Why would anyone want to be a journalist today? The road to Delhi is littered with the carcasses of editors. No one is hiring; the looming implementation of the Wage Board recommendations mean salaries may not go up this year. New endeavours are few and failures have been spectacular: journalists have been asked to leave without dignified severance pays.
On a broader plane, things are even worse. Has the credibility of the media ever been lower in this country? The term Paid News has come to be synonymous with Paid Media and Paid Journalists, a brush with which to insult us all. The profession did not cover itself with glory this election season – there was a time when we crawled when asked to walk; this time, we cheered when all we had to do was report. Triumph of the Will, apparently. What were you thinking?!
It is time to recognise that this is a moment of crisis in Indian journalism. As the administrative machinery takes a sharp turn to the Right, we have to realise that – as Mukul Kesavan puts it so articulately - the republic’s ‘common sense’ will shift rightwards. Do we have the ability, the resources, the courage and the intellectual grounding to understand and then explain it to our readers as it happens? Or will we take sides and enable the forces that seek to curtail the same freedoms our calling needs to survive?
Understand that we brought this upon ourselves. By not reporting enough on agriculture. By not being outraged at health departments. By not doing our homework on the power sector. By not talking to people, by not “going to the spot,” by not looking at data. By not picking up a book. We let ourselves be complacent and assumed we knew the world. We relied on briefings by people with vested interests. We Wikipedia-ed. Ignorant, fattened on junk tertiary information, we sat down on that couch and let ourselves be overwhelmed by an information avalanche.
Understand, that in a battle between public relations and journalism, the latter did not even turn up. To borrow a phrase from the former, we lacked “effective communicators,” people who could decode the election for their audience. We had reporters with no understanding of economics lauding the idea of development. We did not know our history enough to place what was happening on the ground in a certain context. We lacked journalists with an ideological mooring that would have helped them separate the chaff from wheat. Instead, we had reeds go up against the wind.
Despite – and maybe precisely because of - these abject failures, we must call out for new journalists. For we need people to stand up and articulate against the teaching of “ancient historical texts.” We need people who treat the Ministry of External Affairs as a discipline, not a beat. We need people who became journalists not only because they were conned into studying English Literature for graduation. We need youngsters opting for journalism over the civil services. The pay will keep us firmly in the middle class, but let’s continue to naively justify to ourselves that this was a higher calling; let’s continue to be arrogant that we would have succeeded in whatever we chose to do.
For we came into this to change the world. At some point, we took it down a notch to justify the daily grind to ourselves, but the stones on which we stepped to reach that ideal remain the same: the same things that gave us goosebumps as children, reading Where The Mind Is Without Fear and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Preamble to the Constitution of India and the American Declaration of Independence and Tryst With Destiny and I Have a Dream and The fight on the beaches and The Gettysburg Address. We cannot lose sight of the fact that we are what we are because we are the products of a free thinking society. Even if are not going to change the world, it is imperative on us to stand on the edges of free speech and defend encroachments. As those around us try to reduce us to monolithic identities, we need people who can come out in full expression of the multiple ones within. If we continue to be partisan, if we let ourselves be driven by hate rather than knowledge, there may not be a journalism to write home about tomorrow.
Understand, that the towers have fallen. There is nothing to look up to: our tallest news organisations and journalists are at their most vulnerable now. Instead, look within for the fire and integrity and look below to the Earth. The battle for the towers is something we won’t understand, anyway. Let’s take this fight to our street corners. Let’s pester them on facts, let’s engage them on the truth. That book we have been putting off, let’s read. Let’s poke a finger into those incidents and reports they hope will pass under the radar. Let’s place ourselves firmly in the corner of the underdog. Let’s reclaim journalism.
On a broader plane, things are even worse. Has the credibility of the media ever been lower in this country? The term Paid News has come to be synonymous with Paid Media and Paid Journalists, a brush with which to insult us all. The profession did not cover itself with glory this election season – there was a time when we crawled when asked to walk; this time, we cheered when all we had to do was report. Triumph of the Will, apparently. What were you thinking?!
It is time to recognise that this is a moment of crisis in Indian journalism. As the administrative machinery takes a sharp turn to the Right, we have to realise that – as Mukul Kesavan puts it so articulately - the republic’s ‘common sense’ will shift rightwards. Do we have the ability, the resources, the courage and the intellectual grounding to understand and then explain it to our readers as it happens? Or will we take sides and enable the forces that seek to curtail the same freedoms our calling needs to survive?
Understand that we brought this upon ourselves. By not reporting enough on agriculture. By not being outraged at health departments. By not doing our homework on the power sector. By not talking to people, by not “going to the spot,” by not looking at data. By not picking up a book. We let ourselves be complacent and assumed we knew the world. We relied on briefings by people with vested interests. We Wikipedia-ed. Ignorant, fattened on junk tertiary information, we sat down on that couch and let ourselves be overwhelmed by an information avalanche.
Understand, that in a battle between public relations and journalism, the latter did not even turn up. To borrow a phrase from the former, we lacked “effective communicators,” people who could decode the election for their audience. We had reporters with no understanding of economics lauding the idea of development. We did not know our history enough to place what was happening on the ground in a certain context. We lacked journalists with an ideological mooring that would have helped them separate the chaff from wheat. Instead, we had reeds go up against the wind.
Despite – and maybe precisely because of - these abject failures, we must call out for new journalists. For we need people to stand up and articulate against the teaching of “ancient historical texts.” We need people who treat the Ministry of External Affairs as a discipline, not a beat. We need people who became journalists not only because they were conned into studying English Literature for graduation. We need youngsters opting for journalism over the civil services. The pay will keep us firmly in the middle class, but let’s continue to naively justify to ourselves that this was a higher calling; let’s continue to be arrogant that we would have succeeded in whatever we chose to do.
For we came into this to change the world. At some point, we took it down a notch to justify the daily grind to ourselves, but the stones on which we stepped to reach that ideal remain the same: the same things that gave us goosebumps as children, reading Where The Mind Is Without Fear and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Preamble to the Constitution of India and the American Declaration of Independence and Tryst With Destiny and I Have a Dream and The fight on the beaches and The Gettysburg Address. We cannot lose sight of the fact that we are what we are because we are the products of a free thinking society. Even if are not going to change the world, it is imperative on us to stand on the edges of free speech and defend encroachments. As those around us try to reduce us to monolithic identities, we need people who can come out in full expression of the multiple ones within. If we continue to be partisan, if we let ourselves be driven by hate rather than knowledge, there may not be a journalism to write home about tomorrow.
Understand, that the towers have fallen. There is nothing to look up to: our tallest news organisations and journalists are at their most vulnerable now. Instead, look within for the fire and integrity and look below to the Earth. The battle for the towers is something we won’t understand, anyway. Let’s take this fight to our street corners. Let’s pester them on facts, let’s engage them on the truth. That book we have been putting off, let’s read. Let’s poke a finger into those incidents and reports they hope will pass under the radar. Let’s place ourselves firmly in the corner of the underdog. Let’s reclaim journalism.
