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Press Doldrums (Mumbai Market)

About a month ago, the Sunday Times of India arrived at my door with its entire front and back pages devoid of news. No, it was not the return of the censor we knew and came to adore during Indira Gandhi's Emergency. It was an ad -- another ad -- for one of the dotcoms that are popping up everywhere like weeds.

Now as ads go, this was certainly an effective one. You noticed it. In fact, you couldn't help noticing it. That I remember it a month later is itself testimony to its effectiveness. But to a certain sort of Times reader, and I suppose I am one, this was one more nail in the coffin of a newspaper we once respected. Each nail has been greeted with wails and protests, some in the form of anguished letters to the editor. But each nail has been unerringly hammered in anyway. The result is that the Times is today a paper that those who knew it even six or seven years ago would recognise only with difficulty.

Which is broadly OK. All of us move and evolve as the years roll by, and the Times of India need be no exception. But consider what we have lost as it has evolved.

The entire op-ed page is now no more than a grab-bag of recycled fluff from the wire services or from papers abroad. So where there was once space for two or three columns analysing or commenting on the news, you now find articles on the intricacies of flirting, or the irritation caused by proud dads at parties. Nearly never anything more substantial.

The carnage spilled over onto the edit page. Where once we had a 'Current Topics' section of brief musings to provoke some thought, there is now a daily interview. Daily, and too often vacuous. A space for a short opinion piece across the seventh and eighth columns vanished last November, taken over by a daily 'Speaking Tree' column on esoteric spiritual issues. Daily, and far too often vacuous. The main centre article is now the only space in India's largest newspaper for comment, opinion and analysis.

It doesn't stop at the edit/op-ed pages. Across the board, on every page, hard news is more and more an endangered species. One recent front page had a large report across the bottom singing the virtues of the new search engine on the Times's own dotcom site. Presented as if such virtues were news. For several days, a box in the middle of the front page urged you to take the search engine challenge: the Times's own engine against Yahoo, as if anyone cared anyway (do you really care if Yahoo comes off second best in a search for 'Lara Dutta'?). The visits of minor music celebrities to the Times's own music store in Bombay also turn into news. There is the now obligatory, if always meaningless, Net poll. So every day we wake up to the 'news' of what percentage of about 7000 mouse clickers have said 'Yes', or 'No', or just 'I'm Too Bored to Know', to some inconsequential and too often inane question.

And then there are the ads. If the front page fake was unusual, there are full page ads every day for everything from mobile phone services to more dotcoms to cars. Not that full page ads are themselves repulsive, but three or four or five in one paper? Sometimes in a row? Besides, every other page is also plastered with ads. So you are left to search for the real news, hoping that when you find it, it isn't an ode to a search engine.

And be still my thumping heart, I haven't even mentioned Bombay Times (or Pune Times, or Baroda Times, you get the picture). As a collection of gossip, fashion, agony-aunting and party set mugshots, this supplement is unsurpassed. Which is good, because even thinking of what something that surpassed it would look like gives me a headache.

Being the largest, the Times has driven most other papers in the same direction. So what we have in the Indian press is a steadily growing menu of gossip, Internet polls and fluffy supplements. Actual news gets harder and harder to find. The few newspapers that still live up to that term are described as stodgy and unattractive. Calcutta's Statesman is one; and sure enough, a recent column sneered that it was India's worst newspaper. At least it still gives you news, not searches and clickable inanity.

Before you are fully persuaded that this is a pointless lament about our newspapers, let me make a small point. No doubt all these changes are driven by the urge to corner the market. (In fact, Times editors in each city are no more called, as they used to be, Resident Editors. In Bombay, the lady in charge is the 'Editor (Mumbai Market)'). No doubt the publishers want to make their profits as any other businesses do. All of which is fair enough.

Except that the press is not quite like other businesses. We envisage a role for the press in a functioning society: one that informs and protects us, exposes those who subvert it, asks the questions that must be asked to keep such a society thriving. This is why our Constitution guarantees the press its freedom.

It does not, you will note, guarantee profits to businesses.

So when newspapers abdicate their responsibility to deliver the news and turn instead to films and fashion, we might all worry a little. Because that will only hasten us towards anarchy.

Driving to Bhubaneswar the other day, my travelling companion and I were chatting about Orissa's situation. The devastating cyclones last October, the poverty, the apathy of governments that knows no party boundaries, the state of the press and more. Musing about that last point, he asked: Is there any press institution in the country that analyses and then follows through on issues? That goes beyond just reporting an incident and moving on to the next?

The answer? Well, take just a short list of celebrated crimes in the last several years. Whatever happened to the tandoor murder case? The cash-filled suitcase that Harshad Mehta claimed to have handed to Prime Minister Narasimha Rao? The proceedings against various Advanis, Thackerays and Uma Bhartis for the demolition of the Babri Masjid? The glaring absence of any action against some of those very people for their roles in rioting? Why did the hawala case meander into nothing despite diaries full of as much hard evidence of corruption as you are ever likely to get? Why has the Bombay bomb blasts case dragged on for seven years now with no end in sight; who will account for the lives of those incarcerated those seven years who will be found innocent? What about Sukh Ram and his bedsheets full of bundles of cash, millions of rupees worth?

We read about each of these when they happened, but rarely, or never, since. No wonder Sukh Ram is still an elected and powerful politician in Himachal Pradesh. No wonder Advani is now our home minister, in charge of administering the very law and order he helped grind into the dust of that mosque. No wonder Harshad Mehta writes avidly-read columns and Narasimha Rao writes bestsellers.

And no wonder I could only reply 'No' to my Orissa travelling companion's questions.

If we had a press less obsessed with Net polls, perhaps the Advanis, Raos, Mehtas and Thackerays would at least be facing the trials they have so deftly side-stepped. Editors might give that a thought, whether in the Mumbai Market or elsewhere.

Note: I inadvertently deleted several recent responses, some before reading them, the rest before reacting. If you wrote to me between Tuesday May 16 and now, it's likely yours was one of the messages I deleted; so I would be grateful if you sent it again. (In particular, there was someone who wrote to ask about getting in touch with the KNB school in Phaltan).

Apologies and thanks.

Dilip D'Souza