As frenzy over a young girl’s presumed murder three years ago gripped the media, I wracked my brains to think if I had ever met Sheena Bora while visiting my son when he lived in Bandra, Mumbai. No, his wasn’t a party-hopping circle. Had I run into Upendra Kumar and Durga Rani Bora when I used to visit Guwahati regularly? No, they were anonymous. What about Peter and Indrani Mukerjea during my NewsX programmes in Delhi? The programmes weren’t of much consequence. Surely Sanjeev Khanna and I must have clinked glasses on what the papers call Calcutta’s club circuit? No again. My clubs aren’t ritzy enough.
There would have been endless possibilities if only one of those answers had been “Yes”. A TV anchor would have jumped to conclusions and pontificated without any substance. Even as a lay member of the public, I might have pranced on the front page of The Asian Age or preened in interviews, spouting a load of psychological claptrap. I would have been the one-eyed king in the land of the blind for the TV discussions seem unbelievably jejune. With no expert knowledge or insight, the panellists are just a bunch of ordinary folk excitedly enjoying a good old-fashioned adda and playing amateur detectives without asking too many intelligent questions.
Instead, I am reminded of Britain’s Northcliffe Revolution. Even a century later the media in distant India can be deluded into imagining that a flurry of gossip and speculation about one disoriented middle class family’s bizarre doings are of national significance and that this obsession with trivia can justifiably take precedence over the Patel protests in Gujarat, China’s impact on the stock market, and yet another hitch in India-Pakistan relations.
The first Indian newspapers solemnly trumpeted a worthy cause. I don’t mean the Anglo-Indian press but indigenous publications like the Hindu (Madras), Calcutta’s Hindoo Patriot, Bengalee and Amrita Bazar Patrika, the Indian Patriot (Malabar), Allahabad’s Indian People and Leader, and the Tribune in Lahore. They were staid, even dull, to a fault. But their grand-old pioneers — C. Subramania Iyer, Motilal Ghosh, Kristo Das Pal, Madan Mohan Malaviya, Dayal Singh Majithia, to name some — were committed to pushing the nationalist agenda to the extent the “OB markers” of the British Raj allowed. OB (“out of bounds”) marker is a golfing term George Yeo, Nalanda University’s chancellor, borrowed when he was Singapore’s information minister, to describe the boundaries of acceptable (read permissible) political discourse.
Victorian England’s newspapers were not very different until 1896 when Alfred Harmsworth, the first Viscount Northcliffe, exploded with his Daily Mail to “deal with what interests the mass of people”. Giving people what he calculated they wanted rather than what was good for them maximised profits, an objective that has risen to new heights (or sunk to lower depths) in the tortured tale of broken families, ruthless ambition, avid greed, lust for power, sex, whispers of incest, filicide and murder in which very little is known and much is guesswork. Not content with salivating over squalid details, the media seems to have quickly decided who the killer is, who is lying, what the motive was. It’s a wonder Indrani’s biological father and Peter’s first wife haven’t been dragged in.
Is this what people want? Or have media managers cunningly pre-empted public choice? I suspect that newspapers today slavishly follow the idiot box because they are desperately afraid of losing audiences and advertising to the dazzling new god of infotainment. And the idiot box wants visual excitement that makes thinking unnecessary.
Northcliffe’s formula made this mix of cynicism and feeble-mindedness possible. He didn’t invent the horrid word “advertorial” — that is recent — but he did succeed in blurring the division between editorial and business, and establishing a connection between circulation and advertising rates. Given the emphasis on profit and without the challenge of TV, radio, Internet or any other form of social media, Northcliffe’s media was guaranteed a monopoly. The most powerful of his titles, the then formidable Times, brought down Herbert Henry Asquith’s government in 1915 on the charge of not equipping British troops facing the Germans with enough artillery shells.
Almost the last bastion of media conservatism, Britain’s National Union of Journalists complained at its 1946 annual conference that the growth of “commercial newspapers with millions of circulation has reduced news to the quality of entertainment”. There were sober exceptions, as there are in India. But here, too, it’s the excessively commercial newspapers with large circulations that revel in promoting vulgarisation.
In consequence, one doesn’t know whether there are more rapes nowadays or the coverage is just more exhaustive. Abuses certainly call for fullest exposure so that culprits are named and not just shamed but also severely punished. But the tragedy of the 23-year-old physiotherapy intern in Delhi must not be confused with high-profile scandals spiced with wealth and glamour. There is a clear distinction between a public cause and private titillation. However sorry one might feel for Sheena Bora, her sad end raises no public issues. The 2012 gangrape and murder did and does. Educated editors and anchormen are expected to be sensitive to that distinction. Otherwise, the information industry is left with neither fact nor fiction, but the mindless diversion of “faction”.
I confessed at the beginning to not knowing any of the stellar characters. I forgot to include Shamwar Pinturam Rai, who seems to be the main source of information. We’ve heard very little about him. But that’s only to be expected. He is only the driver. Lord Northcliffe created Britain’s popular press for drivers and their ilk. The same genre of coverage caters here to the prurience of their masters.
The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and author
