 So I'm delighted to be and honored to be doing this lecture in the institute in the name of my old friend. I think I'm going to start by maybe putting you off a little bit because I have to say, if I'm to be honest, that close investigation reveals irrefutable evidence that there was one very successful surgical strike. It completely took out the spine of the Indian media while leaving the spleen and other organs intact. It didn't have to take out the brain because that had been lobotomized a long time ago. And that was done by the corporate owners and this was done by governments. This was done by governments, but it was a very, very good surgical strike. Any vestige of spine vanished in the last 30-40 days. Many years ago, Professor Prabhat Patnaik made a very lovely presentation in the ACJ called The Media and the Market, in which he concluded that something has shifted, this was 15 years ago, shifted in the moral universe of the media. What Prabhat said was that the moral universe of the media has shifted and linked it to issues of philosophy, of market, of ideology. Today that moral universe is a different galaxy. And how much that shift has taken place, you can see in a number of ways. One, I mean we will look at various benchmarks tonight, depending on how much time we have to go through. But just one very recent one, say three months, four months ago, you had the chief economic advisor of this country, the chief economic advisor, Arvind Subramanya. And Mr. Vivek Professor, Vivek Debroy, chief advisor to the Rajasthan government and God knows who else, in what purported to be a debate with Thomas Piketty on television. Any of you have caught that debate? Yes. In which Piketty said that inequality in India is desperately gaining ground and that you want to worry about it. And the anchor threw in her two pens and said, Raghuram Rajan, will you have to cite a certified authority to be able to justify your question. Raghuram Rajan has said that people should not be flaunting their wealth, especially those who are in serious debt with public money. Both Debroy and Arvind Subramanya pooped the whole issue. They didn't think that inequality was something important. And Debroy said that if people make pots of money and they flaunt it, it's no business of ours. And the chief economic advisor to the government of India said, I'm with Vivek on this one. He's probably with Vivek on everything, but I'm with Vivek on this one. Someone's flaunting their wealth, this inequality thing, it's not important. It's not our business. Just even in the early years of the reforms, I promise you, even in the early years of the economic reforms, I'm saying early 90s, had the chief economic advisor to the government of India said that flaunting of wealth was not an issue at all and that inequality was, you know, Piketty was making too bigger thing of inequality, I promise you, that person would have been looking for a job the next morning. It's how much your universe has shifted. There is no way, no way that an economic advisor, chief economic advisor in the 80s or early 90s, would have justified flaunting of wealth and inequality. But here's another thing. Most of us from the middle classes accepted it. It did not raise a big furor at all. Nobody wrote a single editorial. Nobody wrote anything, even on the opinion pages, saying that the chief economic advisor of the government of India believes inequality isn't such a great issue, believes that flaunting of wealth is okay. That's how much our universe has shifted. The media has shifted with that. The particular reference which the anchor was using was, of course, Raghuram Rajan's veiled comment was probably directed at Vijay Malia. Now I have great pleasure in telling you that on July 7, 2013, oh yeah, please, that Vijay Malia was lionized and valorized in the media for 15 years. Don't forget that. Nobody ever made an issue of the fact that he bought a Rajasabha seat. Nobody ever wrote an editorial on it at the time that this man purchased a seat in the Rajasabha. That's how he became an editor. The Kingfisher calendar, the advertising, these things were important to the media. In 2013, the problems had begun, but one particular story of which I'm very proud to say I was the author created a, pushed it to the next stage of the situation. We had a story on the front page of the Hindu, I did it, on Malia looting the bank of Maharashtra. Now the bank of Maharashtra is the lead bank of western Maharashtra. It is a bank of small peasants, workers, masdus, your retired government pensioners, teachers, retired employees. It's a small bank of small people. And he had already looted some 150 crores, which by the way was retweeted after the story. But the important thing is that after that, he never got a single paisa from any bank, public sector or private after that story appeared. The response of the bank of Maharashtra was to go after the whistleblower, who is a major union leader in the bank. He was the whistleblower. And it was very difficult for them to get him. So before they got him, they punished seven innocent people who had nothing to do with it. And finally got him by opening up a case filed by the Patipavan Sangatna in 1980s for an anti Gandhi poem that had appeared in the bank employees union in 1994. And it went all the way to the supreme court on obscenity charges. The poem is by a famous Marathi poet and appears in at least four anthologies of Marathi poetry. So nobody wrote anything about this or about the fact of the victimization of these employees, nothing. Except of course those who did the story. Indeed there were tweets from some of the editors of your pink papers defending Malia and saying Sainath doesn't understand restructuring of loads. Now they're very quiet. And of course after he falls, then everyone rushes to dismember the corpse. But that's how it has been. The biggest and most important shift in that moral universe is driven by the material universe of corporate ownership. That's something we will keep coming back to in the next hour. So you have that. You can also look at how the media have functioned. And for me the ownership part is very critical. Who we are, what do we cover? Who owns us? What are their interests? Is the media some kind of independent neutral entity or who are they anyway? We'll come to that. But you can look at coverage of say in the last two years of very major events which are actually processes covered as events. You can look at say the coverage of JNU and the fallout of what happened there, how it was covered, where a couple of channels went after the university's progressive elements, created this national hysteria on anti-national and lack of patriotism and everything else. You can look at it in the completely, completely inane and vapid way in which they have covered and continue to cover the murder of the three rationalists, Dabholkar, Pansareh and Kalburgi, two of whom were known to me. Well, I didn't know Kalburgi, but of course Pansareh was very well known to me and Dabholkar as well. Where were those great investigations that you should have seen? Where was that serious digging? And that will bring me to another point about who runs not only the media, but the country. Or you can look at the fact that how we have covered the fastest growing inequality in the world which is happening in your country, greater than anywhere else in the world. India is not the most unequal country in the world. There are countries where inequality is greater including, say, South Africa. There are countries where inequality is greater than India. But there is no country in which between 2000 and 2015 where it has grown faster, no major country where it has grown faster than it has in India. I'll give you the numbers on it and then we'll come back to this. Some of you have seen Oxfam's analysis of credit suicide data. Have you? Yeah? What does that tell you? It tells you that ten years ago, 388 billionaires owned wealth equal to or more than half the population of the world. That's what the analysis by Oxfam of credit suicide data and Oxfam's independent analysis of human development reports and everything else told you that now 388 became less than 105 years ago. As of 2015, the number of billionaires in the world whose wealth is equal to that of half the world's population of 3.5 billion is 62. 62. So 62, now I want to know does that figure offend you? Actually yours is a lot worse. That's the globe. In India, 15 individuals, one five, own a greater share of total wealth than half the Indian population or 650 million people, 15 individuals. What do the top 100 individuals own in India? They own what? The bottom 69% of the Indian population owed. How are these numbers derived? Credits we say, and by the way to save you the time, it's a free report. The analysis is done by a young economist working in Gurgaon. Her name is Srujana Bodhipatti. And what she's done is something, I used to do this every year in terms of comparing Forbes billionaires list. That's my favorite magazine by the way. And favorite website, it's bookmark. It's the only thing I've bookmarked. And the Forbes billionaires.com shows you 93 Indian billionaires. So the wealth you have is estimated from Forbes 100 richest Indians and its billionaires list. And credit, the credit we say doesn't go there. It gives you share, it looks at, it uses your national sample survey data which gives you decile-wise wealth, holding of wealth. So the top 100 individuals own more wealth which is about, those 100 individuals own about 10.56% of total wealth. And the bottom 69% own about so much. So what the data is not just about how rich the rich are, but how poor the rest are. It's also about that. How little they have. One individual owns wealth, no prizes for guessing who, owns more wealth, owns more wealth than the bottom 20% of the population. If you want the exact figure, he owns 0.55% and the bottom 20% owns 0.52%. That's their share. So one individual owns wealth roughly equal to all your Dalits and Adivasis put together. I mean that would be 24% of the population. So this is the kind of inequity. In 1991, you did not have a single dollar billionaire. Now you have 93, you have 93 which is, makes you the fourth, makes you fourth in the rankings of the world in terms of dollar billionaires. Yeah. Now where does media come into this? All this inequality reflects massively in the media as well. It reflects in the ownership of media, it reflects in the content of media. It reflects in the last 25 years in the changed beats that reporters are made to cover. It reflects in the social and class background of journalists. When Appan Menon, Sujit Dutta and I entered the United News of India and Ritambara Shastri and I entered the UNI in 1980 Appan and Sujit entered before me and Ritambara. We were the first MAs, MFILs to be in Indian journalism. Three years later PTI was advertising no one, those with anything less than an MA need not apply. Most were high school graduates that did a couple of years of college. The chief editor was a BCOM and the chief news editor had a bachelor's in arts. So the education of qualification going up as you know in India also means that the class composition is changing. My first day in journalism I was witness to a very prophetic brawl between two veteran journalists fueled by very high spirits but guess what happened in that brawl? It's prophetic. The business correspondent beat the living daylights out of the Labour reporters who promptly went extinct thereafter never to be heard of again. So there have been major changes in the media also composition wise, structurally all these changes have occurred in the media. The single richest man who owns more wealth than the bottom 20% of your population Mukesh Bhai is also the biggest owner of media in your country. He's also the biggest owner of media in your country. He owns more channels than he knows. He can't name all these channels. I probably might because 19 all those channels you see called ETV they are no longer ETV they are not Inadu TV. Inadu TV had some 24 channels the largest regional geographical spread. Ramoji Rao sold more than sold about 19 of them in my opinion to a front organization that had been set up to purchase that. So they are now the property of networking as far as I understand it's a very contorted thing but all those channels are now the property they are in the bouquet of networking which owns millions of other things and some of the more famous journalists of the country is when it owns them too. So you have a national election and you have a national election and you have a Delhi election where a channel could take a decision that it would not mention the name of the Ahmadi Party and it would not call any of them for any of the panel discussions. Never mind that that party went on to win 67 out of 76. That only shows you how arbitrary that decision making process of the media is. They could actually in one particular day when I was going there for a panel discussion I learned that somebody some anchor who must have really been pulled up later by accident had called one of the Ahmadi people who was turned away at the gate. Now this is not a question of whether you like Ahmadi Party or not. It's outrageous journalistically. It's completely outrageous. And there is not a semblance of shame when you are humiliated and that political entity takes 67 out of 76. What is it that you covered? What did your panel discussions do? What were they about? What was the subject? What were they all about? Now the same person as I said owns that channel. Mukesh Bhai owns that. He owns a lot of journalists and editors. Even some who are not working for him. And he also owns what I will certify as the single, the most, the costliest residence in the world and without a doubt the ugliest. So, but again, I'm taking this because we're talking about the single biggest entity in media. Now, I wake up like all you guys did about a month ago and I see for the first time in the history of the Indian Republic I see a prime minister peddling products on the front page of the newspaper. Now, who owns that product that's been peddled? Mukesh Bhai. Mukesh Bhai owns the product that's been peddled. So, well, the earlier product he peddled was Mr. Narendra Modi. So I think it's only fair that Mr. Modi, you know, that there's some payback in all this. Okay, so by the way, it's a violation of the National Emblems Act. It is a violation. It hurts law. But even the newspapers that didn't get the ad and therefore didn't cover it wrote nothing about it. They wrote nothing about it. It is a violation of law. There was the prime minister with, you know, we were fulfilling his digital vision and cyber vision with GEO. So that day, I mean, from that day I have been using a different national salutation, GEO HINT. Now, as from the 80s, the structure of media started changing in ownership, in content, in beats. Who were we, by the way? Where did we come from? The modern Indian media. You came out of the freedom struggle. And, you know, I'm sorry for those of you who were born after the 80s, but there was something to be proud of in Indian journalism. There still is. There are still individuals who are, you know, ripped apart, become freelancers because they get squeezed out of the mainstream media. They delegitimize when they start. I'm not talking about myself. I have someone very specific in mind and I'll come to that. Oh, but let's go back to the owner of GEO HINT. The current editor of the Economic and Political Weekly, Paranjoy Guha Takurtha, produced a book which I say without hesitation is the best piece of investigative journalism on the Indian corporate world that I have seen in 15 years. Absolutely the best book. I strongly recommend that every one of you buy it and read it. It's called Gas Wars. The book is in process, one publisher after the other pulls out. So, Paranjoy self-publishes the book. That's, by the way, that's why publications like, that's why publishing houses like Leftward Matter. Paranjoy ultimately self-publishes the book. I believe he sold 20,000 copies which is remarkable for a self-published effort, even for a house-published effort. It's a remarkable thing. And it's out in three languages. It's selling in all. Nobody wanted to touch it and he got a notice for 100 crores. This, by the way, is the urban intimidation tactic. I'll come to the rule later. He gets a, now nobody knows, nobody believes that you're going to go to the court and make him pay 100 crores of which he doesn't have 1% or 0.1%. What is the meaning of that? The meaning of the notice to Paranjoy is a signal to every other journalist. Don't you dare. Just as the FIR filed against Neha Dixit for the trafficking story in Outlook is not so much just about putting Neha Dixit behind bars. It's a warning to every other journalist that you don't screw around with some parivar organization. When I broke the paid news story and people were speaking about it, I believe when Arun Shauri got a notice from that wonderful newspaper group, Bennett Coleman and Co Ltd. And each see the, again, so one is that this is one track of intimidation. There are others, but the power of corporations to sue you and break you. Now once you're under that kind of a threat, your hands are tied. Publications don't want to use what you're doing because you've become controversial. And so you get stuck worse and worse and worse in that thing. You become a kind of outcast within the media after a while because people are scared. I do this and then Mukesh Bhai's lawyer sends us 100 crore. Notice what I do. It's not meant to get 100 crores from you. It's to scare the shit out of the rest of us. There is no doubt that you, your next story, you're going to think about this. You can't write without thinking about that legal notice. It is going to have an impact. But there have been very brave individuals who have had their FIRs, their notices, everything else. And this happened in the paid news scandal also which I will come to again in a minute. So let's look at how, what we covered changed and then I'll tell you about the numbers and what we covered. In the 19, in 1918, when I walked into the United News of India, every journal, every newspaper had a labor correspondent. Every single newspaper had a labor correspondent. I knew many of them. And from 1980s onwards, especially after that prophetic brawl that I witnessed, which took place in the UNI was far more famous for its coffee and its canteen than for anything else. And in fact, when Vithambra and I used to say we worked for UNI, they would say, ah, that canteen. I think we, I hope, I'd like to believe we made some difference there. So that fight took place there. Today, look at your, who your correspondents are, what you cover. There is no such thing as a labor correspondent. Labor is covered in the major newspapers. It's covered by a business correspondent who handles what is called the industrial relations beat. The business correspondent, who mostly functions as a spokesperson for business, is then going to give you the labor version also, which he gets from the PRO of the corporation. Because most of your business correspondents have never spoken to a labor leader in their lives. They wouldn't know who the major trade union people in that city are. Because they're not required to talk to them. They're not required. That beat went. The agriculture correspondent vanished. Something like the Yeti. Sightings are reported, but no hard evidence. And well, there are a lot of people called agriculture correspondents. A lot of people called agriculture. They cover the agriculture ministry in Delhi, and they're called agriculture correspondents. Either in the states or in the capital, they cover the ministry. They don't cover the mandi. They don't cover the fields. They don't cover the farmer. They don't cover the farm laborer. They just, and of course they cover the seed companies, which is quite easy since it's all based on reproducing their press releases. And that's what happened to the agriculture. Now, no newspaper or channel today appoints a full-time agriculture correspondent or a full-time labor correspondent. But even a general newspaper can have 14 people covering business. Various aspects of it. I used to know a guy in Mumbai who, when I was creating on my freelancer's existence, his only job was to cover futures. Now, it must have been the most, I actually started out being very sympathetic because it must be the most miserably boring existence that you can conceive of. But when I realized that he was earning eight times what I did, I was a little more cautious in my commissuration. So that was the business correspondent. Look, when we say we will not have labor correspondent and we will not have agriculture correspondent, we are saying that 75% of the population are not worth talking to. They don't make news. That is the statement you're making. You're making that statement structurally by removing those beats when Kisan and Mazdoor do not make news. Actually, they do. Once in five years they do. And that's why you get such bad election reporting because people go back to talk to people they've never seen. They're slumming for that 90 days of the campaign. So it's not their fault either. It's not that reporters fault either. He or she has not met such people and not been required to meet them on a steady, structured basis. So you're saying 75% of the population do not make news. Just take employment correspondent. Take the labor correspondent. The average over the last ten years of job seekers registered at employment exchanges in India, you know how much that is? 44 million. To give you a sense, 44 million is a numbing figure. Let me visualize 44 million for you. 44 million. If you put the 44 million jobless or job seekers in a single queue, it would be three and a half, almost four times your coastline. Let's say two grown guys like me, two to a meter. You can't fit more than two of me into a meter. Two to a meter is 2,000 to a kilometer. So you do the math. 44 million by 2,000. It's 3.8 something times greater than your coastline which is 6,082 kilometers for the mainland coastline. If you include India's coastline, Peninsular India's coastline is 6,082 kilometers or 6,087. If you include all the islands and everything else, then it crosses 7,000. We're not interested in that. Even then it would be three times. But that's the figure. We don't think this is important to cover. We don't think it's important to have a full-time correspondent. A country with one of the biggest homeless and housing problems in the world doesn't have a correspondent on that. We don't have correspondent. What we do have correspondence for is glamour, fashion. My favorite, which I've always tried to get, is the eating out correspondent. I haven't succeeded. But you don't have, in a country with the largest number of absolute poor, you have no correspondent looking at poverty full-time. You have the most horrendous attempts to minimalize, trivialize the agrarian crisis by people who've never stepped onto a farm, never stepped onto an agricultural household, never been in one. Just know this. The average farm household in India, which is 4.9 people, rounded off at 5, average farm household in India, its income from all sources, all sources. This is an NSS figure. Income from all sources means from agriculture and from non-agricultural work as well. The average income of the Indian farm household is 6426 rupees, less than 1,300 rupees per person. You don't have a person to cover this. A few good journalists write about it when the NSS round is out, when the NSS situational assessment of farmers is out, then people write about it. So what then do we cover? What is it that we do cover? Let me give you some of the numbers. I also tell you about the process worldwide. You know the big story of 2010-11, 2010-11 was the gigantic DP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Just about destroyed the Gulf of Mexico, destroyed half the marine life, everything else. The US Coast Guard then held hearings and there was record attendance of reporters, journalists, everything. David Barstow of the New York Times attended these meetings and wrote a very good piece which appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review as well. He was completely taken aback, I would have told him not to be, but he was completely taken aback that the people with notepads, scribbling and taking most copious notes in the hearings were not reporters, but PR people, public relations officers. They had come to learn from the master because tomorrow they were going to be facing similar issues, right? They needed to know. So they were there not to ask questions, but to get answers which they could use. The public relations people in the audience, in the note takers, vastly outnumbered the journalists and reporters. By the way, he is absolutely correct. It's not just true of that hearing. In the US for over 20 years, journalism jobs, I mean, public relations jobs have been growing at almost a three to one ratio. PR jobs are growing almost two to three times faster than journalism jobs and journalism jobs being shrinking has made the gap wider, but it was two to one, even 20 years ago that public relations, the same is true worldwide. Public relations jobs are growing much faster in India than journalism jobs. And I'm not counting all those journalists who function as PR guys anyway. We're talking about the formal delineation between journalists and public relations people. So that's what happened with... that's what happened with PR jobs growing much faster. In 2014, Time Incorporated, publishers of sports, sports illustrated of Time Magazine and all these huge stable, laid off hundreds of employees, 250 at a single stroke, and then a memo of theirs was published by Gawker, an offbeat publication which, by the way, has gone into bankruptcy. And the memo was fascinating. It summed up brilliantly the idea of being politically free and imprisoned by profit. The memo actually produced a table with it. I mean, sorry, the story produced a table which they had got out of the memo. Journalists were ranked, not on how good they were as reporters or what kind of stories they broke, they were ranked amongst other qualifications. Product is beneficial to advertising relationship. Product is beneficial to advertiser relationship. And many journalists, according to the newspaper, were laid off on the basis that they were not beneficial to advertising relationship. I have the table with me. We don't have the opportunity to cast that thing for you, but you can look it up. It's available online. My favorite part of the table, they had all these qualifications, right? Prolific writing, I mean, output, quality of writing. They had one column said quality of writing and one said beneficial to advertising relationship. I loved it. That the guy who scored highest on beneficial to advertising scored lowest on quality of writing. And the guy who scored highest on quality of writing was second from the bottom in beneficial to advertising relationship. But here was a giant corporation telling me that this is what we are about. The memo was leaked and of course time said it's out of context. They didn't deny that it was there. They said it was being misinterpreted, et cetera. It's absolutely the same in our media as well. It's absolutely the same. Who owns what? What do they do? Now, come back to Mukesh Bhai. We love him so much. We keep coming back to him. There is a gigantic difference between media monopolies of 25 years ago and media conglomerates of 20. There's a huge difference. 25 years ago, media monopolies were monopolies that existed in the media. Ramana Goenka had a monopoly of a kind. It was an oligopoly, really. But he had a monopoly of a kind. Bennett Coleman and Cole, when I was a young journalist in Mumbai, and nobody uses that kind of irreverence these days because they're intimidated by legal suits and stuff. In the tabloid where I work, the frequent reference to BCCL was not Bennett Coleman and Cole limited. We used to affectionately call it Bandit, Coleman and Cole. But that was another era. They had a monopoly over certain markets in the media, in the newspaper world. None of that is true anymore. Today, your giant media monopolies are small departments of much larger conglomerates involved in hundreds, if not thousands, of activities of a commercial kind. Now, Mukesh Bhai may be the biggest owner of media in India, but is his media holding, does it figure significantly in the size of his corporation? No. Oil and natural gas, fiber, whatever, all those things are gigantic. So please understand that your media is actually incorporated like a PR department, like a bargaining tool that you're able to bargain with governments.