Shaan Kashyap
“There are lies, damned lies, and statistics”, this phrase popularised by the American writer Mark Twain can help us ingress into the problem of news editorial line. Media which was first called the ‘fourth pillar of state’ by Lord Macaulay has been hanging on to the decorated title without justifying it. There is an urgent need to interrogate it.
Especially in India where we continuously grumble about the
proactive participation of the corporate in media houses, editorial freedom is a rarity. However, when a full 24×7 news channel was floated by Rajya Sabha in 2011, it appeared as a silver lining in dark clouds. Rajya Sabha TV (RSTV) was to be owned and operated by the Rajya Sabha Chairman, i.e.
Vice-President of India. It implied zero advertisements and thus no corporate involvement. Consequently, news content had to be impartial, exhaustive and objective. However, former Vice-President Hamid Ansari and his deputy Gurdeep Singh Sappal acting as the CEO watched over the mutation of RSTV in a Left-Liberal mouthpiece. The channel turned noxious after 2014 with the entry of NDA Government, and editorial line was crafted to sharpen the attack and take an anti-government position as a whole.
Where It All Started?
Launched on August 26, 2011, RSTV conceptualised programmes in different segments of news, analysis, documentary, talk shows, etc. A mini-series of 10 episodes on the making of the Indian Constitution called Sanvidhan was beautifully rendered through the channel and became highly popular.
However, RSTV soon became a consortium of Left-leaning editors and anchors who bolstered their agenda by having similar ideologically bound experts in the panel discussions on news analysis. This became evident when in June, 2017, four guest anchors who were associated with the channel for long were told to discontinue. The decision came after sensing a possibility of the change of guard after the election of new Vice-President. These guest anchors included M.K. Venu (editor of The Wire), Bharat Bhushan (editor of Catch), Govindraj Ethiraj (former editor-in-chief of Bloomberg UTV), and Urmilesh Singh. Before this development, another guest anchor Siddharth Varadarajan who used to host a talk show called ‘Indian Standard Time’ had quit in April, 2017. Varadarajan is also an editor of The Wire. Unsurprisingly, all these guest anchors have for long defined and displayed their ideological leanings in the past. Varadarajan, as the editor of The Hindu, was sacked in the past after he was blamed for ‘continuous violations of the framework of the values (of The Hindu) while handling industrial relation on the business side and on the Editorial line’. The pertinent question is why such anchors were engaged at all.
The reproduction of an agenda driven journalism was carried forward by Gurdeep Singh Sappal and it became more scathing in its attack on government after May 2014. One could easily see recognisable faces appearing on and off on the daily news analysis programmes, namely, The Big Picture and Desh Deshantar.
One of the perturbing sides of RSTV was its growing affinity to solo academic leanings. It has been continuously observed that academics and faculty members from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) were getting more air time on the channel in comparison to others. There are more than 40 Central Universities and various institutions of national importance in the country. Why academics from one institution were preferred over all others for being invited as ‘experts’ in panel discussions must be interrogated. One vindication for this exercise can be easier accessibility of scholars in New Delhi, but scholars from Delhi University and Jamia Milia Islamia have also been neglected. Moreover, experts from different institutions could have been linked through video conferencing facility which has not happened in the past.
Foul Play
One can sense a foul play in this design around JNU. It is so much so that the only historians who could be seen participating in these discussions are Mridula, Aditya Mukherjee and Sucheta Mahajan (JNU). These three historians have been earlier called upon to advisory panels for writing the History of Congress party. Mridula Mukherjee was appointed as the Director of Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML, Teen Murti) in the past during UPA-I and her tenure attracted a lot of controversy as well. Their academic mentor Bipan Chandra remained a Congress Party partisan throughout his life and was known for his closeness to Communist Party of India (CPI). Unsurprisingly even Bipan Chandra was appointed as the Chairman of National Book Trust (NBT) during UPA regime and RSTV ran exclusive show to commemorate his death.
The story goes on. RSTV runs a show called Discourse which telecasts important public talks and memorial lectures which are of general interest and address issues of larger public concern. However, RSTV telecasted nine episodes of different lectures in the Discourse series which were delivered in a single conference. The conference was again organised by Mridula and Aditya Mukherjee titled ‘Political Economy in South Asia’ at JNU in January, 2017. The nine episodes had lectures from participating academics in the conference, namely, Shirin Moosvi, Aditya Mukherjee, Y Subbarayalu, Sanjay Garg, Sanjay Kumar, V Selva Kumar, Suchandra Ghosh, Najaf Haider and Shigeru Akita. The content of all these lectures were highly
specialised and also it mattered little to university students across India since Political Economy is almost a dead discipline now.
Debatable Decisions
How does one then explain this decision of broadcasting the lectures over a period of two months as if no significant public talks took place in New Delhi during that time? Does this say something about the unwarranted preference some of the academics have been getting from the channel supposedly for their political inclination? Another show called Kitab which showcases discussion on some path breaking and significant books has a similar approach. Hosted by Purushottam Agrawal, the show has never come out clean on the fact that why some books are chosen over many others and who makes the decision about the selection of the books and the experts who talk about them.
The Way Forward
With Venkaiah Naidu at the forefront now, we can expect a revamp and enhancement of the channel. Gurdeep Singh Sappal has already resigned and Shashi Sekhar Vempati of Prasar Bharti has been given the additional charge of RSTV as of now.
The news culture under public broadcasters has suffered and
degenerated significantly in the past. What can be called as the Congress Culture of Indian politics has relied heavily on the direct intrusion of the institutions and mishandling their
credibility for political gains. Media in general and public broadcasters such as Prasar Bharti in particular have
suffered manifold due to this approach. However, as the New India is in making, we are optimistic that RSTV under the guiding light of Rajya Sabha Chairman will be redefined and repackaged in its approach to news and content analysis. We need to have lesser ideological interpretations of the news content and an approach for a more inclusive and diverse
voices on the panel discussions. There is an urgent need to also debase the news from the national capital and welcome the far distant voices from other centres.
Some of the ongoing projects under RSTV are appreciable. A
series called Virasat which by far has produced well researched documentaries on the lives of Rabindranath Tagore, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, and Major Dhyanchand, must be expanded significantly.
News also has its cronies who spread lies to establish their opinions as the only truth. RSTV had been high jacked by such cronies from JNU and Left-Liberal establishments in the past. We hope for the liberation of the channel and its alleviation to the excellence of news under the new leadership of Venkaiah Naidu.
(The writer is a Scholar of Modern History)
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