has underrated or ignored cultural resilience. Voluntary borrowing and internalizing elements from another culture presented through the media in such a case would present an especially hard-to-explain problem. Cultural imperialism also fails to explain how, despite so many invasions and large-scale migrations, cultures have not been wiped out. The process of selective borrowing and internalization, therefore, may well have played a part in cultures’ survival itself.

Two examples of this phenomenon are the impact of economic globalization on people’s eating habits and musical tastes. Noodles have become a commonly eaten breakfast diet among urban Indians. Lockard (1996) describes how Malaysian popular music has expanded from folk before World War II to a blend of Chinese, Indian, Western and Malay styles. Such reception, although varied in degree among different cultures, is possible only with popular approval and willingness to expand—rather than change. The process of globalization itself is witness to this process. Nation after nation has taught media and other corporations to customize or perish. After the 1993 General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) summit, the United States strongly resented European Union’s (EU) policy of filtering American cultural entry into the continent. America’s argument was that culture, like any other product, is a consumable. This tug-of-war of culture’s ownership raises the interesting and pervasive practice of cultural protectionism, or even “internal imperialism” (Nanjundaiah, 1995).

Popular culture as flow of meaning. Central to the argument that popular culture is dynamic, and to a redefinition of multiculturalism, is the view of culture as flow of meaning between the participants of a culture. Stemming from Clifford Geertz’s idea that culture is basically a set of meanings, the Swedish scholar Ulf Hannerz treats the nature of culture as primarily a collective matter: internalized meanings that are made public and thus shared and relayed:

“To study culture is to study ideas, experiences, feelings, as well as the external forms that such internalities take as they are made public, available to the senses and thus truly social” (Hannerz, 1992, p. 3).

This “meaning” or “ritual” definition (as opposed to the “message” or “transmission” definition) assumes control in the hands of the receiver of cultural communication. It also helps the student of multicultural communication better understand the cyclical, and hence dynamic, nature of cultures:

“The cultural flow … consists of the externalizations of meaning which individuals produce through arrangements of overt forms, and the interpretations which individuals make of such displays—those of others as well as their own … I find the flow metaphor useful—for one thing, it captures one of the paradoxes of culture … ‘you cannot step into the same river twice,’ for it is always moving, and only in this way does it achieve its durability” (ibid., p. 4, emphasis added).

Hannerz lists three dimensions of culture in its complex form: 1) ideas and modes of thought, 2) forms of externalizations and 3) social distribution, i.e., the distribution of cultural meanings in society, and the relationships between the meanings and the receiving culture.

Glocalization, hybridization and multiculturalism. Joel Khan (1997) traces the advent of “glocal” back to the sixteenth century. Though he does not use the neologism “glocal”, he is actually saying that “local”, if it ever existed, has long since surrendered to the dictates of the “global”, and now exists only as a “glocal” shadow of itself (Thornton, 2000). The term “Glocalization” has its roots in Japanese commercial strategy (Robertson, 1995, p. 28; Robertson, 1992b, p. 173; Featherstone, 1995, p. 118). It erases the dividing line between universalism and particularism, modernity and tradition. The resulting hybrid demythologizes locality as an independent sphere of values and undermines the classic Tonniesian antithesis of benign culture versus malign civilization (Robertson, 1995, p. 29).

There are varied views on how foreign cultures impact local cultures. Traditionalists argue that the entry of other cultures marks a loss of local culture, some others view it as an inevitable process of cultural hybridization. Ulrich Beck (1994) maintains that the result is “reflexive modernization,” a new, transformative reaction to Westernization, in which “progress can turn into self-destruction, in which one kind of modernization undercuts and charges another” (p. 2). Welsch (1994) says that this “ethnic consolidation” or “nationalism” has resulted in much violence and cultural backlash (pp. 201-3). Jonathan Friedman (1999), on the other hand, argues that “hybridity as an objectified concept eliminates the tension and the real contradictions that might be said to exist … in situations of social transformation” (p. 251).

The exact definition of multiculturalism has eluded many a scholar. As Cawelti (1996) says, multiculturalism was initially connected with powerful thrusts toward separatism among African Americans. Yet, Cawelti contends that as a complex and multifaceted concept today, it is difficult, if not impossible, to define multiculturalism in clear terms. In the more well-developed field of sociolinguistics, a distinction is made between “individual multilingualism” — the faculty within a person to learn several languages—and “communal multilingualism”—the existence of several linguistic communities within one society (Hudson, 1980, pp. 8-11). Even in the absence of such a clearly wedged-out distinction, multiculturalism has been viewed from two complementary frameworks: the social-structural view, and as a relationship between the individual and the culture(s). Some scholars (e.g., Bennett, 1995) have seen multiculturalism as a situation that “fosters cultural pluralism”. As a sociological, macro-level concept, culture has been defined by scholars like Franz Boas (1966) as a homogenizing force with several isomorphic points, an integrated whole (Boas, 1966, p. 257). Many American scholars have seen multiculturalism as an ideal society where different cultures co-exist in harmony.

Cultural protectionism in India. The 1991 economic liberalization in India brought with it the promise of showcasing many foreign cultures through products and media messages. Although Hollywood and Hong Kong movies have been present and selectively popular, television has been arguably the most powerful catalyst of cultural hybridity in that country. Particularly, music as a genre among channels heralded a new pattern among audiences. Examples of growth of hybridity in Indian popular, urban cultures may be seen in, for example, New Delhi’s discotheques, parties and gatherings, where it is common to find a blend of music. People dance to Bhangra (Punjabi folk) tunes by Daler Mehndi, “Indi-pop” numbers by Alisha Chinai and pop songs by Britney Spears alike. Massification of music hybidization has spread to far-flung rural areas. Hence, if we look at the popular reaction to hybridity among urban Indian youth, it is possible to extend Wittgenstein’s principle that the basic task of culture is “not to be conceived as an understanding of foreign cultures, but as an interaction with foreignness” (in Welsch, 1994, pp. 202-3). The process is not only desired by the receiving culture, but one that occurs as a corollary of globalization. It is possible from the above perspective, even warranted, to extend the definition of multicultural communication as a deliberate and voluntary processes of cultural borrowing.

We find that in India, on the one hand the government has permitted the entry of foreign culture through television and other sources of direct and indirect investment—economic and informational. But on the other hand, the government has been protectionist in some interesting ways to preserve its version of Indian culture—sometimes defined in static terms. While consolidation in Eastern Europe post-Communism entry of global culturalism was in the form of a groundswell (Welsch, 1994; Tismaneanu, 1998), in India’s case the reaction did not seem to stem as much from a popular protest as from an afterthought on the part of a right-wing government. With added pressure from the pro-Hindu Shiv Sena, one of the coalition partners of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, and from Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, one of the BJP’s philosophical foundations, the government banned the French television channel Fashion TV in 2000 for displaying semi-nude women. The Minister of Information and Broadcasting, Sushma Swaraj, instructed the channel to conform to Indian values before it could resume its telecast again.

MTV India: A brief profile. Music Television was established in the United States by Viacom in 1980 as the first all-music channel targeting ages 12 to 23. Soon, the genre and the channel became a rage among American youth and a perennial cause for complaint among the parents. In the 1990s, MTV expanded its profile to include up to 30-year-olds. In 1993, the cartoon series “Beavis and Butt-head” raised much controversy. Replete with risqué humour, the series claimed to be a spoof on youth culture—especially the methods, lingo and mannerisms of American teen-agers.

In the 1990s, MTV also expanded to other parts of the world, notably Asia. Television messages are articulators of a culture (Kaarsholm & James, 2000). When Music Television (MTV) started beaming its programming into India in 1994 on Star’s platform, it had a 90 percent foreign content proportion, but in 1998, it had undergone a change in programming strategy. Not only was music de-emphasized in favour of humour, but the content of Indian programming went up. Today, 70 percent of programming on MTV India—an entity that is separate from MTV Asia that is available across Southeast and East Asia—are Indian. In the process, MTV India has in part reflected Indian culture, and in part initiated new elements of culture. For example, it popularized the quality of laughing at ourselves—a popular American sitcom genre.

As a way to celebrate 50 years of Indian independence, the channel used the tricolour Indian flag as its logo, but the government intervened, mandated that it was offensive to the national flag, and threatened to sue Viacom. In September 1998, MTV India reverted to its original logo. Ironically, the MTV India website now uses the lotus, BJP’s official election symbol, as a major element in its logo design.

One of the most popular shows on MTV India is “Bakra,” a three-minute show revolving around a guest and the channel’s most popular anchor/video jockey, Cyrus Broacha. The anchor pokes fun at native Indian cultural elements, and since the sequences are shot on “candid camera,” the people involved are not always aware of the proceedings. In one of the episodes, the anchor is a waiter in a local restaurant (dhaba). The role-playing may be seen as a way of ridicule, or it may be viewed as a humorous reflection of society. The meanings that viewers assign to this humour are critical to whether the humour is considered insulting (because the channel is foreign) to their culture, or whether laughing at themselves is merely an extension of Indian humour itself.

Interviews. This researcher interviewed 72 young men and women from urban India to grasp how foreign culture has impacted them, what foreign television means to them.

Responses indicated that whether or not the respondent borrowed and internalized an element of the culture depended on whether they thought an element was worthy of borrowing and internalization. For example, in response to the question, “Do you find content on MTV India offensive to your culture?” and a related question, “Is the humour on MTV sensitive to Indian culture?” one respondent wrote, “I find the programme ‘MTV Bakra’ a little too insinuating and totally unbecoming of a music channel like MTV … to a certain extent, … programs like [MTV] Bakra [could] be a little less pushy.” This respondent marked that Western music was the element of foreign culture that impacted him the most. Another respondent said that “our culture is rapidly changing anyway, like cultures all over the world … change is inevitable, and [a foreign culture] can’t influence beyond a point.” Another response to the latter question was “… [Our culture and MTV] reflect and influence … each other … [MTV is] following what the entire society is doing.”

In a response to the question, “Do you feel MTV gives you a moral license to at out your dreams?” one interviewee wrote, “No, [but] it does open your mind to certain realities … [I]t could never influence me [enough] to break away the parameters fixed in my mind and act out my dreams …” Another respondent said, “No! Morality is an individual trait, and cannot be dictated by any TV channel …”

Overwhelmingly, respondents felt that hybridization does not affect their culture adversely. Only one respondent felt that “patriotic songs should be kept in their original form, tune and presentation.” One of the stronger responses that argued against it said, “Let there be room for improvisation. Let everyone sing the tunes … that will only happen when it appeals to all [listeners].”

An interpretive model for multiculturalism. Just as it is impossible for two individuals to be exactly alike in habits and practices, it is extremely unlikely that two families should follow exactly the same cultural patterns. Therefore, to that extent, each individual and each family adopt different aspects of the same culture that they belong to. This pattern is similar to cultures as well. Hence, meanings are interpreted uniquely from messages at individual, group or cultural levels. The same message may hold different sets of meanings to an individual, a family, and culture. This variance in interpretation may be attributed to layering of information, from the “lowest common level” (LCL) level to the “highest common level” (HCL) level. This is illustrated through the patterns of listening to music. At an individual level, a person may listen to a range of music that is wide. At a family level, the range may consist of only music that is acceptable to all (dominant) members of the family. Similarly, at a cultural level, the common range becomes even narrower. At a multicultural level, it may be limited to “selective borrowing” (defined earlier) of musical numbers from another culture. In turn, this borrowing may vary from individual to cultural levels.

Therefore, the set of meanings assigned by individuals is, theoretically, the largest, and smallest at a multicultural level. Mapping this model onto media messages is perhaps among its most straightforward applications. In the case of Music Television, for example, it is easy to see how it works. From the profile of MTV India, we have seen that the channel repositioned itself to include more than 70 percent of indigenous programming in 1998. This broadening of meanings resulted in an increase of ratings.

It is possible to adopt the sociolinguistic concepts of multilingualism explained in the preceding section, to our study of multiculturalism, by synthesizing them with the concept of culture as flow of meaning, and propose a model:

In other words, there exists a common set of meanings in a culture. When a majority of individuals borrow similar meanings from another culture, what results is a multicultural communication process. It is evident, therefore, that individual sets of meanings are at the largest—or the most diffuse—“lowest common” level, whereas multicultural communication may be mapped onto the smallest—or at least the most restricted—“highest common” level. As more people internalize meanings from another culture’s messages, that is, as HCL grows in size, so does multiculturalism. Put in another way, a multicultural individual integrates all the levels (LCL through HCL) of meaning. This process of multiculturalism, or, more precisely, multicultural communication, is therefore galvanized by messages from another culture and how, in turn, they are adapted to suit the receiving culture.

Stemming from the foregoing arguments, multicultural communication may be defined as the highest common set of meanings that individuals, groups and cultures selectively derive from elements of another culture.

Conclusion. This paper has argued against the concept of globalization as uniformization or a centrifugal phenomenon. It has contended that glocalization is more of a process of cultural choice. Returning to the “meanings” view of multicultural communication, it must be remembered that in multicultural communication, the receiver rather than the sender of messages is vital. In time, as the adopted culture loses the “otherness” about the borrowed elements of another culture, the boundaries of the culture expand to accommodate those elements as its own. Critics of postmodernism, of course, argue that the wearing out of “otherness” may precipitate in a return to traditional values. Featherstone (ibid.) says, “an increased familiarity with ‘the other’ … may result in a retreat from the threat of cultural disorder into the security of ethnicity, traditionalism or fundamentalism” (p. 91). In a post-postmodern world, however, we are witnessing a synthesis. Because the adoption of cultural elements is voluntary, as I have argued, the sense of “nativeness” toward the foreign culture is a progressive process. Therefore, we can revisit multicultural communication from the receiver’s perspective and analyze the process of selective adoption of elements of the sender’s culture.


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DR. SPIN IN SHINING INDIA

Published in International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics (2005), 1(3), 314-319.

ABSTRACT
The “India Shining” campaign represents the biggest mediated political campaign in India until its time. This promotional campaign by the NDA coalition government of India in 2004 adopted and created a complementary and dialectical “articulation/silence” relationship between source and receiver. As this critique reveals, the eventual defeat of NDA in the national elections partly reflects the failure of the articulated messages to produce influential meanings, and the voters’ active reactions to the articulation based on comparisons between propaganda and reality.

DR. SPIN IN SHINING INDIA: ARTICULATION AND SILENCE, IMAGE AND REALITY IN THE 2004 POLITICAL CAMPAIGN

Although it has been widely debated in corporate and journalistic circles, the Indian government’s “India Shining” mediated election campaign of 2004 has not been evaluated for the relationship between the mediated messages in the campaign and human feedback. Simply put, why did it fail?


Features of the campaign

The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government commissioned the $22 million India Shining campaign in 2003 to Grey Worldwide, one of the world’s largest advertising agencies. The campaign ran from February 2004 until two days before the national elections in May. Although it was strategically timed before the national elections in May 2004, its main proclaimed agenda was to create a “feel-good factor” about the country among Indian businesses and people at large.

The strategy was to spread persuasive messages through all strata of the society through a media mix of newspapers, magazines and news television. Newspapers, news channels and news portals later picked up the term “India Shining” and used it in various relevant and irrelevant contexts of news items — consciously or unconsciously either endorsing or criticizing the campaign. The ads resembled any well-made campaign for a product or service. Reflecting energy, sparkling health and contentment, the campaign’s advertisements could easily be mistaken for promotions for health food: Images of a class full of eager children who have all the answers to the teacher’s questions, an old Kashmiri man who smiles at his just-plucked lotus buds, a woman playing cricket with her children and their friends in the backyard. The effort was to accomplish maximum possible reach, and to universalize even local issues. The campaign aspired to convey a positive reality, reflected in the ad’s sparkle of hopeful, simple yet meaningful faces content with their world —diverse yet unified. Implied is the relationship between the government as a platform for achieving dreams, and aspirant individuals across the country.

Support and criticism

Many columnists were all praise for the campaign and saw it as a clear image of reality. One Rediff-Online columnist noted euphorically: “Atal Bihari Vajpayee's most enduring achievement is that he has brought laughter and hope back into the life of India. The sentiment is not universal but it is the dominant theme in a diverse country. The media is merely mirroring this age of happiness” (Dasgupta, 2003). Critics of the campaign hinted the ad campaign was propaganda. A week before elections, critical left-wingers commented: “The slick advertising of the ‘India Shining’ campaign cannot hide the fact that the deepening social divide between rich and poor will have explosive political consequences” (Zora & Woreck, 2004). Former Indian Prime Minister (Indian National Congress, the longtime ruling party), the late P.V. Narasimha Rao, declared that “If you don’t have an ideology or a programme to match [a campaign], you will have to resort to hype before polls” (NDTV, May 12, 2004).

Grey’s billing to the government was nearly one percent of the overall advertising expenditures in India (Singh, 2004). Never before had a government in India used the media so aggressively to its political advantage; never had a mediated political campaign of this magnitude been professionally handled. While there had been several smaller campaigns in the past, handled mostly by in-house communication experts or by small media buying agencies, officially, there had never been a mediated political campaign of this magnitude.

In July 2004, Grey’s South Asia chairman admitted, “I think we [would be] foolish to believe that in a country where there are crores and crores [tens of millions] of illiterate people that an advertising campaign can make or break a government … [But] did the people notice the communication? The answer is yes” (Singh, 2004).

Political dynamics

The government started its campaign with an ideology which it set out to achieve in order to satisfy the volcanic (right-wing) hardliners. Having drawn a circle of pro-Hindu ideology, the government was anxious to propagate the economic gains during its period, reflected in a stock market boom from international investments and a positive market sentiment. However, almost a third of the 1.2 billion people in India live below the poverty line and were presumably uninfluenced by the market boom in any perceptible way. The 13 percent Muslims were not impressed either. Propaganda often finds its nemesis in elections, and the power of the ballot box was a handy weapon for a nation that had witnessed horrors and dilemmas: the Gujarat massacre , the continuing controversy about Ayodhya (the seat of an ancient Muslim shrine that was torn down in 1992 by militant RSS-led Hindus), murders of Christian priests, “saffronization” of history books , and the rise of religious extremism in general. The governance occurred during a period that saw the maximum 5-year growth of disparity between the poor and rich in India. Big jobs were restricted to the urban, young upwardly mobile. Muslim and Christian minorities felt threatened by the pro-majority ruling government. There are more than 40 million unemployed people in India. Factors such as these could have hardly helped the India Shining campaign.

As a litmus test of voter maturity, the India Shining campaign resulted in the triumph of the people, which lay in their ability to recognize propaganda. That critical dialectic forms the crux of this paper’s argument. For the sake of simplicity, I will consider only the mediated part of the India Shining campaign.

The government alliance was led by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the political wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which has promoted Hindu nationalism since 1925. The BJP, the major party in the NDA coalition, is in many ways an antithesis to the Congress party, which ruled over India for 42 out of 48 years after India’s independence from the British in 1947. (The Congress lost the 1996 elections to the BJP-led alliance.) The BJP aligned itself with the hard-line Hindutva (“Spirit of Hinduism”) movement, and its leaders became known for making inflammatory remarks about minority religions. Before the general elections concluded in May 2004, most exit and opinion polls predicted a clear majority for the BJP and its possible allies:

TV channels’ predictions
BJP & allies: 263-275 (Star News); 263-278 (Sahara Samay); 263-275 (Zee News-Taleem); 249 (TV Today)

Congress & allies : 174-186 (Star News); 171-181 (Sahara Samay); 174-186 (Zee News-Taleem); 191 (TV Today)


However, exit polls conducted by The Indian Express (IE) daily and New Delhi Television (NDTV) channel indicated that the NDA would fail to make the magical 260 mark – the minimum number of Members of Parliament hopefuls from that party required to avoid a hung Parliament (The Indian Express, May 11, 2004). They got closer to the truth than anyone else.

The articulation/silence dialectic

Stuart Hall (1988) and other scholars have contended that thought gains endorsement through discourse and articulation. Articulated thought survives and percolates. The India Shining campaign may be a perfect example of the power of articulation and more significantly, of silence (lack of articulation, deliberate or forced) in that silent voter action defeated the expected consequence of articulation. The campaign’s messages did not resonate with the average Indian, who then used the feedback mechanism — in this case, the right to vote the government out.

What were the dominant meanings embedded in the India Shining campaign? Advertisers have thrived on the psycho-centric presumption that buyer decisions are positively impacted by repeat (hence reinforcement and recall) value. The pattern of media use, therefore, could be a major catalyst in media influence. As a socializing agent, the media created what George Gerbner, the cultivation theory proponent, calls “mainstreaming” (Gerbner, et al, 1980). But despite the images created, it was voter behavior that finally undid the influential campaign that was effective in creating a “perception” . The inherent power of interpretation of the messages triumphed again when the campaign failed to achieve its goal — to reinforce a “feel good factor” about the nation’s buoyancy. As voters verified generalized images with personal realities, the India Shining campaign failed to accomplish that objective.

One of the main problems with the India Shining campaign was the ambivalence it created between source-as-government and source-as-political campaigner. Complexity arises from the campaign that targeted largely the news media. There was confusion between messages-as-information and messages-as-promotion. ‘The bills were paid by the Government of India … So why people have mistaken “India Shining” for [the] BJP, I have no idea’ (Singh, 2004). The perception by the public of any distinction between promotion as propaganda and promotion as public interest gets murkier with the attempts by spin doctors to blur the very difference between promotion and information.


Conclusion

If the India Shining campaign articulated to create an image, the reality that citizens experienced was by and large different from that image. The image emerged not from the world of Indian society but from the “other”, more urbane world of marketing and advertising, and was ultimately doomed to encounter, not dialogue (and therefore reinforcement), but silence and simple rejection.

The India Shining campaign seemed to be an attempt to replace the image of a scam-ridden, sulking, poverty-beleaguered nation with that of an economically stable, competitive nation where investment would rake in returns. I have attempted to explain the boomerang of the India Shining as a result in part of the articulation/silence phenomenon, but a study of what has changed post-India Shining would now be valuable because of the huge possibility of significant changes in media policies by the new government. Already, there are signs of a learning process. One year and several months later, it seems that the government that followed the NDA — the UPA, a coalition between the Indian National Congress and its allies — learned its lesson. The Congress’ election slogan, “Aam aadmi ke saath” (With the Common Man) resonates with UPA’s ongoing “Bharat Nirman” (Building India) project, taking asylum in the all-too-familiar shelter of political ambiguity.


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Talbott, S. (2004). Engaging India:Diplomacy, democracy, and the bomb. New Delhi, India: Penguin-Viking.

India Shining website (www.indiashining.com), accessed on July 23, 2004.

Zora, P. & Woreck, D. (2004). The BJP’s “India Shining” campaign: Myth and reality. www.wsws.org, accessed on August 8, 2005.

IS THERE REAL PUBLIC OPINION?

In India, where I live -- a country that prides itself on being a collective, rather than individualistic, society -- it is intriguing that there is a dearth of public movements based on rational and intelligent thinking. Recently, a seminar I attended on the partnerships between the media and modern democracy brought out interesting facets of popular reactions to the embedded issues. At the end of the two-day event, the audience was invited to forward recommendations. Among them was one that sounded the most intriguing to me, and triggered a small debate—one that was seconded and supported by a large percentage of the 100-odd people who had gathered, mostly young, urban people from various backgrounds. The recommendation was that the media should help create a positive image of India. The audience felt that our media indulge in portraying too many negative images of India, and that this critical projection would hamper our country’s economic and political prospects abroad.

The audience actually wanted the media to bring up images, not realities.

Over the past week, there were two major instances of communication patterns in our democracy (the Fanaa and The Da Vinci Code controversies). Both represent characteristically our reaction to arbitrariness. They are also striking by their contrast. But most interestingly, they are case studies in representations of image and reality. The question is, do people want to see or read the truth, or would they rather have image representations?

Modi and the BJP are trying to create an illusion of reality. The BJP has now started propagating that while the BJP has nothing against the film’s screening, it is the theatre owners who have shut out Fanaa. Using a clever “Third Person Effect” method, the BJP now claims that most people on the street want the ban. Had the BJP managed this stunt before the proclamation on banning the film, it would have indeed succeeded in public eyewash. But now let us hope that citizens find their voices above this silencing act.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting took a long, hard look at The Da Vinci Code decision before cleverly establishing a panel comprising Christian theologians and educationists to pronounce a verdict on its ban. Without doubt it was a master stroke, convincing conservatives who wanted the ban, as well as those who did not.

As Stuart Hall, the British communication scholar argues, it is the articulated thought that survives in society. Protests (to be polite) in a cultured city like Pune against a book on the life of Shivaji by a US scholar is indicative of the fact that a small but violently powerful propaganda can silence the majority. (How many protests have we seen so far against banning a film or a book?) Politicians and other communicators, usually via the media, have always attempted to create images in audiences’ minds. As media consumers mature in a choice-making environment, however, communicators had better be wary of the images they create. But in an increasingly localising media environment, audiences like their messages close to their own real to be meaningful.

If public opinion were to mould our policies, we must first ask ourselves which public we mean. We seem to believe that public opinion is the side of the coin that is voiced. We also need to ask ourselves whether by democracy we mean that major decisions must be taken with the consent of the people at large. That would not only be unrealistic—it would be hazardous for our general understanding of democracy. More hazardous will be our increasing dependency on the media to do our job.

The fall from this euphoric faith may at least partly explain why, in countries where media consumption has a reached a level of maturity, impressions of media audiences towards political communicators at an abysmal low. In the USA, journalists are ranked fourth from the bottom in credibility levels. (No prizes for guessing who figures in the last three.) Unlikely public representatives seem to draw much more attention and fear among policymakers than the public that they represent. Local democratic participation through public opinion has mostly been substituted with publicised opinion, as in the case of the Fanaa controversy. If the media’s endeavour has traditionally been earning public trust, consumers of the media must bear in mind the inherent and deliberate manipulations that ‘mediated truth’ is capable of.

CAN WE FLATTEN THE TEACHER-STUDENT HIERARCHY?

Information is history. Knowledge is the future.

It’s not just a turn of phrase. In real terms, information is to knowledge what data are to statistics. By itself, information does not yield anything (except unimaginatively set GK sections of competitive examinations, perhaps!). Besides, information is freely available today. Knowledge entails sifting that information to derive knowledge. That derivation is what we may term learning. An effective method to achieve this end at a higher level of education is research.

I am alluding to a concept of higher education which should entail independent learning. It is true that the “learning model” (as opposed to the passé “teaching model”) is the new catchphrase among educators all over the world, and yet, the interpretation of the term is often suspect. Independent learning can often be achieved outside of classroom education, but the kind of independence I am referring to here is as a constituent component of a mix of guided and individual thinking.

The Information Age has gifted us the power to be independent learners. With information at our fingertips and the technology of interactivity, e-learning has been promoted as the future of pedagogy. (The hyperbole must be excused, since technocrats often cannot help themselves.) Scholars like Dr. Kulandai Swamy have advocated the use of distance learning methods. Each of these methods points out to the fact the learner is now gaining more and more power — the power to use the information s/he has access to, mould it, hone it, develop it, implement it. Yet, does our educational environment provide us that platform?

When we learnt the alphabet, we practised it until we began applying it in all our communication. As we grew up, our education system assumed that as learners we would probably continue applying concepts into practice. At several levels, especially in humanities, social sciences and other such areas, we have largely failed to apply or innovate applications that emerge out of concepts. As a result, many of the applicable subjects, such as psychology, political science and literature, are not harnessed adequately in practice, in the face of a welter of opportunities that were created in the new industries — advertising, marketing, television content, news, etc.

Meanwhile, our obsession with technology and management thereof continues. In a developing country, construction of technical platforms is necessary. Regrettably, in this process, the so-called non-technical areas of study have been relegated to “non-application” subjects that are somehow irrelevant to the techno-world that we live in. Almost as a leveller, content providing has emerged as key to many electronic services such as instructional design and, of course, media. English and arts graduates are suddenly in demand, and even they are caught by surprise.

Slowly, but surely, we are developing a system of choice-based education. My prediction is that by 2010, with the emergence of needs for other areas engineering and technology-based subjects will no longer wield that hierarchical power that they have over the past 30-odd years of industrialization in our country. Since at last the pressures of employment will reduce for non-techies, career choice will be more and more on the basis of aptitude and interest. My hope is that this will be a first step towards the independence of learning which I alluded to earlier. Let us call this the Democratization of Learning.

This democratization will doubtless fuel a potential to create knowledge. No longer can teachers claim to be omniscient, since learning no longer entails mere transmission of information. Educational institutions must ensure the right platform for independence of thought and action by making information available readily. At some of the institutes here and increasingly in Western countries, coursework is made available in advance on a network, either an Intranet or over the Web, to postgraduate students.

By doing so, classrooms become not centres of one-way information dissemination but forums of discussion, thereby entailing the potential to move beyond information and creating new bodies of knowledge through application of information. A study I conducted recently used an informal comparison between a typical U.S. classroom at the postgraduate level and a typical Indian classroom, and revealed that two-way communication in a class greatly helps in individual and group learning process.

At the postgraduate level, most universities in Western countries use a circular class layout these days — a large table around which the faculty and students are seated. Since they typically do not admit more than 20-22 students in a class, university departments can afford to exploit this arrangement to several distinct advantages. A change towards this layout seems to be warranted in our higher education system because of the scope for a conceptual change in the way in-class communication is defined.

The table-chair layout offers the student a feeling of responsibility. The provision of a chair and a table is akin to a seminar hall, and has been observed to enhance a sense of accountability amongst students towards contributing to the subject under discussion — either through discussion or relevant, one-on-many conversations. Both teacher and student feel equally responsible to take the class forward. The evident and irritating phenomenon of “cross-talk”, where students indulge in private conversations while a class session is on, can be curbed. Cross-talk creates negative vibes in class, spreading the message that the class is not captivating enough. In a round-table format such indulgence is less likely, since the group is small and students face one another.

The round-table structure makes a student comfortable interacting with faculty and other students. The small, intimate atmosphere usually helps in breaking the ice with the faculty member and other students in a formal, yet open forum. It is this interaction, in fact, that many faculty members find lacking amongst students at higher learning levels. But often, the psychological barrier is the existence of a platform, standing-teacher-seated-students pattern. This sender-receiver model of communication has been frequently decried, since it denies a comfort zone between them. Both teacher and student find themselves duty-bound to be pigeonholed into talking and listening, respectively.

The layout helps the class in flattening communicative hierarchies between teacher and student. Traditionally, the society was divided into those who have information, and those who don’t. Today, in the age of freely available data, information is the least of our problems. Each of us, young or old, comes with a set of experiences and backgrounds. Therefore, such traditional hierarchies should no longer be valid. At a higher education level, therefore, students should expect, and be expected to, share information and use the class as a platform for better understanding of a subject, in order to further it.

These are important and, thankfully, unavoidable steps towards the democratization of education, but the harnessing of education, especially at higher levels of liberal arts pedagogy, is in the hands of learners of the future.

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.