New Delhi, Feb 26: A good friend who has spent more than half a century in the press and is worried about standards in the profession has asked me what I think of New Journalism. He makes no secret of his attitude towards it. He finds it too flippant, too mercenary and too ready to sacrifice basic principles.
Virtually all societies are divided between those who believe things are going to the dogs and those who think that they are getting better. The young generally take the rosy view while the old wail and whine at the fall in the sense of values. I am not qualified to pronounce on the issue. My age places me among the fogeys but I am hesitant to assert that standards are falling, knowing the games that the owners of newspapers, whether "national" or provincial, whether big, medium or small, have played.
We must take into account certain basic factors. The first is that in times of rapid change, people are more concerned about opportunities than about values. As an old punster put it, when getting on is what matters, you don’t bother too much about getting honour and getting honest. It is societies in which rewards are rather limited that are prone to lay emphasis on uprightness. More prosperity may not necessarily mean greater social morality. If it did, America would not have had Enrons and the like.
We in India are going through a period of rapid economic and technological change. The smart and the adventurous have never had it so good. Society as a whole has not found it too difficult to bid good-bye to virtues like thrift and non-indulgence which long centuries of economic self-denial had taught us to cherish. This is not to deny that there have been some periods in our history, like the Gupta period, the Chola period, Akbar’s reign and the rule of Krishnadeva Raya in Vijayanagar when public servants and merchants displayed an exemplary ethical code. That is why such ages are regarded as golden ages. A Chinese pilgrim who visited India during Harsha’s reign was wonderstruck at the safety of our highways and remarked that a damsel of sixteen carrying a bag of gold could walk untouched from Patna to Purushapura (the modern Peshawar).
The last nine decades of British rule in India were psychologically a most interesting period in our history. Economically we were stagnant, but far-reaching technological and intellectual changes were taking place. Some jobs opened up in the new industries like textiles and the railways and telegraphs. But they hardly compensated for the loss of employment suffered by the setback in agriculture and the closure of the door of military service. As a self-defence mechanism we developed an elaborate ethical code. Throughout the time of the freedom movement our values were an amalgam of the Victorian prudery of England and the semi-ascetic morality preached by Tilak, Gokhale, Lajpat Rai and Gandhi.



The Indian press was a great custodian and propagator of this morality. As an editor, K. Rama Rao, remarked once, journalism was one of those professions in which one could directly take on the foreign rulers. Hence the close relationship between the editor and the politician. Many eminent editors were prominent in politics and many politicians started journals of their own. They wrote under their own signature and manfully went to jail or forfeited the deposits that the government demanded of them as a means of economically silencing them. A hostile political environment, limited capital investment, negligible advertisement support (all of which in turn limited the options in regard to the purchase of equipment), comparatively high cost of raw materials, the controls imposed on their supply, and a meagre potential of subscribers — all these erected a formidable wall behind which the editor and publisher had to operate.



One by one these restrictions have loosened. The middle class has grown in size and has more money to spend on necessaries and luxuries. The advertisement potential has increased dramatically. Newsprint and printing paper are no longer rationed in the old rigorous way. Trade unionism is no longer so dominant in the media organisations. Above all, the technology of printing has undergone a spectacular transformation. Composing with lead type or hot metal equipment locked up a lot of capital and occupied space. The advent of electronic printing freed newspaper publishers from the need to own their own printing presses. Earlier, printing an extra colour meant that the whole sheet had to be fed one more time to the press, adding to time and cost. Block-making was frightfully expensive. Advances in offset and digital colour printing technology have enabled the use of illustrations on a most liberal scale.



There is another major challenge which the print medium has had to cope with and that is television. Whatever newspapers and magazines can do, television can do too, and do it a little better. In the matter of providing entertainment for longer hours, indeed round the clock, it is miles ahead. The need to compete with television for the affections and the purse of the public is the biggest challenge that the press entrepreneurs and journalists have had to face. In no country has the press yet been able to work out a way of co-existing with television. India is no exception. The rise of personality journalism and the tendency to do away with old-style, detailed reporting are both due to this rivalry.



Although there may be dedicated, round-the-clock news channels, the total volume of news that a TV channel purveys is much less than what a standard newspaper can give. Secondly, news on television has to have a visual component, while not all news events are necessarily visual happenings. Newspapers are more portable and are more serviceable for documentation and reference. But these advantages are nullified by the greater visual appeal of television which is what brings in the advertisement income.



There is currently a sub-debate in the press on the morality of tying up news with advertisement, which one major newspaper has attempted. When discussing this point, we must not forget that many newspapers have avowedly had political affiliations. If they can trade their news space for power, it might be asked why they cannot do it for money.



The excesses of New Journalism, some of them very adolescent, are due to the competition with television. The elderly dowager is trying to be as coquettish as the new young damsel in town. It will take some time for editors to find an answer. In America and Europe the two media have begun to be run by their own specialists, whereas here we see the same faces on both the media. Given some more time the problem will be sorted out. While television and the print medium both provide information as well as entertainment, the emphasis of TV will be basically on entertainment and the task of purveying information will be borne more and more by on-line and paper-based journalism.



As for my professional colleague’s question what I think of New Journalism, I would say that the New Editor has not done anything that the old editors from Hicky down to Baburao Patel, Karaka and Karania had not thought up. He has candidly disowned the illusion that the press is an agent of socio-economic change and declared that it is the salesman of the supermarket of consumer goods and globalised services.


Bureau Report