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NEWS VENDORS
The Vendors In The News
Sunder Singh Sabrang
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It is
the fake encounter syndrome all over again. Everyone knows fake
encounters happen with impunity, that they are sanctioned by
governments and top police brass, and everyone joins in a conspiracy
of silence and does not say anything about it. Now, it is fake news.
You think it is news, you think a journalist has written it, some
one at a news desk has edited it, some fact checker has done his or
her job and some editor has taken a call to publish it. In reality,
it is an advertisement masquerading as news, the owner has taken
money for it, the politician's lackey has written it and the editor
has either sold his soul or is too tame to squeak. |
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 For too long
now, everyone has known the industry's worst kept secret: it is
possible to bribe or buy journalists, it is possible to get
favorable coverage, it is possible to befriend a journalist or an
editor with liquor or money or sheer pretence of friendship and get
slanted stuff published.
Now, the Indian
media is dealing with a new situation: the game of bribery has moved
beyond the journalist.
At a recent
discussion on Zee TV's Punjabi channel programme Khabarsaar, former
editor of Punjabi Tribune Gulzar Singh Sandhu said the media in
Punjab
has entered a new realm of complete shamelessness. Newspaper owners
charged political leaders and parties huge sums of money for
positive coverage or promises of negative coverage of rivals or
blocking out stories that could harm the winning prospects.
Complete
newspages were sold, and talk of media packages did the rounds.
Everyone with anything to do with the media was aware of what was
going on.
It is the fake
encounter syndrome all over again. Everyone in India knows fake
encounters happen with impunity, that they are sanctioned by
governments and top police brass, and everyone joins in a conspiracy
of silence and not saying anything about it. Now, it is fake news.
You think it is news, you think a journalist has written it, some
one has edited it, some fact checker has done his or her job and
some editor has taken a call to publish it. In reality, it is an
advertisement masquerading as news, the owner has taken money for
it, the politician's lackey has written it and the editor has either
sold his soul or is too tame to squeak.
 With
intellectual dwarfs as editors and owners who haven't met a scruple
in life, we get newspapers that have divorced morality even in news
space sanctity.
In Britain, the
Advertising Standards Authority has rapped the London-based The
Daily Express for carrying a favorable article on a product
alongside an advertisement of it. The watchdog body said it amounted
to unfair treatment of the reader who may mistake the ad as a
genuine news article. By this standard, most mainstream Indian
newspapers would be in trouble.
Suring the last
Assembly and then the Lok Sabha elections, many newspapers and small
time channels in Punjab sold their pages and time wholesale to
political parties and politicians. Many Congress and Akali
politicians openly said later that the biggest beneficiary of the
new situation was the newspaper proprietor.
In a strange
case of not speaking up against fellow vocation people, most of the
media only spoke in muffled voices about the practice. None dared to
come out openly against it till recently.
It is not a new
phenomenon. After all, how many of the Indian newspapers had refused
the Congress advertisement campaign after the death of Indira Gandhi
that showed Sikhs as terrorists? It will be a roll call of shame
that is still pending, and the names that will ring out will include
some of the illustrious ones in Indian media.
Now, the game
has turned far more sinister than just selling news pages.
Advertisements have crept into news space with ever more innovative
ways hogging the kind of space no one would have thought possible
even ten years ago.
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Shamelessness is
hardly hidden. On its web site www.timesmedianet.com, Medianet has
declared to its prospective clients, who include PR agencies and
advertising and marketing professionals, that “our web-based
services will get complete support from our print publications like
The Times of India and The Economic Times, our TV news channel
(Times Now) and the advertising and event management divisions of
The Times of India group. Our editors would always be looking at
Timesmedianet.com to see what’s newsworthy. Great news made here
finds its way from the web to TV screens and print broadsheets.”
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Ironically, the
mass circulation newspaper brands that claim to lead the media
market in India are involved in this practice.
In such a
scenario, how can the deprived groups, weaker sections, threatened
minorities or fighting for identity ethnic communities hope that the
media will express their concerns? After all, when the mantra is to
earn money, then the only space that minorities can hope to get is
what will be left over after shameless open sale of news space.
One of India's
top journalists and Magsaysay Award winner P Sainath, often termed
the voice of conscience in Indian media, has recently helped expose
the scam in which Lokmat and Maharashtra Times newspapers were
involved in selling news space to politicians.
Lokmat—the
largest read vernacular daily in the country, according to the
Indian Readership Survey’s latest figures—is owned by Vijay Darda, a
sitting Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha, and his brother Rajendra
Darda is a minister in Ashok Chavan’s cabinet in Maharashtra. The
Maharashtra Times, on the other hand, is owned by the country’s
largest media group, Bennett, Coleman and Co Ltd (BCCL) that also
publishes The Times of India.
 Earlier, such a
menace started at the local level: Political paid content started
appearing during local elections in states such as
Punjab,
MP, UP and Rajasthan. Many newspapers have fixed prices for the kind
of coverage major contenders sought in various papers. By one
estimate, just the local newspapers in Telegu grossed more than Rs
300 crore through such tactics during the 2009 elections. The figure
comes from a member of the Press Council of India, the watchdog of
the print industry, who is also the secretary general of the Indian
Journalists’
Union. The
union, in fact, lodged a complaint with the chief election officer
in this regard, who issued strict warnings to publications.
The Times of
India has scoffed at the reports of P Sainath but has left the
matter at that. The reaction of the Dainik Jagran has been no
different. But denials notwithstanding, the allegations have been
flying thick and fast.
But it is not
just politicians who are buying the space to fool the readers. The
“paid content” menace is now everywhere. The practice is more
rampant among advertisers, who are ever anxious to catch consumers
off guard. “And what better way of breaking into their mind space
than disguising their brand messages as news, which is more credible
and convincing than raw advertising,” says Santosh Desai, managing
director and CEO, Future Brands, the custodian of various brands
owned by the country’s largest retailer Future Group.
 No points for
guessing that such content is priced at a premium, ranging from 10
per cent to 100 per cent, vis-à-vis regular ad rates and media
owners, some driven by their ambition to grow bigger and others by
the fear of extinction, have taken the route with no qualms. The
result has been the emergence of practices such as private treaties.
Launched by BCCL in 2002, the practice—which involved deals with
potential advertisers, who couldn’t afford expensive mainstream
advertising, in return for equity stakes in their companies—was
initially disparaged by rivals but in the past two years, several of
them have joined the bandwagon.
The bigger issue
is not whether private treaty clients manage to trespass into the
editorial space. The operative factor is that when news space is up
for sale — and we all know that it is, through private treaties or
other arrangements — there will be buyers for it, especially when it
serves their needs.
The Times of
India newspaper group also provides "other solutions". One such is
called Optimal Media Solutions (OMS), floated by BCCL itself. OMS,
as evident by the name, provides media solutions other than regular
advertising to companies and also runs a public relations division,
Medianet. Some of the solutions provided by OMS include displaying
promotional content as part of editorial content. When asked if a
more than a year-long series of articles on its premium skincare
brand Olay in Delhi Times, the city supplement of The Times of
India, was part of its paid marketing campaign, a spokesperson for
Procter & Gamble, India said: “It is well known…It is paid for…It is
a marketing initiative…”
 A senior
executive of one of P&G’s arch rivals, a Mumbai-based top
manufacturer of consumer products, also admitted to such initiatives
from his company. “They (the supplement) recently ran news stories
on a new initiative for one of our brands,” he said.
Shamelessness is
hardly hidden. On its web site www.timesmedianet.com, Medianet has
declared to its prospective clients, who include PR agencies and
advertising and marketing professionals, that “our web-based
services will get complete support from our print publications like
The Times of India and The Economic Times, our TV news channel
(Times Now) and the advertising and event management divisions of
The Times of India group. Our editors would always be looking at
Timesmedianet.com to see what’s newsworthy. Great news made here
finds its way from the web to TV screens and print broadsheets.”
 It is true that
The Times of India group is not the only media house doing this;
perhaps they have been more upfront about it. Another way that the
advertisers find, and that the newspapers allow, is discretely
called "intrusive advertising". In this, placement of ads is allowed
inside stories related to the subject matter, and the newspaper
claims that there is separation of news and ads. It is clear that
the newspaper is only using a fig leaf to cover its shame. We all
know what is being sold is not an intrusive ad but sacred soul of
the newspaper.
The advertising
corruption in publications undermines the basic principle of
democracy and violates the basic right to information of citizens of
the country.
16
December 2009
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