Yemen
Reminded Us Again: Indian Media Aloof From World Affairs
Saeed Naqvi
Werner Adam, the late foreign Editor of Frankfurter
Allgemeine, used to tell me a story about his meeting in Moscow with India’s
Ambassador, T.N. Kaul.
Kaul had barely started his conversation
with Adam when his secretary tip toed in and handed Kaul a slip of paper.
“Dobrynin on the line”, Kaul whispered to Adam. He then proceeded to have a
conversation with Anatoly Dobrynin, Moscow’s ambassador to Washington since
1962 and now Gorbachev’s principal adviser on Foreign Affairs, with almost
undiplomatic informality.
Adam was surprised that there were no
Indian correspondents in a capital where the embassy had extraordinary access
to the highest echelons in the Kremlin.
There were countless newspots where
Indian journalists could have had extraordinary access but newspaper proprietors
had no interest.
An idea was floated that a public
service multimedia be established. The independence of this outfit would be
insured by, say, a nine member Board of Trustees to be chaired by someone of
impeccable credentials. The Board would insulate the editorial from both, the
government as well as the market.
Prime Ministers like Rajiv Gandhi, Inder
Gujral, Atal Behari Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh moved some distance on this
project but were not encouraged by their respective bureaucracies. Manmohan
Singh actually set up a committee in the Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting to consider the proposal. How could a government department
conceive setting up an independent media?
By the same token, how can a Prime
Minister be involved in such an enterprise? There is only one explanation: because
India Inc is not high minded enough quite yet to singly or collectively sink a
billion dollars in what will, without any shadow of a doubt, be a great national
institution.
In the year he has been Prime Minister,
Narendra Modi must have acquainted himself with importance of the media in the
conduct of foreign affairs.
In a sense, the World Information Order
has continued to be divided between countries which control the sources of
information, the old metropolitan centres of control and countries which are
passive recipients of images and imperial punditry. It could not be helped when
these nations were coming out of colonialism. But for lively democracies like
India to acquiesce in information systems that obtained at the time of
independence is deplorable and demeaning.
The irony is that even as we remain
pulverized for reasons unknown, China, Iran and Russia, among others, have
mounted international affairs programmes, with reporters spread across the
world.
One would have thought stories emanating
from these societies would have no traction in a world accustomed to “western
style democracies”. But this clearly is no longer the case. Either Iran’s Press
TV, China’s CCTV and Russian TV are being directly watched in countries they
are not being blocked in or all the material they telecast is available on
websites, multiplying rapidly.
When global TV was launched during
Operation Desert Storm in January 1991, virtually as a follow up to the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the West had marched way ahead, armed with new
satellite technology. But within two decades, it had frittered away its
credibility. There was a simple reason for declining reliability. When wars
break out, the first casualty always is the truth. Propaganda takes over. Since
the US has been more or less in a continuous state of war, big or small, since
the Soviet collapse, the media has had to be in something of a propaganda mode.
Hence the declining credibility.
In 2011, the help of Al Jazeera TV was
enlisted for the attack on Libya because Arab audiences were no longer
believing CNN and BBC.
And now, the Western media has thrown up
its hands in despair over “Russia winning the publicity war in Ukraine”. First,
Western journalists embarked on a relentless one sided coverage. Later, they
began to blame Ukrainian journalists, “who are choosing patriotism over
professional standards”. This quote, from Olexander Martynenko, Director of
Ukraine’s leading news agency, appears in The Economist. The magazine proceeds
to ask the pithy question: “how much Ukraine’s journalists are aiding its cause
by forgoing impartiality is debatable”.
News is that all the citadels of Liberty
in the US and the European Union are contemplating projects to meet the Russian
propaganda challenge.
Recently, the Indian Navy performed a
remarkable rescue of 4640 Indians and 960 foreigners from Yemen. It is a shame
no Indian channel made any effort to cover the story. Much after the event, a
sheepish looking reporter paced the deck of a ship docked in Bombay as an
apologia for not having been where the action was. Ofcourse, it would be
dangerous to be in Yemen in the midst of air strikes. But how did that CNN reporter
reach Aden?
Wars are going on, not just in Yemen,
but all over West Asia. Ukraine is a classic example where Indian coverage could
have struck a balance between two hotly debated versions.
How long will our political class be
content with BBC, CNN and Fox News providing us news from Afghanistan, Iran,
Bangladesh, Maldives, Sri Lanka and Nepal? Soon elections in Hong Kong will be
in focus. Will the fact that there will be a heavy China angle to the story
stir the Indian media?
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