A young lawyer wanted me to explain why I preferred self-regulation to statutory regulation for the media. He was deeply worried about the state of broadcast journalism, and most of his examples of irresponsible behaviour of the fourth estate were prime-time broadcasts over the last couple of years. He pointed out instances of victim blaming, trial by media, and scant respect for facts.
There is a missing element in his argument. The idea of self-regulation, as refined and modified subtly by the Leveson Inquiry in Britain, and which I agree with, is not devoid of any statutory underpinning. In what way statutory underpinning is vastly different from state control, censorship, and propaganda models has been explained in many scholarly papers since Leveson’s recommendation.
The scope of self-regulation
Self-regulation goes beyond the statutory arrangement by having a mechanism for continuous reflection on the craft of journalism. This arrangement is not restricted to ensuring fairness and accuracy in reportage alone; it also actively provides a platform for both readers and journalists of this newspaper to wrestle with a range of dilemmas. A newspaper does not just provide credible information; inquisitiveness, reading pleasure and visual experience are of equal importance. No statutory framework can address all these elements.
These additional layers of self-regulation work only when we have both questioning readers and a responsive editorial team. One of the issues that poses an additional burden on good journalism is the contested aspect of our history. For instance, there was a query about why the newspaper referred to the place of recent protest in two different ways: Bhima-Koregaon and Koregaon-Bhima. The journalists who handled these sensitive reports had a clear answer. Koregaon-Bhima is the official name of the village as per the Census, and that is what this newspaper uses when referring to just the place. But the battle between the British East India Company and the Peshwa’s army 200 years ago was fought on the banks of the Bhima, and is referred to as the Battle of Bhima-Koregaon.
Criticism is not seen as a flood that washes away everything in its path when the sluice gates are opened. What I have witnessed over the past six years is that journalists — reporters and the desk — in this newspaper absorb and internalise diverse criticism and evolve the standards of journalism. For instance, when I flagged the unintended consequences of literary allusions in headlines in “ Do literary allusions hurt? ” (Jan. 1, 2018), the Weekend Sport desk not only deliberated the issue threadbare but also explained how they came up with the headline “ Into the Heart of Darkness ”.
Giving headlines
The darkness in Joseph Conrad’s novel is about a range of discomforting questions and the desk felt it captured the nagging questions that confront the Indian cricket team. The novel’s title helped to invert racism to hint at South Africa’s own apartheid experience. The desk was aware of Chinua Achebe’s criticism and the theory of interpretation of text. The team said that the author of a headline cannot limit the text’s meaning just to his or her own original intention. It referred to Derrida: “A text... is no longer a finished corpus of writing, some content enclosed in a book or its margins, but a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential traces.”
The desk took care to separate the geographical region, South Africa, which was dealt with in a different story on the page titled “Lay of the land” that gave the various venues of this fixture. However, the main story dealt with the mental preparation of the team and the fear in its mind given its dismal record in South Africa. The team felt that “Into the Heart of Darkness” was evocative enough to bring out a range of issues.
The column irked one of the readers. He felt that instead of examining whether the headline was relevant to the content, or whether the two matched, the column chose to mention a host of literary stalwarts. The challenge was not a routine journalistic one, but one that flows from literary allusions. An excursion into literature was thus inevitable.
readerseditor@thehindu.co.in
