More News Is Good News: 25 Years of NDTV

One

An Overview

More News Is Good News

PRANNOY ROY

THIS BOOK CELEBRATES the story of NDTV, and through its experience the story of Indian television and India’s media revolution. In over twenty-five years of NDTV, we have seen the electronic media landscape in India change from one government-owned channel, Doordarshan, to, at last count, over 400 news channels, all uncontrolled and uncensored. But our story, which began more than twenty-five years ago, is the story of a constant struggle by India’s electronic media against government control. Perhaps some of this history can be understood through the life and times of NDTV.

When my wife Radhika, who was a print journalist, decided to start a private television news organization, she realized that it was impossible to cover any hard news on India. This was 1988, when the only national TV channel was the terrestrial broadcaster, Doordarshan. I joined Radhika and we began to work together to create New Delhi Television – NDTV.

The first challenge we faced as journalists, which many journalists in Third World countries face even today, was that we were not allowed to report news on or about our own country. Although the Indian press was free, television news, because of its greater reach, was a government monopoly. When we were granted permission to cover only international news, the warning was reiterated: ‘Nothing on India’. So we launched a weekly programme called The World This Week. Fortunately, in comparison with the bland news on Doordarshan, which, without visuals, was more like radio than TV, it was not difficult to look good. It was after all the newsiest decade in television history: the Berlin Wall came down; the USSR disintegrated; the scenes of protest and revolution from Tiananmen Square had to be covered. With The World This Week, the seed of private news television was sown. But even then, every single story we did had to be vetted and cleared by government officials. So we struck a deal and told the government officials that, yes, we would send them our scripts for all our stories, but if they changed one word of any script, we would drop the entire story, no matter how important, and replace it with a completely different story. It worked.

The first tectonic shift in India’s broadcasting policy came in 1995. We at NDTV had been pressing the government to allow us to report on India news. One evening, the risk-taking, genuinely enlightened head of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting told us he had decided to give us a chance and allotted us a nightly half-hour slot for national news. He added that the government wouldn’t pay us a penny for the costs of production. We started our rounds of private companies with the plea: ‘Please fund the first-ever private news programme in India … it’s the beginning of a new era.’ The response was terrific. Mr Ratan Tata was the first to say yes and five others followed and we were ready to go with three years’ funding and editorial independence assured. On 5 February 1995, we aired India’s first-ever private news broadcast. Then came a blunder on the first night of our news broadcast of The News Tonight. I was anchoring and, like any other young anchor, decided to show off. As we went on air, I glanced at my watch and said, ‘It’s eight o’clock and this is The News Tonight coming to you live.’ Someone in the PM’s office heard the word ‘live’ and immediately phoned the information and broadcasting ministry and asked them to take us off air, or at least stop private news from being live. ‘Live’ was a four-letter word that, freely translated, meant ‘danger’. But frankly, nightly news that was not live might as well be dead news. So we decided to race against time.

There was Indian Standard Time and there was NDTV time. We bought a large-capacity hard drive, which could store ten minutes of video, and everywhere in the NDTV studios, we had two sets of clocks – the second one showing NDTV time that was ten minutes ahead of the first that kept Indian Standard Time. (We began at ten minutes and over about a year reduced that to a minute.) We would start our nightly news at eight o’clock sharp, NDTV time, the video would go into the hard drive - and automatically regurgitate itself ten minutes later - at exactly eight o’clock, Indian Standard Time. So the PM’s office could relax because, technically, we were not live but, in reality of course, nobody could preview or change anything while it was in the computer’s hard disc for ten minutes. For the few years our news programme remained on air, our studios had two sets of clocks everywhere.

We have come a long way since then. By the time of the general election in 2014, we had expected the number of news channels to rise to well over 250. There were close to 400. In fact, the media coverage of the 2014 elections marked a remarkable shift in what I would call the third phase of India’s democracy. This is how I characterize the shift in our democracy, corresponding to the evolution of media temperament: In the first phase of our democracy – the first thirty years since 1947, when we became independent – 80 per cent of governments were voted back to power. That was our ‘docile phase’, when media was at its weakest and literacy the lowest. The second phase after 1977 was the opposite, with 60 per cent of governments being thrown out. This was our ‘volatile or angry’ phase, coming right after the Emergency. The ‘anti-incumbency’ mood was the result of a maturing electorate, the failure of politicians to deliver and the beginnings of an aggressive media. But it was still essentially print, and it did not reach the number of voters that television does today. Consequently, voters didn’t really have enough information to distinguish between different hues of politicians. They just assumed that politicians, ipso facto, were incompetent or corrupt and threw them out. In our third phase, post-1992, half our governments are being voted out, while half are voted back. This has been the ‘more discerning phase’, where relatively good governments are voted back while poor performers are voted out because the electorate is more informed.

In many ways India’s ‘new, more discerning, democracy’ is beginning to be a driving force which pushes for development and growth. Gone are the days where leaders could deliver the famous Hindu Rate of Growth of 3.5 per cent and still be re-elected. Today, with a better-informed and more mature electorate, the message is clear: either deliver on BSP (Bijli-Sadak-Pani – electricity, roads and water) or you are out.

How much the nation and the media have changed can be gauged from the way elections are conducted now and how much the technology of elections has changed and impacted not just voter behaviour, but our lives on election night. It has also ruined our lives.

When we started live television coverage of election night results twenty-eight years ago, India used the good old ballot paper. Counting votes would take ages as 240 million ballot papers were counted. It would take three days and three nights. So election night specials would be ‘election nights and days’ specials. We would not sleep for seventy-two hours or more, always on air, analysing results. Forecasting was a delight. Our ‘revolutionary technology’ then was an Apple 2! And for the first time, India, through Apple 2 graphics, saw and heard the theory of uniform swing and of homogeneous swing zones in a heterogeneous society, and the only things that kept us going during those long hours were adrenaline and the late Paul McKee, whom you will hear more about later in the book.

Since India loves its elections and since at that time there was only one TV channel, viewership levels couldn’t be higher. It was heady stuff. The words ‘swing’ and ‘psephology’ became household terms.

Today, India has come a long way technologically. We no longer use ballot papers. India now has the most wonderful electronic voting machines – robust, reliable and I believe substantially tamper-proof – and, since these machines are deliberately kept offline, hackers can’t get at them. These are now used to count more than 400 million votes (that, by the way, is thirteen times the number of votes in British elections and three times the votes in the American elections). And so far the counting of these hundreds of millions of votes has been virtually error-free and scandal-free. So when I heard a BBC reporter at the last US elections say that in Florida the counting of votes is like a ‘Third World country’, I couldn’t quite get what she meant. In fact, President Obama set a goal for himself during his acceptance speech in Chicago. He thanked everyone who cast her or his ballot ‘whether you voted for the first time or waited in line a very long time’; then he quickly added, ‘… by the way, we have to fix that.’

Well, Mr President, all you have to do is come to India and we’ll show you how to fix it.

So, while these magnificent voting machines have been a huge success, they have also reduced the time taken to announce the results. From what used to take a hundred hours counting ballot papers, it now takes just ten hours using voting machines. Which is of course wonderful for the people of India. But it has ruined our business model. We used to be able to guarantee three days and nights to advertisers. Now it’s down to just ten hours! It’s all over in a flash, and with it our revenues.

In many other ways too technology is ruining old business models. Technology, elections and media are a heady mix that can also make one do outrageous things. I must make an admission of guilt, of doing an experiment that we will never do again. And we only did it because we felt it would pass the ‘Butler Test’. David Butler, who was also interviewed for this book, always pointed us to research which showed that opinion polls did not affect actual voting behaviour. So we went ahead with a top-secret exercise.

During the Punjab elections in 2007, we carried out the world’s first and only Insta-Poll. It was a huge exit poll with the difference that we used mobile phones extensively, to send in data on whom people said they had voted for. Every time a key on a mobile phone was pressed for any party from each of the hundreds of locations, it would be processed and transmitted live on air. From the first vote in the morning to the last vote at night, a graphic was always on the screen, showing in real time who was winning and who losing, throughout voting day. We called it an Insta-Poll for obvious reasons. And in the end, it was dead accurate. Which also suggests that it didn’t influence voting behaviour.

The Election Commission sued us in each of the twenty-one districts of Punjab. It was only a few months ago that they withdrew the cases. I had to mention this because it was the world’s first and probably only Insta-Poll.

As an aside, let me describe how politicians have changed with this changing media. When we used to question them twenty-five years ago, they would take three minutes to get to the point: clear their throats, look at themselves in the studio monitor, and start with a historical perspective. Now they are sharp – they make three points in twenty seconds, very aware that if it takes longer they may be edited; and by having to be on TV so much, our politicians today are so much better groomed and better looking. A welcome fringe benefit of the 24x7 lens.

The revolutionary transformation in Indian media has been brought about by two underlying factors: first, the intrinsic force of new technologies that challenge and bypass government control and domination; and second, the unstoppable energy of India’s chaotic, anarchic and creative democracy.

When we began, we got the news by telex and teleprinters, then by fax – in fact, when NDTV started, our first technology choice was whether we should buy a telex machine or a fax machine. Since those were also the days of government regulations and censorship, we had to use ‘creative’ methods to overcome the many hurdles that kept cropping up. The rules did not allow us to use normal satellite links for video but stockbrokers were allowed VSat terminals for data transmission. So our team wrote an algorithm that converted video to data, sent that data across VSat terminals via satellite and then another algorithm to reconvert data back to video. That made us the fastest with the news and yet we stayed within the uplinking laws. Now of course, with the Internet, and especially with the rise of social media, things are different. The phone too is a media device today where people get their news, cricket scores, music and astrology. From five million phones twenty-five years ago, today there are 900 million. And with 4G taking off in India, I estimate there will be close to 600 million Internet users within five years, up from 140 million today. Broadband Internet is the next mobile revolution. Despite this growth in different forms of media, India remains one of the few countries where newspapers are still growing, adding twenty million readers a year, about the population of a small European country.

But more significant than the numbers is the change in the nature of India’s media: from censorship and government control, electronic media in India today is free and overwhelmingly in private hands. And, for all its faults, it is vibrant, hard-hitting, and run primarily by younger Indians (who are far more talented than we ever were), and who, with democracy in their DNA, tend to question everything. They make Amartya Sen’s ‘Argumentative Indian’ look like a bit of a wimp. It is also the case that the electronic media in India is run by a very high proportion of female journalists and producers. At NDTV, they account for approximately 66 per cent of the workforce. Most economists argue that the highest rate of return in any economy comes from investment in female human capital; and that has certainly proved itself to be true in Indian media.

To go back to the story of NDTV where we left it, after having convinced the government to let us go live, it was time to take our next step, which, in hindsight, started a major new direction for news in India. Rupert Murdoch asked us to produce, first, the nine o’clock news on his entertainment channel and later a twenty-four-hour news channel. Although he financed the entire operation, he had no hesitation in giving us total editorial control. And one man more than anyone else, John O’Loan, one of the finest TV professionals I have known, ensured we succeeded in launching India’s first twenty-four-hour news channel in February 1998. Few realized that this was the beginning of a flood, or rather a tsunami, of news channels emerging in India.

Today perhaps the biggest challenge facing news channels, in fact all of TV in India, is the excessive competition and fragmentation. Media reports tend to miss this point as they focus only on the rapid growth in advertising revenues in India. They are impressed with the growth figures of around 15 per cent a year, impressive indeed by world standards. But for us on the ground, that is only half the story. Advertising revenues reflect only the demand side of media. The supply side, that is the advertising time available, is growing in India at a rate of 35 to 40 per cent a year. So supply is growing three times faster than demand because of the number of new channels starting every month as well as each channel offering more time per hour for advertisements. With so many channels, India’s television sector is almost as fragmented as the dotcom sector in Britain or America. And the problems are similar too: low advertising rates resulting in losses. Only the top television channel in each genre is making a profit. For the rest, losses are the norm.

There are a few key reasons why the number of news channels has increased from just one channel in 2004 to over 400 today. First, the barriers to entry have come down, both because of liberalization – it is much easier to get a licence to start a news channel – as well as because the capital cost of launching a news channel has come down by 95 per cent in just eleven years.

Television’s greater reach and its ability to influence public opinion have also become key motivators for many political parties and many have begun their own news channels. And finally, there is glamour and the perception of power. This might seem like an apocryphal story but it’s true: An editor friend of mine heard a loud knock on his door not so long ago. It turned out to be a well-known builder desperate to start a news channel and who wanted my friend to run it. ‘Money is not important. I will finance it all,’ he said. When my friend asked him why, the builder said: ‘I am one of the biggest builders in this country and I put in a bid for a recent tender for a mega project in Uttar Pradesh. Everyone shortlisted was called to meet the chief minister. I went too, but had to wait for eight hours before he called me in. However, anyone who had a news channel walked right in without waiting a minute!’

Once Mr Murdoch started a twenty-four-hour news channel, everyone seemed eager to want to start one too. And the explosion followed: in English, Hindi, regional languages and so on.

One of the more fundamental ways in which the media has impacted politicians and the political processes in the country is in its exposé of corruption. The media is, in fact, a driving force in this aspect and increasingly so. As scams and scandals emerge every other day, today’s India appears more corrupt than ever before but, in truth, corruption was always as endemic as it is today. Unlike the past, for the first time corruption is being exposed and politicians are being punished. With the media’s unrelenting focus on exposing corruption, India is perhaps beginning a ‘cleansing process’ towards a truly ‘swachh Bharat’. In the short run, exposing scams and scandals may be harmful for the image of the country but in the longer term, I firmly believe that all this is likely to lead to a better, cleaner India.

Therefore, perhaps it is not surprising that at every stage in its opening up, India’s media was always in confrontation with the government of the time. No matter which party, the one thing common that ran through their veins was to keep control. After the Indo-Pak war in Kargil in 1999, the Pakistani president is reported to have said, ‘India won the war because of its media.’ That lesson – and the shock that President Musharraf got at the failed Agra Summit in 2001 when he was constantly surrounded by dozens of Indian TV channels – was a key factor behind the opening up of the media in Pakistan. From total state control at the time of the Kargil war, Pakistan’s media since 2002 has been free, and, despite many challenges, threats and hurdles, is fearless, energetic and aggressive.

Back home, there were some in the government who blamed the failure of the Agra Summit on NDTV’s telecast of the editors’ meeting with President Musharraf. We began receiving threats that we were about to lose our licence. As a first step, the government cut off all our cables and video feeds from parliament. At times like this the only thing to do is lie low and wait for the storm to pass. Which it eventually did and six months later our lines to parliament were restored.

A few months later in 2002, when the Gujarat riots and the mindless killing of Muslims took place, NDTV reporters were uncompromising and hard-hitting. I recall getting a phone call from a very senior minister in the PM’s office to say, ‘You know I am your friend and I always support you against many of my colleagues who want to shut NDTV down … but if you carry on reporting like this from Gujarat I will not be able to prevent them from shutting you down. So please tell all your reporters and anchors to cool down, or else …’ Of course we did no such thing. No message went out to anyone and the reporters continued exactly as they were doing. A few hours later I got a call from the same minister, who said, ‘Prannoy, I just wanted to thank you for sending a message to your team. Things are much better now!’ I didn’t say a word. I must say that since then there has been virtually no government interference, no threats or warnings.

As our five-year contract with Murdoch was coming to an end in 2003, James Murdoch came to see us to discuss an extension for another five years; but this time he said, quite understandably, ‘Let’s make it a joint venture.’ We agreed on one condition: editorial control must remain with NDTV. I still remember James Murdoch saying, ‘Yes, of course. I want that too because if any politician complains, I can just say it’s nothing to do with me, go talk to NDTV.’ Three months later, James Murdoch asked me to meet him once more for lunch. He told me all financial and legal terms were agreed but he wanted one change. He must have editorial control. I asked him three times why he had changed his mind. He didn’t answer. I still don’t know why. So we parted in 2003, but as friends, and we still work together in some key areas.

That break with Murdoch transformed NDTV from being a production house into an independent broadcaster. We launched two twenty-four-hour channels immediately, one in English and another in Hindi. After a rocky start, both NDTV 24x7 and NDTV India were a reasonable success. But gradually the news channel space started becoming crowded. In fact, overcrowded. India is now at a stage where many of the problems with our news media are almost the same as they are globally.

There is undoubtedly an element of truth in what James Murdoch said in a 2009 speech at Edinburgh, that ‘the only reliable, durable and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit’. But it is probably not entirely true. Similarly, perhaps Elizabeth Murdoch’s contrary view may have exaggerated her case. In her speech, also at Edinburgh, a few years ago, Elizabeth Murdoch criticized the making of profits without purpose as ‘one of the most dangerous … goals for capitalism and for freedom’.

Before I go on to give you some examples of how this debate is unfolding in India, let me explain that we at NDTV operate by what we call, rather pompously, the ‘Heisenberg principle of journalism’. The Heisenberg principle, crudely interpreted, suggests that as you get closer to one target or object, the very nature and essence of the target changes. Similarly, we hold that a ‘revamped Heisenberg principle’ suggests that given its duality, the closer you move towards the objective of profits, the very nature of journalism tends to change.

While it seems to us that there is nothing wrong with James Murdoch’s goal of trying to make a news channel generate profits, the problem lies in the path to profitability. Almost by definition, the path to making profits for a news organization is littered with compromises that change the nature of journalism, often so that it can no longer be recognized as a news channel. In the quest for profits in the overcrowded market of news channels in India, several choices are possible and different channels have chosen different routes, but the greater the success with any one of these routes, the more the nature of news journalism changes.

The first and most popular option is to go tabloid and gain eyeballs. Virtually every single Hindi news channel in India today is grotesquely tabloid. It all began after Murdoch’s Star News split with NDTV. For a few years, Star did not do well. It was a serious news channel but was making losses as a result of low viewership. Star News decided to go tabloid. Seeing the success of tabloid news, virtually every Hindi news channel turned tabloid. I recall what I think is the lowest point so far when one Hindi channel anchor (not Star News) twirled her hair with her forefinger, looked into the camera and said, ‘Break ke baad aapko ek rape dikhayenge’ (After the break we will show you a rape).

But why blame Hindi channels? With competition and the rush for eyeballs, tabloidization is a global trend, but more than that, it should be seen as the death of good journalism. Forget the usual suspects, it is disturbing to see even the wonderful National Geographic and Discovery channels going down a slippery slope with many programmes designed to titillate by using titles containing sex and violence.

India has an added problem with tabloid Hindi news channels. The advertisers, the agencies, the CEOs and marketing heads do not watch Hindi news. They almost universally watch English news channels, so all decisions on advertising rates and expenditure are based solely on the number of eyeballs, not on the quality of the channel, because nobody has watched any Hindi channel. So, unlike in the UK, where a serious newspaper gets a much higher advertising rate per eyeball than a tabloid, no such stratification exists in India. I don’t need to state the obvious that going tabloid in the quest for profits changes the nature of the beast, destroying journalism. I can honestly report that it is widely accepted that the only Hindi news channel in India that is not tabloid is NDTV India and I must also report that the channel is making a loss!

The other option to going tabloid, and it’s not mutually exclusive, is to fiddle the ratings. Virtually every city in India has a ‘ratings consultant’ who, for a relatively small fee, will ensure higher ratings for any channel. The method is simple: the consultant gets to know the homes where the people-meters that measure viewership are located. These are meant to be anonymous homes, but the consultant manages to find out addresses. He visits the people-meter homes, gives them a brand-new 60-inch plasma TV and says, ‘Watch whatever you like on this lovely big TV, but on the TV attached to the people-meter, you must watch this list of channels.’ The family also gets an additional reward at the end of the year if they’ve done what they were asked to do efficiently. In fact, Nielsen sent out their global head of security to India and, after a four-month elaborate investigation, he said, ‘I have never seen as much corruption of the Nielsen system anywhere else in the world.’

There are many other ways apart from going tabloid or fiddling ratings, which some channels do, to make profits – like blackmail and extortion, an accusation against the media in Britain too. In India, there is also the widespread phenomenon of ‘paid news’, where newspapers ask companies or politicians to pay for editorial space and it’s not made clear to the reader that this is an advertorial. Sometime ago we were visited by a regional editor of a major newspaper chain. She wanted to leave her newspaper and work with NDTV. When we asked her why, she said, ‘I don’t really mind paid news when it comes to entertainment, I have done that for years, but last week when I had to put a positive article about a dodgy medical product on our front page, I decided I had to leave.’ I needn’t add that that newspaper chain is highly profitable. One thing is common in all these methods: so many compromises are made on the path towards making profits that the channels either lose their integrity or can no longer be called news channels.

India’s media may not be perfect, but in the world’s largest democracy, on balance our news media and its ‘soft power’, both television and print, have been working for democracy. As India’s media has grown over the years, despite all the baggage, so far more news has been good news. So far we have seen the upside of unfettered journalism. But any strength taken too far becomes a weakness and our media appears to be hurtling towards its own regulatory cliff. It is at these critical moments that governments try to take control. Like these moments in the past, the time has come once again to fight any encroachment by the government and to act before it is too late. Only then can we ensure that in the future too more news will continue to be good news.

So although it is wonderful to see how far we have come, I believe that the media in India, and globally, is at a crossroads and there are some worrying trends that need course correction now, before it’s too late. Never has the role of the media been more important; yet at the same time, never has it been so confused, some say misused. In an uncanny parallel with Britain, to take just one example, we are also in the midst of a debate on how much regulation, if any, the media in India needs. With virtually no punishment, India’s media runs on self-regulation, which gives it enormous ‘soft power’ to set the agenda. However, we may be reaching a tipping point and if we in the media don’t take corrective steps now, a downward spiral leading to a loss in credibility may follow. I get a sense that it is already beginning to happen.

I do not believe there should be any government-led statutory regulation of any type as that would kill the greatest asset of India’s media, its freedom. We have been fighting for twenty-five years against any form of control by politicians or the government, even if it is indirect, like by controlling the appointment of the head of a statutory body to oversee the media. However, I do not believe that the other extreme, of no regulation at all, works in our society. Today in India, we have no real penalties for defamation or libel, and no effective privacy laws. It is, frankly, a free-for-all environment. You can say what you like, and get away with it, without being fined or penalized in any way. As a result our media is losing its rigour. There is, after all, no need to double-check your facts, no real need to do any research. The lack of punishment for defamation is leading to the end of honest journalism.

I know it goes against our own interests in the short term because we, ourselves, may be fined or punished, but NDTV is fighting hard for the implementation of defamation laws, by the judiciary, independent of the government. We have a Press Council that is toothless. It needs judicial powers. It’s important to give the Press Council powers to impose fines and ensure that the appointment of its members be made by the judiciary, not by the government. We already have most of the laws in place. They just need to be implemented fairly.

In volatile countries like India, where social tensions simmer beneath the surface, the consequences of anonymity are even greater than stealing or defamation. For example, a wild anonymous message against a community, caste or religion can, and has, led to violence, panic and killing. In 2012, tens of thousands of youngsters from the north-east of India living in Bengaluru fled the city because of anonymous messages that all north-easterners were going to be killed. Those who sent these messages were never caught because they hid in the anonymous world of the Internet. Terrorists constantly use the anonymity of the web.

While there are many advantages of anonymity – it is the essence of freedom on the Net – it is important to recognize that its inherent dangers might in certain circumstances outweigh those very benefits. Maybe it is time to bring the Internet a little closer to the responsibilities that all other forms of media face – you should take responsibility for what you write. A provocative message on Twitter in a sectarian confrontation can erupt in a wave of violence and death. Let me be clear: I am not arguing for a complete ban on anonymity on the Internet. There are many degrees of anonymity that coexist. In everyday use, for comments, criticisms and opinions, anonymity must be allowed to continue. What is needed perhaps is a law that only permits the piercing of the veil of anonymity when a serious crime is committed, the very last resort. Once again it must be the judiciary, not the government, which decides when this can be done and ensure it is only in the rarest of rare cases.

Twitter, YouTube and others are aware of certain dangers that are relevant to their own society and consequently rightly screen their content before publishing. That’s why you’ll never see porn on YouTube or messages on underage sex on Twitter, and thank goodness. But are these same sites as aware of the dangerous consequences that a different kind of image or message has in developing societies and, like they pre-screen their sites for their own societies, are they ready to invest in similar systems for other countries? Perhaps it’s time for Twitter and YouTube to become sensitive to, and screen, messages that are dangerous or harm genuine democracies like India. We have different flashpoints to those in America or the rest of the West, and these too need to be stopped before they incite sectarian or communal violence.

Finally, in the context of regulations, I believe that any changes in the media environment must be initiated and guided by journalists, in dialogue with the judiciary, not with or by the government. And we need to take some key steps soon, before social pressures give governments the mandate to intervene. To change the rules of the game, the media needs to take the lead, to look beyond short-term profits, and take action with the long-term freedom and credibility of our media in mind.

So we, the media in India, have so much going for us. We have democracy in our DNA; we can, and do, question everything. We are at the cutting edge of new technology that bypasses government controls and frees our wings. Our media is more vibrant than anywhere in the world. Let’s not throw it all away and commit hara-kiri as we are pretty good at doing. As journalists, let’s not chase profits without purpose. Let’s not forget the Heisenberg principle and turn into insiders. Let’s voluntarily accept legal discipline when we defame and fail to do our research. And let’s embrace the new world of the Internet with imagination, and leverage that democracy in our DNA. The Internet is the future for all of us. It’s a new sunrise for journalism. NDTV, for one, is now focusing on becoming a digital company more than a television company. We learnt a lesson during the last elections. Our website, ndtv.com, with what was widely considered to be non-tabloid election coverage, had 13 billion hits in twenty-four hours.

It is only fitting that I end with my feelings about lifetime achievement awards, which are the pitfalls of being in the limelight like I have been. I was given my first lifetime achievement award about ten years ago, and I took it as a not-so-subtle message, saying, ‘Prannoy, it’s time to pack up.’ After a couple of more such messages, which pointed to the sunset, I decided to avoid lifetime achievement awards. Things reached a climax when (and this is absolutely true) the head of a very prestigious TV award organization called me up and asked me to accept an ‘Award for being India’s Most Trusted Anchor’. A few days later he sent me a formal letter, which confirmed the phone call, except, he left out the ‘T’ in ‘trusted anchor’!

I’d like to end with the same five words I used when I was awarded a lifetime achievement, which applies to NDTV and Indian media at large: You ain’t seen nothing yet!

Twenty-five Years of Keeping It Sane: From Budgets to Bull and Biryani

SHEKHAR GUPTA

IT IS NO coincidence that NDTV, India’s finest news TV group, was among the first independent electronic media ventures to take birth as economic reforms began in 1991. If India’s licence/quota-fattened tycoons were going to be exposed to competition, so inevitably was Doordarshan. From the beginning, NDTV’s coverage of elections and budgets has been unparalleled, and let me add that it is even more creditable that this excellence was achieved in spite of the fact that I featured rather prolifically as a guest in both. Manmohan Singh’s 1991 budget changed India and the following three brought more reform, even if the pace was tapering. Then came Chidambaram’s dream budget in 1997. In those years, old-fashioned values worked: experience, accuracy, fairness and, most important, calm. Go back to the archives, for example, and look at NDTV’s coverage of the 1993 serial bombings in Mumbai. But things in the marketplace began to change soon.

To leapfrog to more contemporary times, news TV has changed quite fundamentally. All the qualities that worked in the past are under threat of being tossed away. Who has the patience to verify facts, for fairness, understatedness and calm in this phase of non-stop shout-rage on news TV? The biryani metaphor draws from the raucous surround sound of our times, when the screen splits into rectangles and the volume goes higher and higher, without anybody ever needing to touch the remote control. Then an angry face fills each window on the screen. And you hear more adjectives in a minute than what you would use in a month in old-fashioned journalism. And if you can tease a coherent narrative out of this chatter, it usually boils down to one profound question: are you a murderer or are you just a thief?

If that sounds facetious, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it to. The most formidable challenge to sanity and scepticism, so essential to our trade, has come from this dangerous undermining of news at prime time. The old-fashioned evening news bulletin has gone extinct. What you have, on the other hand, is debate after debate on each channel after 8 p.m. And because that debate must be polarizing, vicious, loud and therefore fun, it has to be provocative, anchors have to look stern, disgusted, preachy and so holier-than-cow. Further, since all competing channels look at the same list of stories that broke latest by 6 p.m., there is no time to fact-check, to hold a story up for verification. If the public prosecutor claims Kasab demanded biryani in jail, who can afford to wait until it is checked out with jail authorities. Somebody has said it, everybody has heard it, so let’s go with it, only challenge being how to look more outraged than the rest.

The biryani theory had, in fact, been cooked up decades before 26/11 and Ajmal Kasab. Google the siege of the holy Hazratbal shrine in Srinagar in 1993. As negotiations continued with militants who had seized control of the Kashmir Valley’s holiest Muslim shrine, the government obviously arranged for food for them. This was then immediately seized upon by the BJP and its backers, saying Narasimha Rao’s government was pampering terrorists with biryani, rather than storming the shrine and killing them. Of course, no biryani had actually been served. Food was apparently supplied from the CRPF/BSF langar and, as my friend and famous Kashmiri writer Basharat Peer tells me, biryani is not even a familiar dish in Kashmir. Now, when you are fighting vile terrorists, you don’t have the patience to get your culinary imagination right. Or Rao would have been charged with feeding terrorists goshtaba or tabaq maz instead, and the metaphor would have remained confined to Kashmir rather than become a scar on our minds, marking out coronary-clogging biryani as a symbol of Muslim appeasement. It was impossible then not to take the claim of the prosecuting lawyer at face value and launch the shout-rage. Until he bragged years later, in March 2015, that he had lied to make public opinion angrier with Kasab, and underlined to the entire world how gullible, unquestioning and non-journalistic we had become meanwhile.

Many more recent instances underline this increasing gullibility. The death of two Badaun girls (in May 2014) was immediately accepted as rape-cum-murder by boys of a higher caste. Shortly thereafter, the story of a serial rape as a consequence of love jihad emerged from nearby Meerut. Then, there were the two ‘brave’ girls in Rohtak who beat up their ‘molesters’ in a bus. Lynching of a Muslim man (accused of rape by a Naga woman) by a mob that stormed the prison in Dimapur. The rape of a seventy-one-year-old nun in West Bengal. In each case, almost nobody waited to bring you the story first, with at least the basic facts verified. The pressure to find issues for the evening’s tu-tu-main-main is much too great today to allow for any patience or scepticism. Each one of these stories caused plenty of what we prefer to call shout-rage. But in the course of days, each one of these cases unravelled slightly different narratives. The CBI concluded that Badaun was a case of suicide; the woman in Meerut had apparently made up the story; so probably had the ‘brave’ girls of Rohtak; the Muslim boy in Dimapur was not only no Bangladeshi illegal but the brother of a Kargil martyr of our army; and finally, while it is reprehensible that an elderly nun was raped, the suspects were (probably Bangladeshi) Muslims and there was no linking it with the spate of vandalism at churches happening at the time. But each one had already been squeezed fully for prime-time value and just nobody was about to apologize.

This is the era of hashtag patriotism and anger. And biryani makes a sexier hashtag than a budget. No surprise then that even the navy officer who bragged in Rajkot that he had ordered the destruction of the suspicious Pakistani boat in the Arabian Sea said he wasn’t going to capture terrorists alive only to feed them biryani.

It is in this new environment, through twenty-five years of tumultuous, and not necessarily healthy, evolution of the TV news business, that being able to maintain your calm can be such an achievement. I reflected on this challenge at some length while preparing for the prestigious Lalit Doshi Memorial Lecture in Mumbai in August 2011, and I draw from it here. The topic I was given was whether the media today was a bloodhound or a watchdog.

I began by confessing that I am a dog person. And asking a journalist and a dog person to choose between a watchdog and a hound, trust me, isn’t as easy as it sounds. I say this from personal experience. I have seven dogs at my farm, pure-bred mongrels, a dozen more share my post-dinner night