Media must question those in power
through the political system. In 2015, Mamata Banerjee chose to walk out of an interview because I raised the issue of the Saradha chit fund scam. Mamata at least agreed to an interview; Mayawati hasn’t given one in a decade so we still don¹t have answers to allegations of disproportionate assets. An imperious Jayalalithaa refused to step out of Fortress Poes Garden to meet the press, Naveen Patnaik follows a similar ‘no questions’ policy in Odisha, while in Kerala, Pinarayi Vijayan has never hidden his open hostility towards the media.
Sadly, rather than defend the media’s right to dissent and speak truth to power, there are many who choose to applaud an opaque, authoritarian leadership. It wasn’t always like this. When Indira Gandhi muzzled the media in the Emergency in the mid-1970s, those who stood up to her were celebrated. In the late 1980s, when Rajiv Gandhi introduced the Defamation Bill, the media rose in one voice to protest. In almost every instance of arbitrary use of state power against the media, the citizenry has been on our side. Not any longer: now, when a politician takes on the media, there is a sizeable audience which cheers from the sidelines, perhaps reflective of ideological cleavages in society.
Maybe we in the media also need to introspect as to why we have allowed this to happen to us. When sensation replaces sense on television news, when political alignments determine news priorities, when ownership patterns are non-transparent, then we make it that much easier for the netas and their hired armies to chastise us as ‘presstitutes’. Actually, we aren’t a ‘know-all’ media as Mr Rao suggests; maybe we are just a media which has lost its moral spine to fight back.
Earlier this month, the BBC, in the spirit of true democracy, had both the prime ministerial candidates in Britain face the general public with no choreographed questions. How many of our political leaders are willing to subject themselves to a similar no-holds-barred interrogation?