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Market, morals and the media

By Prabhat Patnaik

It is important for the media to display the same humaneness and concern for democracy in looking at the impact of `liberalisation' and `globalisation' as in exposing the doings of a Narendra Modi.

NOTWITHSTANDING THE fact that the media continues to draw into its professional fold some of the country's most talented people, who in turn continue to get their due recognition as individuals, its power as an institution has gone down greatly in India in the 1990s. Consider one example. The media, both the print and the audio-visual media (I can of course speak only of the English-language media), played a remarkable role in the coverage of the Gujarat carnage. With rare unanimity it exposed the complicit role played by the State Government in the attacks on the minority community and demanded the removal of the Chief Minister. And yet, notwithstanding this unanimity, the Chief Minister continues in office totally unfazed.

Let me cite another instance. The Tehelka tapes, whatever one's views on the ethics of the methods adopted in obtaining them, clearly showed powerful political figures and functionaries of the state accepting or negotiating kickbacks on presumed defence deals. The armed forces took the tapes seriously enough to take disciplinary action against several serving officers. Barring a relatively minor figure, no political figure, least of all the Defence Minister, has paid any price on account of the Tehelka exposure. Contrast this with the Bofors case which again was `broken' by the media and which brought down a Government. To be sure, the Government was brought down after its due tenure had expired, and that too through elections in which the Bofors issue played a central role; but even when the issue `broke' the Defence Minister of the country resigned and there ensued a split in the ruling party contributing to its eventual defeat. Media action in one case set off a chain of events resulting in the fall of a Government; media action in another case has had no such repercussions, though the cases are comparable in moral terms. This is what I mean by the decline in the power of the media.

The same decline is evident in a number of other cases of exposure. Why? One can have `internal', that is, media-centric, explanations for the phenomenon. It has been suggested, for instance, that the electronic media (and the print media too) tend to homogenise `calamities', which are seen increasingly to differ only in quantitative terms. This tends implicitly to obliterate the difference between `natural calamities' and, say, human-induced genocide, so that the audience begins to accept the latter, much as it accepts the former. It loses its capacity for feeling a sense of moral outrage. Such `internal' explanations, however, no matter how valid they may be, are not enough, since it is not only the media whose power has diminished. Such a diminution has also occurred for the entire intellectual community...

An explanation for this phenomenon that readily comes to mind is that this invariably happens under fascist governments. But saying this is not enough. We do not, after all, have a fascist state, a characteristic of which is a terrorist dictatorship. We still have liberal democratic institutions, though under a Government in which communal fascists predominate. Even they, however, are forced into alliance with a whole array of political parties that can by no stretch of imagination be called fascistic or undemocratic. How is it then that the media and intellectuals are afflicted by growing impotence even in such a situation?... The moral universe of the people has somehow undergone a change, which is what enables communal fascists to get away with their unconcern for media and intellectual opinion. Saying that a change has occurred in the moral universe does not mean people have ceased to be occupied with questions of morality; but a degree of confusion, uncertainty and fuzziness has got introduced into the moral conceptions of the people... People no longer have clear notions of `right' and `wrong'...

Why has this happened? An obvious reason that immediately suggests itself is the collapse, for the time being at any rate, of all dreams of building a society that is not based on private aggrandisement. This collapse was coming for some time, but it finally came with the collapse of the Soviet Union and of Eastern European socialism... The reasons for this general collapse of the socialist vision, or even of a distributivist-welfarist vision, have to do, in my view, with the process of globalisation of finance, which has robbed the nation-state, the only entity that in principle can play an agency role in social transformation and management, of the capacity to play such a role...

The emergence of international finance capital, based on the "globalisation of finance', undermines the capacity of the nation state to play any agency role, such as is enjoined upon it by all socialist and redistributivist visions. Any such role frightens globalised finance and threatens to trigger off a capital flight (and does trigger off a capital flight unless the `concern for the poor' is checked in time)... Even Governments which may otherwise have progressive or social democratic inclinations, finding their hands tied, make a virtue out of necessity, and justify their swallowing of the Bretton Woods line, by putting forward exactly the same argument, namely, that regressive policies help the pace of development. A veritable bloc therefore gets built up which puts forward this argument, giving it intellectual hegemony.

The media on the whole has fallen prey to this hegemony. It might appear at first sight, and that perhaps is the self-image of the media, that while it may be powerless on issues such as Gujarat and `corruption', it is extremely powerful in setting the `economic reform agenda'; but that is a chimera.

It is not the media that is pushing `economic reforms' in this country, but international finance capital, through agencies sympathetic to it such as the Bretton Woods institutions, and through the pressure exerted by advanced country Governments.

Thus, in fields where the media is on the same side as international finance capital, it appears powerful; but in fields where it strikes out on its own, upholding humane values and expressing concern for the poor and the suffering, it appears powerless. But its powerlessness in the latter case is the result of a process, the process of ascendancy of international finance capital over our economy, which the media, paradoxically, with a few honourable exceptions, has avidly supported. People's moral positions may have become less certain, but this does not mean they do not appreciate the role of the media in spheres where it does uphold morality.

To use this `moral capital' to acquire a more powerful role in society, it is important for the media to display the same humaneness and concern for democracy in looking at the impact of `liberalisation' and `globalisation' as in exposing the doings of a Narendra Modi. Otherwise, the loss of its power witnessed in the 1990s will continue unabated.

(Excerpts from a convocation address to the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.)

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