Session 4
Ensuring Transparency: The Role Of The Media
Moderator: Dileep Padgaonkar
Pamela Constable
Many of us in the American media tend to feel especially privileged. We have laws to protect how we report and what we publish. We have freedom to say virtually anything, as long as it is accurate and not slanderous. Our institutions back us up and do not pressure us to take sides. We are a wealthy and respected part of society, and even those who say they hate the messenger are often knocking on our door with their own message the next day.
Abroad, we can become even more spoiled. We expect world leaders to receive us at the drop of a hat; we expect all doors will open to us. We have blue passports that will get us in and out of difficult spots, while the local press is stuck dealing with the same sometimes repressive conditions every day. We hire people to help us with foreign languages and political nuance. We have the resources to travel, know our rights and our power. We are CBS, CNN, Time, the Washington Post. We tend to think you need us more than we need you.
But despite all those resources, power, and access, we can still be wrong - as anyone who watched part of the recent election debacle in Florida knows. In the end, everything came out okay, the system did not collapse, and the press settled back into a more normal mode. But the episode does remind us that, in this era of pressing multi-media competition, with deadlines collapsed from 24 hours to minutes, it is easy to make mistakes, and those mistakes are even more costly because they are transmitted so swiftly to so many millions of people.
Transparency is necessary for a truly free press, and a great advantage for the media. But it is not a sufficient condition to ensure high quality media coverage, even in a sophisticated democracy. Moreover, it is a right we sometimes take for granted. We forget that, even in America, it took some hard battles, against powerful forces that fought hard to keep their doings in the darkness, to reinforce and enshrine that right.
It is worth briefly recounting one case - the role of my own paper, the Washington Post, in uncovering the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s. As many of you know, it started with burglary in a Democratic Party office in Washington, and evolved into a major scandal involving illegal use of funds, cover-ups, and strong-arm politics by the Nixon administration that finally forced the president to resign and sent many of its aides to jail.
From 1972 to 1974, the White House waged an all-out, vicious campaign to smear and destroy the newspaper, accusing it of a variety of crimes, threatening to pull the company's TV and radio licenses, and to sue the paper for libel. For many months the Post was out on a limb, in danger of losing credibility and even financial viability, because a corrupt government viewed it as the enemy. It was not until some senior government officials confessed to their crimes that the paper could breathe easily again. Prizes were won, and freedom of the press reverted to being an easily mouthed platitude.
I also want to mention another scandal that hit the paper a few years later, in 1981, when the Post was still riding high on its prestige from the Watergate triumph. This was a scandal with a different lesson in transparency, one that showed how the power of the free press can be misused and twisted, unless it monitors itself as rigorously as its critics.
The paper published a story about a little boy who was addicted to heroin, and it won a Pulitzer Prize. It turned out, however, that boy did not exist. He had been concocted by an ambitious young journalist, who had also faked many of her credentials to get a job on the paper. Her excuse was being under intense pressure to produce a dramatic story. The fabrication was eventually discovered, but not before the editors had to face the extreme embarrassment of giving back the most prestigious prize in journalism.
I recall both of these stories, not particularly because they are about my own paper, an institution I am extremely proud to be a part of, but because they point out two, equally important, lessons - that even a truly free and transparent press can make egregious mistakes, unless it is extremely responsible and cautious, and that even in a democracy, the press can sometimes face obstacles one would expect to find only in a dictatorship.
In India, the press enjoys many of the same freedoms, and suffers from some of the same excesses, as ours. It is delightfully combative and freewheeling and opinionated, as one would rightly expect from a country that is committed to democracy and has more newspapers, printed in more languages, than probably any other country. I love nothing more every morning than to read the latest tale of a politician's shenanigans, or a corruption expose, or the gleeful crucifixion of bureaucratic bunglers and babus.
As a reporter whose job it is to cover news in India, the thing that makes my job easiest is that everyone here has something to say and almost no one is shy about saying it, from the humblest village farmer to the most loquacious MP. People in India thrive on debate and information, and if anything they are bombarded by too much of it.
But the Indian press also has an Achilles' heel, especially when it comes to certain sensitive issues. Where foreign policy and security are concerned, I have seen that the national press can become so fiercely nationalistic that it is practically a mouthpiece for the government. The most blatant example was the Kargil incursion in Kashmir, where every official Indian report of a Pakistani atrocity was reprinted instantly and unquestioningly, and any Pakistani allegation of abuses was ignored or dismissed.
The outpouring of patriotism that understandably accompanied Kargil was echoed breathlessly in the Indian press, which fought the war from one side as unabashedly as the American press did during World War II. It took another war, Vietnam, and a major scandal, Watergate, to make us more skeptical of the official line. As the Indian press matures with the country's democracy, I think, it will inevitably need to acquire a more balanced and dispassionate view of these issues.
One of the places in India where I have spent a lot of time as a journalist is Kashmir, and there too I have observed that much domestic press reporting fails to cover all sides of the story. With a few exceptions, newspapers, weekly magazines and especially television are quick to play up the latest terrorist bombing while largely ignoring abuses by the security forces.
Only now, with tensions beginning to ease in Kashmir and people tiring of the conflict, have we begun to see any serious questioning of official events there. The massacre of Sikhs at Chittisinghpura, and the military killing of several alleged attackers afterwards, was one of the first incidents to come under serious press scrutiny.
It has still never been satisfactorily clarified, and some officials and "patriotic Indians" have taken great umbrage at journalists' questioning of the official version. But I agree with those who argue that it is more patriotic, and ultimately of more benefit to democracy, to dig up the truth than to bury it, even if feathers are ruffled and sensibilities offended in the process.
All guerrilla wars are murky, built on lies and propaganda, betrayals and physical abuse. But that only makes it all the more important to try and separate propaganda from reality, fact from fiction, victim from aggressor, on a case by case basis. Otherwise, it is all too easy to believe whichever side one chooses, and for truth to matter less and less.
That said, India is a strong beacon of press freedom compared to most of its neighbors. In Pakistan, the former government of Nawaz Sharif tried to buy and bully the press into towing his line, manipulating newsprint contracts, giving envelopes of cash to sycophantic journalists, and having aides personally threaten critical reporters and editors. The situation, ironically, has become somewhat better under General Musharraf, who claims to be committed to a free press and knows he must tolerate some dissent to gain any credibility abroad. In Pakistan today, critical columns and editorials appear regularly, and Musharraf, despite his illegitimate seizure of power 15 months ago, is becoming known as the first Pakistani dictator who is willing to criticize himself and correct his mistakes.
Sri Lanka, a parliamentary democracy in name, has seriously tarnished its credibility by a draconian crackdown on press in recent months, ostensibly for national security reasons during its ongoing civil war with the LTTE, (or Tamil Tiger guerrillas). Last year, it decreed that all press reports on the conflict must be submitted to government censor, with the result that many appeared with dozens of paragraphs excised out. Cartoons appeared blank, and one publication was shut down for disobeying the ban. The censorship was both a silly exercise and a tragic one, all the more so since its real motive seems to have been making the government look good, rather than protecting any military secrets.
The press situation is far worse in Afghanistan, another country where I travel regularly. There is no free press; indeed there is no press at all except a newspaper and radio station controlled by the religious regime. TV is banned completely. Most Afghan journalists have long since fled the country, along with the rest of the middle class, and the few brave souls who remain to work for foreign news agencies are often harassed and sometimes arrested without warning. Foreign correspondents like myself are allowed in for only a few weeks at a time, and we must work under severe restrictions. We are accompanied at all times by a government guide, and banned from a wide variety of activities, including taking pictures, speaking with women and visiting homes. Needless to say, news reporting from Afghanistan today is sketchy, incomplete and only partly credible at best.
With few exceptions, in India and the United States, the authorities know that, for better or worse, it is far more practical and healthy for democracy, in the long run, to humor the fourth estate than to try to quash it. Sometimes, it may seem that media transparency only brings out dirty laundry that might seem better off left in the closet, for the sake of dignity, good taste and public morale. Far more often, though, I believe such transparency serves to let in light where it most needs to be shed, and that society is far better off for it.
Shekhar Gupta
I do two jobs as editor-in-chief and chief executive officer. When this occurred exactly a year ago, I wondered if I could really handle it. Can an editor handle the CEO's job in the same company? So I went back to the two people I tend to consult in such situations and asked: "Is this possible?" Yes came the reply, but only if you use two different sets of calling cards. If you are consuming them at the rate of ten of the editor's to every one of the CEO's, you will be all right. I think I have passed this calling card test over the year. The reason this story is significant is because of the theme today: Can the media ensure transparency? If the media sees that as its primary role, can it stay afloat amid these times of rising newspaper prices, rising wages, and very tough competition? Overall, I think the picture is not too bad, it could be worse.
What do we mean by ensuring transparency? There are two or three distinct areas to consider: one is the overall quality of governance. Politicians and bureaucrats tend to talk of the media as a great scourge. They think, "don't do this or there will be a scandal in the media, the media will find out". The fact is that in our society, the media finds out very little.
Frankly, there are no freedom of information laws here. It has been debated for some time, but will require more time before it actually comes to the statue book. What we do have is a good tradition whereby bureaucrats and politicians tend to open up to journalists, happily, if it means getting some good news about themselves, and even more happily if it means getting in bad news about a rival. So, that is perhaps the only way the media in our country has been able to ensure the transparency of governance. Beyond that, if you wrote to a government department, and a minister or his secretary chose not to tell you about something, if you did not find some disgruntled person in a key position in that department, your chances of getting information would be zero. You then have to wait.
You have to find a friendly MP, to plant a question in parliament, and then hope that that department or section of the government will give the right answer.
Although I believe the lesson that the bureaucracy learns very early on is never to lie to parliament, they also learn "when asked your name, to tell them your date of birth". So, it is almost never possible to get answers. Journalists have to go by their contacts, their own network. This sometimes leads to a different problem: because you want a certain story or certain information, you tend to be soft on something else. You have to build a network, and some give and take has to take place.
I will give you a small example of how difficult it is to perform this role of bringing in transparency. Various governments of India, and two states, and many authorities including the National Highway Authority, have been trying to build an alleged highway for the past 13 years. It is actually a four-lane road between Delhi and Chandigarh, a distance of 250 kms. Chandigarh is my hometown and I like to use that road. This four-lane road, not a highway, has been built at the pace of nine kilometers per year, and even that is charitable, because by the time they had built the first 90 kms, the initial 40 kms needs to be repaved, and they are doing that again.
I planned a series of stories, asking how you build a four-lane road at nine kms per year with the might of the government of India, two agencies, one very rich and one relatively rich state government, the National Highway Authority of India, and the prime minister's promised support. All doors were slammed shut on us. The Haryana government Minister of Surface Transport said: "No, no these are official secrets. How can we tell you?" Then we realized there was no legislation by which you could ask for this information as a right. So, I decided if you cannot get the facts, throw muck on their own faces and embarrass them. We printed the names of all those who served as chief engineer for this project and stated how much of the road was built under each term. I think that we found that it was almost a rate of 15 kms per chief engineer. The fact is that even then we could not bring anybody to book. More money is now being thrown into the project. We are now told that in another couple of years the project will be ready, by which time I am sure the next 45 kms will need to be re-paved.
We look forward to the new freedom of information act, which will be flawed and have many restrictions because government systems do not open up so quickly. But we believe that things will change, it will make a difference. Also, some chief ministers in the country now realize that transparency pays; at least the notion of transparency pays. The Rajasthan state government has now come up with a freedom of information right. These politicians do not intend to open the door too much, but once they open it a little bit, leave the rest of us to push it open a bit more.
A second area is to do with corporate governance. The Indian corporate sector is one of the most non-transparent of all. Anybody who reads a prospectus and makes investments is asking for trouble - unless he has the benediction of many Gods on his head, or unless he has friends in the sector or in the banking community who will give him inside tips. The record of our media, by and large, in bringing transparency to corporate governance has been zilch.
The Indian financial press has not been able to bring in any notion of transparency in corporate governance, which is why you have strange cycles of market booms and busts, people borrowing money, robbing providence funds, selling off their wife's jewelry, and investing in markets and companies that then disappear. We tend to blame the security and exchange board and other regulatory bodies for that, but I think some part of the blame must lie also with us in the media.
The media has lost its way a bit in the last five years. Many of us seem to think that it is not the role of the media to bring in any transparency, to hold a mirror to the society, but to entertain. If thou shall not entertain, thou shall perish. Many of us were persuaded to that point of view because so much of the media was into entertainment, and the rest of us were beginning to look like fuddy- duddies.
This led to very frustrating times. There were times when you had exposed some real wrongdoing, but you were very shocked and surprised by the lack of popular response. You felt: why the hell don't people wake up. Or, maybe people don't want information, people don't want the mirror held up to them, they just want to be amused, entertained, tickled.
I think this is beginning to change because some of us also figured out why this was happening. There were two reasons: people were becoming cynical, people thought everybody was corrupt. People know corruption takes place, but also that such and such figure is very good at delivering. A bad leader is someone who does not take the money and does not deliver either. So, people were beginning to judge with a much lower bar.
The second reason was that, as an institution, the media was losing credibility in a big way. Failed journalists joined politics over the past ten years, mostly writing bad speeches for bad politicians or holding press briefings, instead of staying on the other side and asking questions. The audiences began to ask if these people were such "hot shots", why did they stay in the media for 20 years, only to become Johnny-come-lately press secretaries to ministers? Many journalists also went into the corporate sector in decision-making capacities as minor fixers or media managers. I think it led to a tremendous loss of credibility and, combined with increasing cynicism, created a situation, where the public was not responding to our stories.
I am happy to note (or maybe it is wishful thinking) that this has begun to change. I will give you one small example. There was a case in the state of Haryana where the director general of the police had been facing the charge for ten years of having molested a 14-year old girl who had come to play tennis at his club. He felt her up and the kid complained to the police. He then harassed her family and he arrested her younger brother for theft four times. Each time the court let the boy off but eventually the fellow went astray, and dropped out of school. The police chief then had the father fired from his job. The gentleman disappeared, and the girl committed suicide.
Ten years later, the CBI, our federal investigation agency, filed a charge sheet against the policeman, yet the state government refused even to suspend him from his job. My paper took up this issue. For a few days we saw no response. I was beginning to give up and to think that people did not care. Then, a couple of the other papers joined the campaign, and within a week the police chief had to go. The courts will decide whether he was guilty or not, but the principal that he could not remain in post while facing such a serious charge was accepted only because the media put on the pressure.
I think the media here is now beginning to find a balance between being entertaining and being interesting, and playing a fundamental role in trying to ensure transparency. We cannot change very much on our own, but if you hold the mirror to the society and the society is enlightened enough, then it will change itself. It will make corrections. I think it will also begin to change as we begin to get international competition in our business, with international standards. I think we are now getting out of the trough in which we had fallen.
... if you wrote to a government department, and a minister or his secretary choose not to tell you about something, if you did not find some disgruntled person in a key position in that department, your chances of getting information are zero.
Fang-Mei Lin
There are six points we should keep in mind when discussing the media and democracy, particularly in relation to my country of Taiwan. First, the media is itself an industry with vested interests, closely related to the information and communication technology, and to the entertainment industry.
Second, advertising is one of the major revenues of the media industry. It can be problematic when a specific company or industry accounts for a large share of a newspaper's advertising. For example, if this company acts illegally and is fined by the government, this would either not be reported at all, or in a low-key manner.
Third, some media owners and proprietors can also be legislators, as in Taiwan. They can pass or amend laws in their own interests. Typically, they favor of less regulation from the government.
Fourth, legislators can also be talk show hosts, as in Taiwan. These shows discuss current, mainly political, issues. The audience can call in to vote for one of two positions designated on the show. The host of the show may not express an opinion, however, as the host, he or she enjoys the privilege of setting the agenda and framing the issues to be discussed. Overall, we can say that the media industry in Taiwan is not a sector separate from either the public sector or the business sector. Actually, all three are intertwined.
Fifth, we should pay more attention to the role of the audience in building democracy. If the audience is to be regarded as consumers, do they have consumer rights if they are dissatisfied with media output? If they are to be regarded as citizens, are there institutionalized channels for expressing their concern with the performance of the media? The media can play the role of watchdog of the government. But who can play the role of watchdog of the media if it abuses its power?
Finally, we have relied on liberal theories to explain the role of the media in democracy. However, these theories were founded in the 18th and 19th centuries, when print was the major media of the time. Now, we are in the age of global capitalism, the age of the Internet, mobile phones, satellite television, and so on. Yet we still use the rhetoric of "freedom of speech" and the rhetoric of the "professional ethics of journalism". In Taiwan, as in many other democratic, capitalist, societies, we have freedom of speech, but we do not have the freedom of "not being bombarded and harassed by low-quality speech". It is about time we moved beyond freedom of speech to look for "quality of speech", and beyond journalistic ethics to look for regulation and governance of the media industry.
Having made these six points, I now turn to two issues. The first is about media and public policies, and the second is about the personal relationship between journalists and politicians. First, then, in their representation of public policies, the media resort to the logic of conflict, confrontation, and polarization. They simplify complicated issues into "for" or "against" something and someone. From a variety of opinions, they construct a binary opposition of two camps, and then assign a label to each of the two sides involved. Public policies become the politics of labeling.
The more a policy is given exposure by the media, the less accountability and good-quality discussion takes place. Instead, the involved parties, especially when legislators and social movement activists are involved, resort to antics and dramatic means to attract media attention. Eventually, the public becomes either too passionate about politics, or too cynical and apathetic about it. Rational and in-depth discussions of public policies are rare in the media.
The second issue I would like to deal with is the personal relationship between politicians and journalists. In Taiwan, some journalists cultivate close relationships with politicians and, vice versa, politicians court the attention and friendship of journalists. Journalists can serve as campaign advisors during an election, they write biographies for politicians, and sometimes there are sexual liaisons between them. Once the relationship turns sour, journalists might start bad-mouthing his or her former friend. This phenomenon has, so far, not received enough critical attention. Few people would ever think that the close relationship between journalists and politicians jeopardizes the objectivity of journalism.
I have been talking about the mass media. Media should really be taken as a broad term, which includes face-to-face communication, small-circulation and specialized media, such as the newsletters of civil society organizations, even daily conversations taking place in the family, the workplace and the community. I think we should keep in mind that the mass media is only one of the many instruments for communication.
The media itself is not communication. On its own, it cannot create mutual understanding. To foster democracy, we need what the German sociologist, Habermas, has called "communicative action", which relies on mutual trust among citizens and deliberation of public policies. And when we talk about the importance of accountability and transparency for democracy, these two principles should be applied not only to the government, but to the media industry as well.
Discussion
- A number of problems in the way the media operates in India and in other Asian countries, were identified - namely, the tendency to editorialize inside news stories; a tendency to publish unsourced stories; failure to crosscheck stories with third parties; and failure to give those criticized the chance to respond. Such aspects can be more damaging in emerging democracies or countries in transition. Editorializing was said to be a general development within the print media, in response to news and facts being provided instantly by the broadcast news on television and radio.
- The link between the degree of corruption in a society and the level of press freedom needs to be considered carefully, as there is no simple correlation. To some extent, the press will mirror the style and organization of existing institutions. A freer press can expose more corruption, suggesting that there is more of it, which may not be accurate. There can be limited corruption alongside a highly controlled press, such as China, and, again, there can be extensive corruption with a free press, as in India or Indonesia.
- In promoting the democratic role of the media, it was suggested that the Asian Center should consider running workshops focusing on the following six themes: laws and standards covering censorship, liability, licensing etc; techniques and training, for example in carrying out anti-corruption investigations; the impact of new media; dealing with irresponsible and incorrect media reporting; ownership issues, preventing undue influence and control; and creating an editors' forum across Asia so that editors could share information and experience aimed at protecting and establishing a free press.
- The influence that can be exercised by state bodies via their advertising budgets on the media needs to be monitored, particularly where papers are small and regional and could be dependent on advertising revenue for their survival.
- The media in some countries, such as South Korea and the Philippines, while free, can still be unduly influenced by political power, with media owners, for example, keen to stay on the right side of political leaders, or out to influence politics directly. Self-regulation of the media to prevent excesses and abuses, as in Taiwan, does not often work. But all agreed that media regulation must not be carried out by government. The Philippines was experimenting with an independent ombudsman. It was suggested that exposing and educating journalists from emergent democracies in the West does help.
- More effort should be made to ensure that Asian countries have information and news about fellow Asian countries as opposed to focusing on the West or crises. In India, for example, there is a free press, but relatively little coverage of Asian news, partly because it has become so set in its way in covering countries that speak English.
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