Photo: Chandu Mhatre
This post has been prompted by writer and contrarian Arundhati Roy’s assertion that many Western journalists based in India operate instructions of “No negative news” from their editors. The rationale behind the instructions seems to be India’s dramatic emergence as a giant investment destination for Western corporations. It is a controversial claim which may not be entirely without foundation.
Roy’s comments came in an interview with The Guardian’s Stephen Moss on June 5 and exercised Andrew Buncombe of The Independent enough to write a rejoinder yesterday.
Roy told Moss, “I have been told quite openly by several correspondents of international newspapers, that they have instructions – ‘No negative news from India’ – because it’s an investment destination. So you don’t hear about it. But there is an insurrection, and it’s not just a Maoist insurrection. Everywhere in the country, people are fighting.”
Against this backdrop, let me describe in simplistic and therefore inaccurate terms how the foreign media coverage of India has evolved over the last four decades. It has evolved from poverty porn of the 1970s and early 80s to exotica/conflict porn of the 1980-90 decade to prosperity porn of 2000 and beyond. In short, correspondents have practiced journalism that they can easily understand for themselves and interpret for the largely uninformed readerships of their respective countries.
If foreign correspondents in New Delhi, a species to which I once belonged, are expressly told by their editors to write only what we used to call “sunshine stories”, I suspect that is because it is an easy sell. For instance, sometime ago multibillionaire Mukesh Ambani’s reputedly billion dollar multistoried home in the heart of Mumbai was a preferred subject of this prosperity porn journalism.
Even as I write this I also read a story The New York Times’ website today about a Moroccan style home of Kawal Singh Ahluwalia, a former chairman for South Asia of the marketing research firm A. C. Nielsen. The story casually mentions that a bed in his house made from the wood fallen from trees was once used by the singer Sting. That Sting slept in that bed is mentioned as if by that one act of the singer’s behind touching it the bed acquired rare sanctity. I see no relevance of that piece of information otherwise.
But then the same Times also had a story yesterday about the iconic Indian IT giant Infosys coming under a federal investigation over accusations of misuse of business visas.
The point is newspapers these days are like the Gujarati thali (Those who do not know what it is look it up here) which serves a mix of vegetarian food that is sweet, spicy, sour and pungent but never bland. People no longer read newspapers for just substantive information and credible perspectives but also for entertainment and out of aspirational voyeurism.
Journalism is no longer a profession that can be practiced in a hermetically sealed moral echo chamber whose inmates are forever protected from the vagaries of the world outside.
It is entirely possible that foreign correspondents in Delhi are told by their foreign desk to look the other way poverty buttonholes them on the streets of Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad and instead focus on what goes on behind the glistening glass and steel exteriors of corporate offices. One good thing about the mirrored frontage of corporate offices is that they cannot pick and choose whose reflections they capture. It does not discriminate between an Armani clad CEO of walking in and a deformed beggar hobbling behind. I am not saying that someone might not invent a mirrored glass that can make that distinction and erase unwanted images but until that day...
