When colleagues who you respect express reservations about a choice you make, you take their opinions seriously and examine them.
In September 2012, when I became the Readers’ Editor of this newspaper, many journalist friends felt that I was opting for a job which was meant for seniors from the desk and not for someone who had spent nearly three decades in reporting, which I did even during my stint as an editor. Some opined that a newspaper ombudsman’s job was akin to a post-retirement posting of judges to commissions like the National Human Rights Commission or the Press Council of India: “They do have an adjudicatory role but it is not the ‘judicial’ role.” A news ombudsman deals with journalism but what he or she does is not journalism, they contended.
However, a couple of months into the job, I realised that a Readers’ Editor functions exactly like a reporter. My job is to cover my beat as comprehensively as possible. My primary beat is The Hindu , both the print and online editions. Since The Hindu operates within the larger media ecology, the global media environment became my secondary beat. I realised that my Terms of Reference did not constrict my area of work but have given a clear focus to what I should be doing. Given that the entire newspaper is my beat, the varied content generated by the newsroom expanded my area of work into hitherto unexplored subjects, and the four years went by in a wink.
Troubling observations While this expansion was satisfying, two specific observations were troubling. First, colleagues in the Organisation of News Ombudsmen were talking about this job being a lonely pursuit. I celebrate and cherish solitude, which is a state one voluntarily chooses either to think or to write. But I am wary of loneliness. I am always reminded of what Fali Nariman and Rajeev Dhavan wrote on the decision-making habits of the Supreme Court judges: “technically unpredictable, not uninfluenced by imitative cosmopolitan habits, conditioned by native instinct to a depth not yet predictable by the psychologist or documented even by a novelist, the dramatist or the fiction-writer, and suffering from an over-sensitive opinion of their lonely and unparalleled position.” (A disclosure: I have used this particular quote more than once.)
Second was the observation made by N. Ram in his article to mark the tenth anniversary of the Office of The Readers’ Editor at The Hindu . He wrote: “ The Hindu as an institution committed to the highest standards and values of journalism remains firmly committed to continuing and strengthening the office of its Readers’ Editor. It takes pride in being the first Indian newspaper to have this office and make it responsive to the needs of the time. However, it has mixed feelings about being the only Indian newspaper to have an independent and regularly functioning news ombudsman — for the simple reason that this does not seem to reflect well on the priorities of the Indian newspaper industry.”
While the mainstream print media is yet to warm up to the idea of institutionalised self-regulation, two relatively new digital news organisations have decided to address the concerns of their readers and establish a rectification process to deal with the questions of accuracy, fairness and standards of journalism. Scroll.in has appointed C. Rammanohar Reddy as its Readers’ Editor. The Wire has announced the appointment of Pamela Philipose as its Public Editor. Dr. Reddy and Ms. Philipose are both my seniors in the profession.
In my other avatar as journalism teacher, I have used the writings of these two outstanding journalists as models of good journalism. In 1998, after the Pokhran and Chagai nuclear tests, Dr. Reddy, who was then the economics writer for The Hindu , did an excellent three-part series titled, “The wages of Armageddon.” I consider it to be a fine investigative report. The series did not rely on any of the surreptitious gadgets, but it was a meticulous calculation of the cost of having a nuclear weapons system. This included not just the weapons cost but also the cost of the delivery systems and a command, control, communications and intelligence system (C 3 I system). He established that given the threat perceptions of the government, an Indian nuclear doctrine based on a “no first use” policy would imply an arsenal of 150 bombs. He brought home the dilemma before the Indian state: “A decision on what an Indian C 3 I should comprise of is very much a choice between Scylla and Charybdis. If the Government chooses to be economical, no adversary will believe that India has an effective second-strike capability. However, if it opts for an elaborate system, the outcome will be an extremely costly programme, which would compel the neighbours to make their systems more sophisticated and so the spiral will grow.” Though the nuclear world is divided between hawks and doves, Dr. Reddy’s calculation was widely accepted by both, and that is a testimony to great reporting.
Ms. Philipose, along with Aditi Bishnoi, has put together an excellent anthology, “Across the fire”. This series is based on news features commissioned by the Women’s Feature Service, of which Ms. Philipose was the director. It documents a range of women’s experiences of conflict in India: lack of emergency healthcare, sex trafficking, and the vulnerability of living in the shadow of the gun. It also documents their courage, resistance, resilience, and their attempt to create space for conciliation. Her 2005 reflective essay, “Practising Journalism: Values, Constraints, Implications”, is valid today as much as it was a decade ago.
With the appointment of Dr. Reddy and Ms. Philipose, my lonely existence as a news ombudsman in India comes to an end.
readerseditor@thehindu.co.in
The article was edited for a factual error. The line, "He brought home the dilemma before the Indian state: “A decision on what an Indian C 3 I should comprise of is very much a choice between Scylla and Charbides ... " should've been, "....very much a choice between Scylla and Charybdis "
