The Indian media is getting bigger, fatter, richer, but is it getting any better? More importantly, does it have any possibility of getting better? These are evergreen questions. They have been asked before (recently by Martha Nussbaum) and will doubtless be asked again and again.
In the Columbia Journalism Review, Basharat Peer, a former rediff.com and Tehelka staffer and currently a fellow at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, weighs in with a scathing piece on the state of the media in India titled “Style over substance”.
And the ills he lists are all too familiar.
# The lack of space and resources for serious, well-researched long-form reportage
# The hollowness of the television bulletins with their anchors’ faux American accents
# The newspapers’ growing fixation with all things sexy, frivolous and glamourous
There aren’t too many to cover the grim suicides of farmers. But, says Peer, even the stuff that occupies the attention of Indian newspapers—the billionaires, the girls who win big at global pageants, the software success stories—they don’t do it well.
“It is no coincidence that foreign journalists produce much of the best journalism about the difficult issues facing India… Indian writers who are serious about doing in-depth journalism also must look to foreign venues to find a home for their work.”
Read the full article here: Style over substance
Cross-posted on sans serif
26 June 2007 at 6:15 pm
I wonder whats so illuminating abt this article , looks like there is a bodhi tree in the Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism which helped Mr Peer peer into the workings of indian journalism from there…
26 June 2007 at 6:40 pm
Since I didnt go to columbia, no one listens to me
26 June 2007 at 7:18 pm
“….looks like there is a bodhi tree in the Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism …” VERY FUNNY!! :) ( had my morning laughter fix)
Is it just me or any of you have observed – the News readers in India (especially the english news channels) seem to be constipated all the time.
26 June 2007 at 8:23 pm
Judging from Mr Vinay’s rather cynical response to virtually everything under the sun and the moon, it is probably a good thing that Basharat Peer’s prayer for indepth, detailed, long-form journalism has not been answered yet in the Indian media. Poor Mr Vinay will have to wade through it, and it seems that publishers seem to have correctly surmised that he and his ilk just don’t have the time or the inclination or the intellectual wherewithal to either read such pieces. All, it seems, they can do is come up with a pompous response that only underlines how full they are of themselves.
26 June 2007 at 11:07 pm
And now, Nikhil Moro’s comment eagerly awaited. This one’s right up your alley Mr.Moro. I’m sure you won’t pass up such a great opportunity to pontificate.
27 June 2007 at 12:47 am
I was reading the coverage of the recent Karnataka High Court ruling against all the schools that promised to have Kannada as the medium of instruction but were illegally using English.
Reading the coverage in the English media you would have thought that the government and the High Court were dragging Karnataka to the dark ages. Hardly any source pointed out that the schools were illegally conducting classes in English. All of them made it seem like the government had taken an arbitrary decision and was out to appease Kannada activists. Add to it the interviews of the affected students and their parents and you would think that the government was imported from some shining examples of bigotry in the neighbourhood.
How about sticking to the basics? Start with the facts. Append the “human interest” pieces to the end.
27 June 2007 at 1:01 am
Ole BP himself is tainted. C’mon he is from Tehelka of all rags! Sheesh!
27 June 2007 at 10:58 am
@ yashica , had difficulty in ‘wading’ thru ur comment , better to be a cynic than a pseudo intellectual
27 June 2007 at 11:50 am
There are many reasons why Indian journalism is shrinking. There aren’t as many talented and committed people getting into the profession as there were say some twenty years ago. The demand for journalists or people with writing and editing skills is far higher than what our journalism schools can supply. As a result, a number of people whose true calling is not journalism are getting into the profession. When DNA was launched in Mumbai two years ago, they hired desk hands the way call centers hire college grads. Over the years the culture in media organizations has changed too. There was a time when a reporter would think twice before putting his by line on a story. Nowadays they get bylines irrespective of the story’s worth. News papers are mere marketing machines. Journalists go fish for entertainment rather than information. The quality of journalism, in general, sucks. You don’t need a Bodhi tree to figure that out.
27 June 2007 at 12:12 pm
@G3S – You are correct about the coverage of school issue in english media.
The same goes for English media coverage of GoK’s decision to start English from first std. If you simply depended on ToI, DH, The Hindu and others, one would get the feeling that English was never taught in the govt schools!! These papers even published letters from readers that were really funny to read as most of the letter writers had no idea about the past policy of teaching english from 5th std.
28 June 2007 at 12:36 am
Great piece by Peer. It is a dilemma that most of us in journalism are well acquainted with. Though India has witnessed a media boom, that boom, has been inimical to the interests of serious journalism.
28 June 2007 at 3:39 am
Dear All,
I spent some time reading Peer’s piece. While he has warm words of praise for Islamic Utopia he conveniently fails to mention the plight of Kashmiri Pandits. Well I have news for you Peerless Peer! You want the media to be one-dimensional which is not surprising where you are coming from–I hope you will learn a lot when you return from NY and start writing on the ‘realism’ that is India. Tehelka was such a cheap shot at some gullible army types, it made even Goebels look like a saint the way it covered up for ‘secular’ netas.
28 June 2007 at 3:48 am
Contd… Peer is sooo sincere in his stories…he wanted to write about the uranium mine victims right? Then he makes a convenient excuse for the magazine’s editor and resources saying they lacked the means–this guy himself could have covered the story, regardless. But I suspect somehow the ‘template’ premise did not substantiate the reality on the ground! So Peer became queer and started proclaiming his greatness as to how given half a chance he can come up with stories…
28 June 2007 at 5:57 am
At the end of the day, the unvarnished fact remains: BP is a keyboard terrorist. I googled and found that he had no good words to say about Indian democracy. He treated the Parliament attack as some routine attack carried out by genuine ‘freedom fighters’ and we are applauding journos like these!!
28 June 2007 at 8:13 am
Dear RN: I hear you. Thanks for the feedback. Please continue to read me. :)
28 June 2007 at 10:26 am
Implicit in this entire article is the assumption that Indian media = national ENGLISH media.
I wonder what Mr. Peer has to say about the local non-Englsih media that continues to exist and thrive. Does he not count this as journalism simply because he can’t read and understand what is written. Nor has he even given a cursory mention to the regional television news channels that abound in India.
Just because he doesn’t keep a track of this large majority, he has chosen to draw his ill-judged conclusions by examining a reasonably accessible, but by no means totally representative section of the media.
28 June 2007 at 10:51 am
Alok,
Very nicely observed. Here we were going after the queer Peer and you have just exposed him for what he is–a Kashmir-Johnny-Come-Lately to the Secular Party! Oh dear! it is very crowded at the top secular pin head these days!
28 June 2007 at 8:51 pm
Alok has hit the nail on the head. The thriving mass of regional media is what we need to first look at while talking of the Indian media scene, for two reasons. a. the kind of stories they break is very often much better as they have their ears closer to the ground. b. the impact they have on the lives of ordinary indians is much more since they reach out to a much wider cross section of people. (never mind the unending coverage of the more mundane issues of crime, marriages, deaths etc.!)
while the national media has it’s own pressures on the defence and external affairs front, media in several states like TN, Bihar and Kashmir work under severe pressure. In several states like Karnataka and Maharshtra, the media is relatively much freer to write what they want, netas are comparitively more tolerant to criticism and thus the standards of journalism here in many ways is much better … there are lazy jurnos and fixers everywhere … Maybe Peer thought it unnecessary as his home town srinagar is particularly high on the number of fixers posing as journos.
Peer is a nice guy, but there are several flaws in his logic, though he has his age on his side to correct them … CSJ though has produced several greats like N Ram and more recently his daughter Vidya Ram … we wish Peer all the best and hope he folllows in their footsteps!
29 June 2007 at 4:23 pm
@bull, ‘…CSJ though has produced several greats like N Ram and more recently his daughter Vidya Ram…’ was this sarcasm or u meant it ????
30 June 2007 at 7:26 pm
well … maybe that was a bit too subtle!! ;-)
23 August 2007 at 4:03 pm
I doubt if we can be pessimistic. Journalism is today a vast canvas, much wider than what it ever. You have journalism on mobile phones too, not just newspapers. So, when we talk of Indian Journalism, we need to be much more focussed.
It is wrong to say there is no serious journalism around. Just walk into book stall, log into the net, if one can see serious journalism, it is only because he or she is blinded by the glare of non-serious journalism around.
Tell me, how many people — who crave for serious journalism — actually read the editorial pages (or weblinks)?
It is wrong to say that sexy pictures shouldn’t be published. Tell me, who doesn’t have a second look at such pix?
I don’t think, we can complain about Indian journalism. It’s robust and throbbing. There is such a wide variety which should make Indian media proud. Look at some of the science, history, archaeology, space articles carried by our newspapers. The sort of detail to which they go I don’t think one should have any complaints.
On farmers’ suicide, it’s only one side of the story of their deaths. Why they have landed in debt is never discussed. A lot of farmers have been extravagent with resources and never planned.