In this exclusive excerpt from Vinod Mehta’s new book titled ‘Editor Unplugged: Media, Magnates, Netas and Me’, the author takes on the complexities of corporate houses investing in the media and its fallout on the free flow of information. He says corporate funding or ownership is necessary to keep much of the media from going bankrupt, but cautions against ‘oligopoly’.
Mehta calls the book, which also has chapters on ‘The Ratan Tata problem’ and ‘Understanding Narendra Modi’, the “second and final volume of my autobiography”, an “unintended consequence of the first”. It is as engaging, frank and replete with sharp witticisms as Lucknow Boy
Am I scare-mongering? After all, no Murdoch clone is currently operating on the Indian media scene. Absolutely true. Regardless, two gentlemen deserve mention and watching. (There are others too, but these two will suffice for my purpose.) One is Mukesh Ambani. He is acquiring newspapers, TV channels and digital networks at such a pace we have no idea what his portfolio will look like next year. His media ambitions are a work in progress. If he and his younger brother, Anil—who also possesses a few odds and ends—combine their media strengths they could emerge as an unbeatable force. Even singly, for Mukesh Ambani to buy the Times of India Group—and much else—would mean spending loose change. (Mr Ambani’s growing control and alleged manipulation of the media has received some negative attention courtesy Arvind Kejriwal; it is a battle Mukesh will win in the long run, although he has been slightly bruised.) The second force, to a large extent, we are already familiar with. Samir and Vineet Jain, the landlords of Bennett and Coleman, have huge holdings in print, TV and radio. All three are backed by formidable managerial and marketing support. Indeed, it is the managers in Samir’s stable who are his pride, not the editors. But that’s another story.
In the last decade, Samir has extended his newspaper presence to nearly every state in the country. As a result the Times of India has become the world’s highest selling daily. A distinct pattern is observable. The Times, say, enters Bangalore. It introduces something Murdoch pioneered: invitation price, i.e., for the first year or so, the paper will sell at around Re 1 while the local leader—there always is a local leader—sells at around Rs 3. All hell breaks loose. BCCL is accused of unfair practices and ‘predatory pricing’; matters even reach the Press Council. The Times nevertheless persists with the price cut and mops up a significant part of the market. Eventually, it becomes the Number One paper in Bangalore. (One of the melancholy truths about readers I have discovered is while they swear to pay the extra rupee or two to keep subscribing to the paper they have been reading through generations, as soon as a cheaper option is available, they switch. At Outlook, I found a marginal increase in cover price resulted in an immediate drop in circulation.)
I now need to tread carefully because I am going to say a few words in praise of Samir Jain and BCCL. Editors and journalists outside the BCCL universe hate, and I use the word advisedly, Samir Jain. Part of it could be envy, part of it could be the unconcealed contempt Samir Jain has for competitors, and part of it could be his real and anecdotal disdain for editors. Possibly, Samir Jain overplays the disdain bit; PR has never been his forte. He could easily write a book titled How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.
Now the good word. The Times of India has won readers across the country not merely with ‘predatory pricing’ and dumbing down. In the last five years, the paper’s content has improved considerably, especially the news coverage. The Times devotes more space to news, has beefed up city and national reportage and analysis, provides detailed graphics and has a remarkably quick response time. A story which breaks in the late evening will get the full treatment the next morning. The opinion pages too, particularly on Sunday, combine the serious and the frivolous shrewdly. BCCL’s success therefore, goes beyond price-cutting.
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Since both Samir Jain and Mukesh Ambani, and a few other industrialists are poised to dominate Indian media, we need to consider the implications of such dominance on the free flow of information. Considering the alarm corporatization of the media and cross-media holdings cause, it is surprising that till date only one serious study has been commissioned to examine its consequences. In July 2009, the independent Hyderabad-based think tank, the Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI), published a 200-page report on the subject at the instance of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry. It was placed on the ministry’s website only after the Parliament’s Standing Committee pulled up the government for taking no action on the report’s recommendations.
The ASCI report’s main findings are blunt and worrying: it says ‘ample evidence of market dominance in specific markets does exist’. It argues for an ‘appropriate regulatory framework to enforce cross-media ownership restrictions’. The standing committee on information technology headed by then Congress MP Rao Inderjit Singh, warned that the issue of cross-media ownership ‘merits urgent attention’ and needs ‘to be addressed before it emerges as a threat to our democratic institutions’.
This is a very hot potato for any government. No prime minister wishes to annoy the Samir Jains and Mukesh Ambanis of our industrialist-friendly republic. Predictably, the ministry tossed the ASCI report to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to sit on. For four years TRAI did just that. Then in June 2013, the chairman of TRAI, Rahul Khullar, a no-nonsense bureaucrat with a reputation for calling a spade a shovel, announced an extraordinary proposal. In an interview to Prashant Jha of The Hindu he informed the paper that TRAI was all set to recommend the creation of an ‘institutional buffer’ between corporate owners and newspaper management. He said TRAI would ‘suggest ways and means to restrict cross-media ownership in line with practices in most other established democracies’. And then came the radical fantasy. The chairman revealed his recommendations would be based on the principle that corporate ownership of the media must be separated from the editorial management as the media serves the public interest.
Mr Khullar had no difficulty with corporates investing in multiple media platforms, ‘but the problem arises when the corporate wants to abuse the media it controls to project a coloured point of view for vested interests. There is a conflict of interest here.’ He promised to ‘recommend a special organizational structure in which the corporate owner—who may have multifarious interests—would have only a financial interest in the company restricted to owning of shares. The editorial operations would be under a different structure in which the corporate owner would have little say.’
I wish chairman Khullar godspeed. However, he has a better chance of discovering a discotheque on Mars than persuading, say, Mukesh Ambani to put cash into a TV channel or newspaper and then sit back as an interested spectator and watch his money disappear. It is common knowledge that investing in a media company yields very low, if any, returns. In fact, the corporate owner invests precisely because he longs to influence editorial policy. And for such influence he is prepared to risk a few million rupees.
Well-known media critic Ben Bagdikian summed it up nicely: ‘The desire of most corporate leaders is not to become the President of the United States but to influence the President of the United States.’
If corporatization of the media has created a scare, the TRAI chairman’s roadmap provoked equal disquiet. The blast came from a veteran editor, R. Jagannathan, currently guiding the part-Ambani-owned website Firstpost. In a passionate polemic titled, ‘Why TRAI Is Utterly Wrong about Cross-media Ownership’, Jagannathan took on Khullar. ‘But freedom is not threatened only by corporate houses;’ he declared, ‘it is threatened by politicians, government, criminal gangs and regulators like Khullar . . .’
Jagannathan argued that ‘freedom of speech is not restricted to individuals: the constitution offers the same freedom to corporate houses. If private parties can own a bank, or a coal mine or property, they can own a media house too.’ He concludes, ‘The government’s main purpose in talking about the evils of cross-media ownership is to ensure that each media segment remains unviable and in need of government support. Media freedom will then be doubly imperilled.’
Another writer calls for a laissez-faire type of market environment in which the big fish are allowed to gobble up the small fish. Such ingestion, according to this argument, ‘allows for economies of scale which enable media companies to absorb the cost of content and distribution over a large volume of revenue. This, in turn, allows companies to invest in better resources such as talent and technical equipment.’ Both writers present plausible justifications. Yet each is fl awed. Mr Jagannathan believes newspapers and TV channels have the same social and ethical value as a ‘coal mine’ and a ‘bank’. This is the marketer’s favourite proposition: a newspaper is no different from a bar of soap and should be sold as such. The second argument is an invitation to media accumulators lusting for market dominance to run rampant.
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We are faced with something like a Catch-22 situation. On the one hand, corporate funding/ownership is necessary to keep much of the media from going bankrupt. On the other, we have to ensure that corporate ownership does not turn into an ‘oligopoly’. (A United Nations paper defines the unattractive word: ‘When a few firms dominate a market, the larger scale media companies buy out the more small scaled or local companies and become more powerful within the market. As they continue to eliminate them through buy outs business competition is diminished, with the companies left to dominate the media industry and create a media oligopoly.’) Yes, we are back to the big fish swallowing the small fish syndrome. If tomorrow, Hindustan Times were to take over the Times of India and the Economic Times, HT would own 75 per cent of the daily paper market in India. Surely, that is not in the public interest.
The Leveson Inquiry, established in Britain after the Murdoch hacking scandal, deliberated on the Catch-22 conundrum: ‘Competition rules and impartiality rules are very important, but do not remove the need for ownership rules.
However, any rules inevitably act as a potential constraint on that market, so it is essential that they be proportionate and do not unnecessarily restrict growth and innovation.’ The solution is staring us in the face. We need a media regulator with a sensible and clear mandate. Simon Jenkins, one of Britain’s wisest media commentators, says, ‘The one sure defence against monopoly is to prevent it. Diversity of opinion demands diversity of platforms.’ Putting a number on the platforms required to ensure plurality is problematic. How much should a large group or corporate house be allowed to hold? We have been so busy fighting ideological battles on ownership that we have failed to focus on this crucial issue.
In the UK, the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, a statutory body which decides if a merger or acquisition is in the public interest, maintains a ‘third of the media market should be the limit for any one group’. Others maintain it should be around 20 per cent. Perhaps the TRAI chairman would be better advised to apply his mind to such matters than waste his time on creating phantom buffers. Lord Justice Leveson began his inquiry laying down the central assumption behind his probe: ‘Media plurality is the cornerstone of a healthy democracy.’ Champions of a free-for-all in India remind us that there are 84,000 print platforms in the country, while the nation’s capital receives sixteen English dailies every morning. Marvellous. While some bogus proprietors need to be weeded out, our strength is in our numbers.
As a free-press democracy we are blessed as far as media plurality is concerned. Think of magazines like Tehelka (before the ‘rape’ accusation sent Tarun Tejpal to jail), Caravan and Economic and Political Weekly. How they survive is a publishing miracle, but look at how they enrich and enliven public discourse, look at the new information they dig up. Think of the crazy ideas they occasionally espouse. If diversity is essential, we have to accept crazy ideas. They should be protected by law! All the titles mentioned above, interestingly, do not belong to large media groups. They live precariously, month to month. Small is beautiful? Think of Prabhat Khabar, a tiny independent Hindi daily from Jharkhand, and look at the brave journalism it prints—exposing Madhu Koda, breaking the Coalgate story and uncovering numerous cases of illegal mining. Think of Jan Morcha from Faizabad, tinier even than Prabhat Khabar, and consider the valuable work it does. I now present the case of the Pioneer, which I launched in Delhi and which is now in the hands of the BJP MP, Chandan Mitra. The paper’s editorial line need not detain us. However, for any person who takes a serious interest in politics, especially saffron politics, this small-circulation paper is indispensable reading. Not only does the reader get a rare insight into who is up and who is down in the Sangh Parivar, he also gets the last word on intra-BJP feuds. If it was to go under, even a pseudo-secularist like me would protest.
Let me quote the slayer of Rupert Murdoch, the editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger. ‘The inquiry [Leveson] would not have happened without plurality. The Guardian, an independently owned newspaper, supported by a trust whose only purpose is the sustenance of the paper, held another media company to account at a time when the police, the regulator and parliament were all reluctant to do so.’ The overwhelming case for media plurality in our broken republic cannot be overstated. We can legitimately argue that even when a small newspaper dies, democracy dies a little. Walter Lippmann, possibly the wisest, most perceptive columnist in the last sixty years, noted, ‘The theory of the free press is not that the truth will be printed in any one instance but the truth will emerge from multiple sources.’
(Excerpted with permission from Penguin Books India from Editor Unplugged: Media, Magnates, Netas and Me by veteran journalist Vinod Mehta)
