Fading magic of news

I am a sucker for news and I think the newspaper is one of the most glorious things invented. As a child, I was fascinated by two things. One was a bioscope, a little machine that a ragged old man brought every week. One paid him four annas and watched fragments of old films where Nargis and Madhubala merged into a blur of fantasy.

To this weekly desire, there was a daily need — the newspaper. In those days, waiting for a newspaper was a ritual of expectation. Sometimes the newspaperman threw it at the gate and my dog and I ran to fetch it. Adults had the first claim to it and then it was handed over to children, who feasted on the sports page and the cartoons. These were worlds of action which a dreamy nine-year-old could never have enough of.
Reading a newspaper was an act of trust. I still remember men sitting on a khat in a dhaba reading news aloud among slurps of tea. News like tea was hot and strong. News was nutrition, it provided gossip, stories, reports, and the daily calories of democracy, as a wise observer put it.
Today news has lost that innocence. I admired journalists like Frank Moraes, S.K. Gurunathan, Shiva Rau. I always felt that editorial was an act of integrity and the editor was the new shaman, the wise man who understood and interpreted the world.
My anger with the newspaper today is not just that news is tainted. It is something more insidious. Today tainted news and tainted journalists are seen as a part of the commodification of a newspaper. News and newspeak have merged and editors see little reason for separating the two. Earlier, at least, paid advertisements had a little footnote, like a medical warning. Today news and paid news have fused in the same lethal way that civilian and military violence have merged.
It is this taken-for-granted-ness that I find frightening. In fact, owners of newspapers see it as an opportunity. Today a newspaper is seen as space to be leased out. It seems to make little difference whether the space is for editorials or advertisements. Then came a brain wave which hybridised the two, offering “advertorials”. This questions the very integrity of language and the sanctity of the word which the world of news did so much to sustain.
Today a leading newspaper establishes paid content services. It offers to openly send journalists to write about events. I see it as a blatant violation of the social contract between news and the reader. But I realise I was naïve. The contracts have moved laterally. They are between politician and the news-owner. News is produced in PR packages, written and canned by agencies. The journalist on the beat is often irrelevant and defenceless.
One thing that destroyed this world in a normative sense was the introduction of supplements. They were attractive inventions which added colour to the grey solidity of the news forma. But the supplement blurred languages. It was corruptible space, open to experimentation, susceptible to trivia, a suburb of news to be leased out for less serious and profitable concerns.
Today the disease has spread inward and news is becoming a supplement to power. Maybe this is why my students prefer comics and science fiction. These genres at least retain the quality of inventiveness and tautness of morality plays.

I have been reading about the Niira Radia episode and watching the whole soap opera. What I felt deeply was the rage of people who felt cheated. They looked up to icons like Barkha Dutt or Vir Sanghvi and then watched with horror as the icons became self-destructive iconoclasts. It became worse as people who one saw as professional tried to put the Humpty Dumpty of their reputation together again. One felt they could have been repairing a piece of plumbing or indulging in cosmetic repair. There was no guilt, no sense of ethical repair, no sense of loss. But more than the
journalists indicted in the Radia tapes, it is Niira Radia who is a sociological event.
What stuns one is her contempt for journalists and the way she cajoled and ordered senior journalists. She was demanding made-to-order news as she would order a dish to personal taste. The sadness is she was treated like a diva, the empress as procurer, imperious “in her Roberto Cavalli gown”. This very description made her look like a cut-out figure, a creature from nowhere, so utterly blatant and yet unembarassed as if she represents the new icons and exemplars of our time. Her sense of power and
consumption makes her indifferent to whether she is buying people or commodities. In fact, the tapes indicate she is more loving about her new Jaguar than some of the people she is contaminating. Everything is instrumental, buyable and calculated. It is as if ethics has been cloned out of her.
By this time, the reader might ask if there is anything optimistic. I think there is. Individuals and their idealism have always made the difference. I think of Arun Shourie in the Emergency era, the sheer tenacity of a P. Sainath; I keep hoping the likes of Claude Alvarez would return to journalism. They add sanity, ferment and integrity to news.
I still wait every day for my stack of newspapers, my TV news. Despite my jaundiced eye, I still have to hope that idealism and integrity are not dead,
that there is still news which is unadulterated. All I can do is hope and salute those who keep my hopes alive.

The writer is a social scientist