Stenographers & Stray Dogs

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.

The Rajdeep Rehash

Just like Rahul Gandhi sees two Indias I believe there could also be two Rajdeep Sardesais. There is one Rajdeep who, in his privacy, is often in deep introspection and contemplation with great thoughts and the other on TV who often can’t string together a single coherent sentence without stuttering and stammering. The stuttering and stammering is not so much a speech handicap as it is the manner in which he handles or approaches issues. On 29^th July Rajdeep released his latest Friday blockbuster on his blog “When should a minister resign?” And then in the evening he decided it was to time to discuss Subramanian Swamy’s provocative article in DNA.

It’s a bit surprising that Rajdeep chose to discuss Swamy’s DNA article over two weeks after it was published. The reason? Some Harvard students and faculty members have petitioned for Swamy’s dismissal from Harvard University. Well, whatever else happens to Swamy at Harvard, it appears those petitioners are not quite aware of the First Amendment to the US constitution that guarantees free speech. Rajdeep is right in bringing up the issue on CNN-IBN but when he allows absolute trash to pass as expert opinion or analysis that is where is he is guilty of thoughtlessness and refuses to see idiocy when it happens right in front of him. Among the participants was Dipankar Gupta, supposedly a Sociologist,  and these were some statements he made to Rajdeep during the discussion on being asked if Swamy should be thrown out of Harvard:

“If anybody goes to teach summer school in Harvard he is obviously not top of the pops”! Well, for a sociologist that is supposed to be a hard argument against Swamy’s article I guess. I also assume Rajdeep and Dipankar aren’t aware that Swamy was in the Department of Economics at Harvard as a professor and the summer school teaching is the latter part of his career. Still, what that statement by Gupta has to do with the topic is a mystery. Rajdeep fails to read that. Gupta doesn’t stop there, he goes on to make another interesting observation: “Swamy has the right to his opinion but not the right to be published”! Can anyone explain that? And that too goes over Rajdeep’s head? Why? Because Dipankar Gupta is supposedly a “sociologist” with great skills at debate and those statements were his sound arguments against Swamy's article. We all get it!

And then Rajdeep Sardesai has the penchant for claiming “we exposed, we exposed, we exposed”! This, on the cash-for-votes scam. Anyone following events would know that CNN-IBN had actually suppressed the sting video which helped the UPA survive a no-confidence motion in July 2008. Now that the SC is hounding the Delhi police and the case is back in the news Rajdeep claims to have exposed the scam. Not only that he claims to have exposed 2G, CWG, Adarsh and so on. If this continues he would one day out-do Bollywood starlets in exposure.

That is the first Rajdeep. The second Rajdeep is one who thinks a lot more clearly when he retires to his privacy and is able to regain his presence of mind and think with greater clarity. Which could be the reason his blogs are so different from the personality on TV.

Still, his clarity of thought does not take away from the fact that his channel, and others too, do not possess adequate moral and ethical balance in their account to be lecturing politicians or common people. I decided to have some fun rewriting and rehashing his latest blog. So here goes: “When should a minister resign?” asks Rajdeep. (Quotes from his article are in blue)

Referring to the resignation of Shastri in 1956 owning moral responsibility for a rail accident, Rajdeep says: “That, of course, was a different age: a period when the notion of 'integrity' had genuine meaning, and was not the self-righteous proclamation it's been reduced to today.” How true! If back then there had been TV channels and they had captured something like the “Cash-for-votes” sting they wouldn’t have suppressed it. They would have put nation ahead of parochial considerations. Isn’t it funny to hear this guy talk about integrity?

The self-righteous lecture on moral science doesn’t end there, here’s more:

It is this growing public frustration with a tardy judicial process that has created the present environment in which a carnivorous media is playing, to quote a rather forlorn prime minister, "accuser, prosecutor and judge." The classic jurisprudential principle in which an accused was presumed to be innocent till proven guilty has been turned on its head. You are now guilty till you can prove your innocence. A television studio is now a cacophonous courtroom, and the news anchor (this columnist included) is often the ultimate judge. The result is that resignations can be forced if a sufficient amount of surround sound is created over a 'scam'.

You could take that para and put it in any article concerning the media. Well each time Rajdeep and his channel heap scorn on someone and carry out a media-lynch operation this would suggest he is a very different person on TV and an altogether different one when he introspects and writes his blog. Each time he sermonises – look inward, raise the standards of media and so on and even submits a meek confession by including himself in the crime. A sort of Dr.Heckle and Hype! Hitchcock would have loved this guy! And then he allows the likes of Dipankar Gupta to make the most stupid statements on his channel without countering it. That’s how you allow mindless lynching.

That done, he once again returns to his favourite principle : “Hammam mein sab nangein hain”, here he rephrases it for the netas:

The battle, in that sense, is now being fought in the peoples' court where perception matters more than legal niceties, a perception magnified by the 'sab neta chor hai' slogan. In normal times, an A Raja would not have had to step down on the basis of a CAG report. After all, CAG reports often 'indict' ministers and officials. But in the case of Raja, the report only confirmed the widespread suspicion of a deliberate misuse of the telecom ministry for personal benefit. Similarly, former CWG chief, Suresh Kalmadi was deemed guilty even before a chargesheet in the case because there was a general 'perception' that he had manipulated games contracts. By contrast, Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit stays on in office even after the Shunglu panel probing the Commonwealth Games scam indicted her government because she is 'perceived' to be an honest, hard working chief minister.

Here’s the truth: The biased media, including CNN-IBN, NDTV, Headlines Today chose not to make half the noise about Sheila Dikshit as they did about B. S. Yedyurappa. To their joy they also found a TV-hugging Lokayukta who simply loved frequent press conferences. This Lokayukta was discussing his report on mining even before actually releasing the report. I can't recollect Shunglu hugging and delighting the media with his reports. The public perception of media’s motive isn’t too hard to see as Rajdeep himself gets the feedback from various sources and responds through Twitter. The corrupt media is as brazen in promoting the cause of one party and a family as were Raja and Kalmadi in their actions.

Here’s some more:

The 'perception' factor in public life is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can be a rough check of the system, forcing normally brazen politicians to resign under the sheer weight of public opinion. A Yeddyurappa may seek a Nobel Prize for fighting illegal mining, but once a crusading Lok Ayukta has charged him with corruption, he loses credibility. An Ashok Chavan could argue that he was forced to quit as Maharashtra chief minister over the Adarsh housing scam even before an FIR could be filed in the case, but the emotional quotient attached to Kargil war widows made him a political liability.

Now how does this rehash sound like?:

The 'perception' factor in public life is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can be a rough check of the system, forcing normally brazen journalists to resign under the sheer weight of public opinion. A Barkha Dutt may seek a Nobel Prize for fighting imaginary communalists, but once a crusading Manu Joseph or Vinod Mehta has charged her with power-broking, she loses credibility. A Vir Sanghvi could argue that he was forced to quit as Hindustan Times ED over the Radiagate scam even before an FIR could be filed in the case, but the emotional quotient attached to paid news made him a media liability.

The words are exactly Rajdeep’s, I have just changed the name and causes. So how about applying it those who are peddling bias, untruths and covering up important news and issues? Not to forget, even employing fake tweets to back their own causes.

We aren’t done yet. Let’s take another para on this moral science sermon from Rajdeep and rehash it.

On the other hand, an uncontrolled war of words can lead to instant character assassination where lines get blurred between fact and allegation, truth and hype. Take the case of former union minister Shashi Tharoor. There was no legal charge against him, and yet, he was summarily removed on grounds of 'perceived' impropriety. That he had no real political base perhaps made him an even softer target. Contrast his situation with that of a Vilasrao Deshmukh who remains a cabinet minister even after having strictures passed against him in the Supreme Court. A Tharoor was 'dispensable'; a Deshmukh is a political heavyweight.

Here’s the rehash:

On the other hand, an uncontrolled war of words can lead to instant character assassination where lines get blurred between fact and allegation, truth and hype. Take the case of former CNN-IBN journalist Siddharth Gautam. There was no legal charge against him, and yet, he summarily quit on grounds of 'perceived' impropriety. That he had no real media-celebrity base perhaps made him an even softer target. Contrast his situation with that of a Rajdeep Sardesai who remains a Managing Editor even after suppressing the cash-for-votes video. A Gautam was 'dispensable'; a Sardesai is a celebrity heavyweight.

The story of the cash-for-votes sting and the subsequent events and suppression of the video by Rajdeep Sardesai is documented at India Today. I recommend reading it. The unfortunate experience of Siddharth Gautam, former CNN-IBN journalist involved in the sting op, is pretty well laid out in the article at India Today.

To his favourite line “Hammam mein…”, Rajdeep has now added another line “Sab neta chor hai”…. I have a suggestion of one more that he can add to his collection: “Muh me Ram, Bagal mein Churi”… Every once in a while Rajdeep’s conscience strikes, and trust me, I will be there to rehash it for him.

Politicians Need Not Fear The Media

If you were out on a vacation like me and came back to find things a bit different there is nothing to worry. It all remains the same and you are guaranteed a new scam any day. The ‘Cash for votes’ cable leaks by Wikileaks is now on channels everywhere. While all the channels are having a good time with the new story there is one channel that stands out – CNN-IBN. They still claim to be the first to have exposed the cash for votes scam in 2008. The sting-tapes they did not air on July 22, 2008.

As most people know now, CNN-IBN actually buried the video tapes of the sting operation they carried out. A truncated version was aired only much later. In between there was this drama of BJP MPs showing up suitcases with cash in the parliament.

“In this particular story, there were many loose ends that needed to be cross-checked, corroborated and investigated further before the story could be aired. As it transpired, even before we could complete the process of investigation, three BJP MPs made allegations in parliament of having been bribed and displayed cash in the House”.  That’s not a statement from the CBI or the ED. That was the statement in a post by Rajdeep Sardesai defending not airing the tapes. You can be forgiven for a moment for thinking CNN-IBN is an investigating agency and not a news channel. It is anybody’s guess why the tapes were not aired or what pressures came upon CNN-IBN to avoid the telecast.

Typically, politicians and other diplomats and spokespersons are on all the news channels at each others’ throats. One statement from Pranab Mukherjee stands out. He stated ‘cannot confirm or deny” the contents of Wikileaks. At least one thing is clear now. The leaked cables are far more reliable for facts and accuracy than the reports in our media. So it’s no more our media that exposes anyone, while they can’t help falling over each other in claiming credit for the expose or ‘impact’!

Suddenly, it’s not the media that our politicians have to fear anymore. It is the breed of politicians and diplomats making statements through classified channels that might scare them more, especially with Wikileaks doing what the media should have been doing. This could well be a trend and the future might see more sites like Wikileaks that expose the truth. As for our media I am laughing at their comic attempts to scavenge. I am tempted to tell them:  ‘go take a leak’!