Whenever a political turn or event happens who do our reporters run to
most? You guessed it – Digvijaya Singh.
And what does he offer them? Nothing but filthy utterances against others and
mindless statements that aren’t even fact-checked. His own party is on record
stating that his statements are not “authorised”.
Yet, DS with no political position or responsibility and clearly over-the-hill,
is the Guru for most TV editors. The reporters seek his comments like
Stenographers and faithfully relay it. By evening, on many occasions, based on
his silly utterances, you will find DS doing a full-fledged interview with
Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai or Rahul Kanwal. It’s a well-planned and
organised routine. Did I just say ‘stenographers’? My apologies, someone else
has a different take about stenographers. We will get to that.
Let’s call this paragraph Chapter-
C for reference: Can you figure out who this guy is? “He was overjoyed… He
did his mandatory piece to the camera and rushed to office. Once his script was
done, he waited for a call from his Editor. No call came. For hours, video
editors sat with the material. He was not allowed inside the editing bay.
"I sat in a corner of the office like an outcast though I was the key
person in the investigation," he recalls. And then, all hell broke loose.
All he could hear was two words as an explanation for the volte-face:
‘inconclusive evidence’. The editor, who had not talked to him so far, asked if
he needed police protection. For what, he asked? "I felt like a stray dog," he says and then resigned from the
channel and took a bus home”. Sounds like an errand boy, doesn’t he? But he’s a
reporter. His channel made him feel like a stray dog as he says. The man could
well hold the key to one of the most infamous episodes in India’s political and
media history but his story was shut out because his channel and his boss
wanted to suppress the story.
Meet Amber Lyon, she has a
similar story. She’s not a journalist covering India and the story may not have
a direct relevance but her channel, CNN,
does have a stake in India. Let me just quote the story (edited excerpts) from LibertyBlitzkrieg:
The Amber Lyon story is just the latest in a series of articles that
expose the total Joseph Goebbels like censorship rampant in mainstream media
today… This is precisely why alternative media sites are taking off. They provide the only outlets left for genuine
journalism… Back in March 2011, CNN sent a four person team to Bahrain to cover
the Arab Spring. Once there, the crew
was the subject of extreme intimidation amongst other things, but they were
able to record some fantastic footage.
As Glenn Greenwald of the UK’s Guardian writes in his blockbuster:
In the segment, Lyon interviewed activists as they explicitly described
their torture at the hands of government forces, while family members recounted
their relatives’ abrupt disappearances…She spoke with government officials
justifying the imprisonment of activists. And the segment featured harrowing
video footage of regime forces shooting unarmed demonstrators, along with the
mass arrests of peaceful protesters.… Despite these accolades, and despite the
dangers their own journalists and their sources endured to produce it, CNN International (CNNi) never broadcast
the documentary. Even in the face of numerous inquiries and complaints
from their own employees inside CNN, it continued to refuse to broadcast the
program or even provide any explanation for the decision. To date, this
documentary has never aired on CNNi…. In March
2012, Lyon was laid off from CNN as part of an unrelated move by the
network to outsource its investigative documentaries. “At this point,” Lyon
said, “I look at those payments as dirty
money to stay silent. I got into journalism to expose, not help conceal,
wrongdoing, and I’m not willing to keep quiet about this any longer, even if it
means I’ll lose those payments.”
The ‘dirty money’ Lyon is referring to is the ‘severance package’ she got from CNN for getting rid of her. And
just like the reporter in Chapter-C she too must have felt like a stray dog.
Naturally, most editors have turned their ground reporters into stenographers
who take a dictation and transmit the sound-bites. Reporting that is fine but
there is no follow up from the studio staff or anchors to “verify the correctness and accuracy” of those sound-bites. Anything
that is sympathetic to the ruling party passes without any challenge. But hey,
that’s an insult to even stenographers as Glenn
Greenwald brilliantly explains in his article "Inept Stenographers":
Journalists' excuses for their bad behavior -- it's necessary to get
quotes -- are both fictitious and irrelevant…. A common criticism of
establishment journalists entails comparing them to stenographers, on the
ground that most of them do little more than mindlessly write down and
uncritically repeat what government officials say. But stenography is a noble
and important profession: they’re the court-licensed officers who, with
astonishing speed and accuracy, transcribe the statements of all witnesses,
lawyers and judges in judicial proceedings. If establishment journalists
were to replicate actual stenography, it would be an improvement on most of the
work they produce…. “And that
explains why establishment journalists provide this service to these political
officials: because they serve them as spokespeople, not report on them
adversarially”.
Think of the journalists who are embedded with a political party. You
can easily identify them on TV. They even interpret body language of ministers
or even Sonia Gandhi for you. You can also easily replace any party
spokesperson with these journalists. They have become the spokespeople. I agree
with Greenwald, Stenographers are far nobler. Crony media bosses treat some of
their own as stray dogs as the reporter in Chapter-C feels. Then there are
stray dogs elsewhere too. You will suddenly find them spinning strange
theories. Sometimes it will be in support of the ‘cronies’ who can’t tolerate
any criticism. Sometimes they will suddenly unleash a campaign for Priyanka Vadra as PM candidate. Oh do
remember, at times like these they will refer to her as ‘Priyanka Gandhi’ for effects. NYTimes itself admitted that MSM news is nothing but censored propaganda.
If that can happen in a true ‘free speech’ society, imagine what it would be in
India.
Gallup, the respected
research company, published a poll on reliability of TV and newspapers in July
2012. They carried out a survey to find out confidence of Americans in the
media. Not surprisingly, the confidence in TV news has fallen from 46% in the early 1990s to a low of 21% in 2012. Newspapers didn’t fare any
better. From a peak of 51% around
1978 the confidence has fallen to 25%
in 2012. This kind of decline would be true for India too except that there is
no one measuring it. There is no one acting as watchdog over our MSM either.
This gives them the license to run their propaganda and lies unhindered. Now
that’s where opportunity lies for people to open up alternatives. Nope, not for
more news but for the Truth.
So what about the guy in Chapter-C?
One has to wonder how much he was Censored. That "feel like a stray dog” is Sidhartha Gautam of CNN-IBN who quit
immediately after the Cash4Votes
sting that he was ordered to conduct. That Editor is none other than Rajdeep Sardesai. Why did
Gautam quit? Was there a severance package like with Amber Lyon of CNN, IBN’s
partner? Gautam, according to his new employers, gave a “rehearsed” testimony to the parliamentary committee on C4V. (IndiaToday August 5, 2011). The
2nd para that I called Chapter-C is also about Gautam from an India Today article of April 6,
2011. Stenographers are noble. Treating ground level reporters as stray dogs is
the tactic for some editors to run their well-oiled propaganda machinery. With
the ruling party in trouble again, another C4V is not too farfetched.
