Targeting the Mind

- Dasu Krishnamoorty

Fierce opposition erupted again to the efforts of a small group of newspapers to pressure the government to permit foreign direct investment (FDI) in the print media sector. Leading editors, publishers and journalists told the Constitution Review Commission (CRC) last week that the government should not expose the Indian print media to control by foreigners. At the CRC meeting were present Kuldip Nayar, Inder Malhotra, Prem Shankar Jha, Dileep Padgaonkar, Ajit Bhattacharjee, Mammen Mathew, Alok Mehta, Prabhas Joshi, Coomi Kapoor, and attorney general Soli Sorabjee. For good measure, Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu also joined the elite band taking exception to the entry of FDI.

This is a notice to Parliament, which has just begun its winter session, to recognise the reality behind the sophisticated and camouflaged face of foreign media adventurism, waiting in the wings for a signal from its collaborators in this country to ambush the domestic media and set up hegemony over the minds of the Indian people. The parliamentary standing committee on IT is likely to finalise anytime now its report on the entry of foreign media interests and foreign investment into the Indian newspaper sector. Fortunately, a majority of members of Parliament in and outside the committee are convinced of the longstanding validity of a resolution passed by the Union cabinet in 1955 barring the entry of foreign media and investment.

Despite stiff opposition, marauders inhabiting the global village never gave up on entering the Indian media scene and capture its levers. Encouraged by the winds of liberalisation, they made proxy attempts in 1989, 1990, 1994 and 1995, all of which were encouraged by the indecision of governments caught between their commitment to globalisation and the political compulsions of seeming to preserve national interests. The NDA government is no less dithering, giving room for optimism among the foreign media barons and their agents at home.

The consistency with which several federal administrations have rejected domestic space for foreign media received a blow when Broadcasting Secretary Y.N. Chaturvedi said a year ago that the 1955 policy was under review ‘because the situation has changed now.’ A month later, Information and Broadcasting Minister Arun Jaitley said that the 1955 resolution had no relevance now. This was followed by a flurry of conflicting statements by Sushma Swaraj, now indicating that there is room for foreign direct investment in the print media and now flatly asserting that FDI in print media was inconceivable.

The Reserve Bank of India added its own share to this confusion by permitting the Mid-Day group of newspapers of Mumbai a few months ago to seek foreign investment and then hurriedly retracting the permission. The Mid-Day managed to defy the state diktat about foreign investment in print media by launching a public issue for export of fully paid shares to foreign institutional investors (FIIs) to their place of incorporation if they so desired.

It is this kind of unorganised response that encourages people to ask ‘if foreign capital is welcome in industry, why not in newspapers?’ We do not need to allow foreign media or investment to bring home the consequences of such hospitality. For more than half a century, we have been living with pictures of the world exported to us by Reuters, AP, UPI, AFP and Tass, overlooking their ideological proximity to their governments. Our intelligentsia have deep faith in their impartiality, a faith that has its roots in the education system designed for us by Macaulay. It is a serious flaw in our communication perceptions to have regarded the university system as outside the media orbit. Universities are the earliest of mass media and their structures (having been fashioned by the British) have conditioned the minds of generations of our youth to regard everything western as superior to indigenous systems. Therefore, though we can stop foreign media and investments entering the Indian scene, we cannot undo the harm already done by our university system, which has preceded the print and other media.

Our journalism education in the last half a century shows that the entry of foreign media or equity can hardly match the harm it had already done. Herbert Altschull (Agents of Power) says: “In handing down ideas about the role of the press in public affairs – ideology, that is – the importance of schools of journalism cannot be ignored. The word ideology has a somewhat sinister connotation in the United States, although it is more acceptable elsewhere. In any case, the education of journalists is obviously an important factor in the building of a framework of ideas about what role the dissemination of news plays in society. In the United States, ideology is transmitted by other names; … The American school of journalism has by the final years of the twentieth century become a model for schools in all parts of the world.”

We had ample evidence of the perceptions of the journalism school products at the time of Fiji crisis, during the Gulf war and now in the Afghan tragedy. Our media covered from the sidelines the ouster of an Indian prime minister in a coup in Fiji, where more than 40% of the population was of Indian origin. The entire Gulf war reporting was a reproduction of Pentagon briefing to CNN. Today, our coverage of the Afghan events looks as though there is no alternative to endorsing the images relayed to the world by American media, which to our desks and bureaus can never go wrong. As Zia Us Salam says, “many Indian channels are nothing but dutiful messengers of the stuff relayed by foreign visual media.”

But, private greed knows no limits nor does it recognise the role of news in moulding the minds of its various constituencies. Those who want the repeal of the 1955 resolution argue that the entry of foreign media and equity will induct competition and thus improve the quality of content in our media; increase information choices; and introduce state of the art technology. This argument ignores the realities of the Indian media scene, which suffers from none of the inadequacies mentioned above. The foreign lobby represented by a minority group of some newspaper editors met Information and Broadcasting Minister Sushma Swaraj to request the government to allow investment from foreign institutional investors (FIIs) and non-resident Indians (NRIs). They had clarified that such an investment would not mean editorial control or ownership of Indian newspapers by foreign companies.

There are more newspapers in India than anywhere else and that takes care of competition. The only competition that foreign-owned newspapers is in the form of a threat of take-overs, an antithesis of competition. Once the door is opened, what has happened and is happening on a large scale to the consumer goods sector will happen to the media sector too. Foreign companies or Murdoch-type invaders will suck not only the big newspapers but also the small and medium newspapers into their orbit with the money clout they have. The country has not forgotten how Ramesh Chauhan has pioneered the process of selling viable and successful manufacturing units to MNCs for a million or two dollars more on the unit’s existing market value. This is how the majority share of the soft drink market has passed into the hands of a multinational firm.

About information choices, there is certainly no need because Indian readers already have more choices than their counterparts in other countries. This is because our newspapers bring to their readers not only pictures of their country but also of other countries. Thanks to our distorted news values, we are over-informed. Also, foreign newspapers permitted to operate in India can give our readers more of the foreign stuff plaguing the columns of our newspapers. Apart from these smaller issues, the bigger danger is in allowing foreign newspapers the right to freedom of expression, which is available only to Indian citizens under the constitution. Imagine allowing the Dawn of Pakistan to open or launch an edition in Kashmir!

If you haven’t seen the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal already, see it now and compare it to any of our newspapers and decide how far we are ahead of or behind them in terms of layout and design. Our newspapers and magazines are too fairly well produced to need import of technology. If it comes to content pluralism, it is difficult to beat Indian language newspapers, which not only do justice to the country’s vast rural side but also to every social group including minorities.

The NDA government, though likely to last all of its five-year tenure, is functioning like a provisional government. This explains the deafening and persistent chorus by some of our newspapers to permit Trojan horses to sneak into the domestic media arena and challenge the 1955 plan. Look at the power they have over the content in our media by virtue of their majority contribution to the ad revenue of our media. Their share in the ad revenue that went up from 20-30% a decade ago has gone up to 45-55% today. In TV, the primary source of ad revenue is the foreign companies.

According to N. Bhaskara Rao, chief of the country’s leading media research group, ORG, the foreign factor is already moderating media priorities in the country. Foreign firms today control advertising and market research, determining the scope of the media and setting their path and pace. These manipulations have already transferred the power to determine content into the hands of the foreign firms, especially so in the case of TV. Fortunately, our newspapers, heirs to the best Indian media traditions, are fiercely resisting foreign inroads into our media arena. Just now, it is Advantage India.

Disclaimer