 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. I'm Paranjoy Guha Thakurtha and with me here in the studio I have Pallagumi Sainath. Sainath is a Max essay award winner. He's a senior journalist who's been writing and reporting on rural India. He's the former agrarian affairs or rural affairs editor of the Hindu and he's currently the founder editor of Pari which is an acronym for the People's Archive for Rural India. In the first part of this discussion we discussed the agrarian crisis and in this part we're going to look at the media in this country. Sainath, you yourself mentioned that sometimes the media and the middle classes to whom the media caters to because they are the quote-unquote consumers for all those who advertise on their media, their vehicles, their newspapers and magazines and their websites. They can be sensitized or they can actually be concerned about the underprivileged, the dispossessed, the one-third of India which is struggling to live. When you look at, are you a little hopeful about the way the media has evolved or changed or do you see a very substantial section of the media still subservient to those in positions of power and authority? I think you've got to make a very serious major distinction here in order to understand what's happening. For me, there is a very big distinction between media and journalism because what the media are not any longer about journals. When we talk about the media, we talk about the structures of media. We talk about the institutions and institutionalities. You're talking about the owners, the business interests. This is what you mean when you say media. On the other hand, you have journalism and journalists struggling to do something which they believe is journalism within these structures. And in a situation where, as you've seen recently with the Anand Bazar Patrika, three perfectly fine journalists are forced to resign because they did a story that offended the Prime Minister's office. And because they did a story that showed that a woman who had been saying her income had been tutored and in her own words she said that she was told what to say. By the way, newspapers everywhere have been laying off people in hundreds. Do you realize that the same ABP's telegraph covered some part of the Kerala floods with its correspondence being based in Bangalore? Indeed, the data line says Bangalore on the flood stories because they've closed their bureaus. Because they've drastically cut news gathering, expenses on news gathering and people who can go on the field, cut the ground level and report. Newspapers have closed dozens of bureaus. As you know, a year and a half, two years ago, HD closed six editions. Anand Bazar laid off 700 people. The Times has been doing this from the last 25 years. Some of the best journalists in this country are jobless because they refuse to be stenographers. Or public relations officers. By the way, jobs in public relations are growing three times faster than jobs in journalism across most of the world that we know. But the point is this, journalism is now down to two schools. There's journalism and there's stenography. And 80-85% of what we get from the media, which it then directs at the middle classes, is stenography, increasingly corporate stenography. I'll stop you here. There's no doubt about the fact that the corporate control over the mass media in India has become stronger than ever before. Some of the richest men are also the... The richest man in the country is the biggest owner of media. Mr Mukesh Ambani. All right. We also see the convergence of what was earlier telecommunications and what is broadcasting. So you even have, say, Mr Birla, who owns Idea, Mr Ambani, Relance Geo. These are, these have converged, you know, the means of communications because of technology. Across the world, after the Great Recession, expenditure on advertising has stagnated or hardly gone up or come down in many countries. This has also coincided with the rise of the net, the spectacular rise of the internet and how everybody wants everything free. So the traditional models, business models, revenue models have turned upside down. So much of the media has become that much more dependent on advertisers. You mentioned ABP News, Patanjali, which was advertising, comes back. Or government, or the ruling political party. Is that one of the reasons why the media has become so subservient? A. J. Liebling, the incredibly wonderful columnist of the New Yorker, writer in the New Yorker way back in the 40s, 50s and 60s, as early as in the 60s predicted the doom and demise of the advertising revenue-based model. So it's not as if it wasn't known that this would happen. Of course it's going to happen, it's going to keep happening. However, it's also driven greater levels of concentration. Now, today, Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. So the largest monopolies in the world are the digital monopolies. And they are going to increasingly embrace and absorb the print, television and other online media. They're going to do that. Yes, I'm saying that the advertising revenue model is doomed. And well, there's not much happening by way of manufacture or anything else for you to be advertising a lot. But please, for a joy, look at the specificity of India also. This is the reason why the media today, the Indian media today are more craven, spineless, shameless than they have ever been. Because they are so deeply embedded in governmental favors, whatever a government, whether Mr. Manmohan Singh's government or Mr. Modi's government, whatever privatizations of public resources that governments do, the biggest beneficiaries are the biggest media owners. So tomorrow, spectrum is privatized. Who are the gainers? Ambani's, Mittal's, Tata's, Birla's, oil and natural gas are privatized. Mining is privatized. When you have got so much at stake as the media owner, are you going to allow Punya Prasoon Vajpayee to say that this movement shows that the government has been lying? How are you going to allow that? You're not going to allow that. One minute. Sign up. Let me draw parallels to what happened in the 1970s. The emergency lasted 19 months. In January 1977, Indira Gandhi called for elections. By that time, she'd put not only many of her political opponents behind bars, some journalists included. Though, as you recall, after that, when Mr. Advani became the INB Minister, the Information and Broadcasting Minister, he was asked a question about editors. And he said, when they were asked to bend, they crawled. But why are today editors bending without being even asked to crawl? Sorry, why are they crawling without being asked to bend? And in what way is the overall scenario, when it comes to the media, when it comes to freedom of expression, similar and different to what happened over four decades ago? Firstly, they don't need to be asked to either crawl or bend. They're, in fact, bounding ahead on all fours like the attack dogs of the regime. That's what they're doing. They don't need to be told that, you know, this is an embarrassing story. No, they just immediately go and forge and manipulate videos themselves and show it and get caught doing it. Much more loyal than Durdarshan or All India Radio. And I'm trying to say again and again, the corporate ownership means that any different streams of competition in the media have, since the 70s, narrowed dramatically. You had exceptions in the 70s when the Indian Express would occasionally carry a blank space where the editor was mainstream. There were many other smaller publications. Yeah, it was the smaller publications that did the fighting. It was the lesser journalists who did the fighting. And I think we should, in this meeting, acknowledge the wonderful Kuldeep Nayar, who spent so much time in prison himself, himself a dissident journalist in the time. But that competitiveness also, even the capitalist competitiveness of media has gone in the kind of concentration. And I want to talk about the convergence in a minute. In the 80s and 90s, for enjoy, you had a rat race in the media. In the concentration of today, the rat race in the media is over. The rats have won. Okay, so you spoke about the convergence of media. I'm speaking about a non-technological convergence in India. In the last two and a half decades, large business houses have entered media in a very big way. They've entered politics in a very big way. Please look at the number of MPs who are Karod Pathy sitting there who are industrialists. You're saying this is a key difference between what happened 40 years ago. Yes, yes. But three convergence, three. So one is giant business houses have entered media in a big way, politics in a big way. The difference between politicians and business persons has blurred. Second, giant political families, powerful political families have entered media in a big way and business in a big way. The Badals are a wonderful example. The Marans are another example and so on. You'll find one in every state. Third, big media families have entered big business and politics. So you have what Ben Begdikian, the great Ben Begdikian described in Media Monopoly as corporate incest within corporate incest. So they're so closely intertwined, interwoven. Everybody has too much to lose by a changing around of that. That is going to ensure that they will resist until the very last moment when they have no choice. They will resist any criticism of Mr. Modi or Mr. Amit Shah. They might sometimes snare loftily at a Satyapal Singh or a Mahesh Sharma, but they will not attack Mr. Modi or criticize him. Now you've had a prime minister who says at a public, you know, at the inaugural of a reliance group, health care foundation or whatever it's called, that Lord Ganesha is proof of the fact that we knew plastic surgery tens of thousands of years ago. Where are the editorials? Where is the condemnation? Where is the thing? Where are those anchors so bold and brave and spitting fire saying this is crazy. This is an absolutely loony remark for the prime minister of a country to be making. It does not serve this country well. Simon, you've painted a pretty bleak picture of the media. And I separated media from journalism. Correct. I will point you a very bright picture of the journalist. All right, please do so because there is an impression that the space for independent journalism, independent reportage, where the journalist is not the stenographer, not the PRO, not the advertising agent, but is holding truth to power, taking a critical look at whoever is in positions of power and authority. His job is that of an adversary and antagonist. If that space has so narrow, has become, has shrinking so rapidly, what do you see? What is the future for Indian independent journalism in this country? I see a kind of guerrilla journalism happening. I find even today in the mainstream corporate media, I find hundreds of very fine young journalists who joined there driven by an idealism, wanting to do something who then run into news editors and chief sub editors who beat the idealism out of their heads with a stick. So it's a constant struggle. But here's the thing, if you do challenging journalism, you will be challenged. There's no getting away from it. Second, it's astonishing to me how this profession, how this occupation still draws the idealistic. I've been teaching journalism for more than 30 years now. Year after year, I see those kids coming there and sitting, wanting to connect with society, wanting to leave behind something, wanting to build something good, and it does me good. It reinvigorates any ideals that I have. It reinvigorates it looking at the young generation, because unfortunately I think it's better not to look a lot at my own generation in the media. It can be very demoralizing, but the young give you that hope, they bring it there. And the other thing is, yes, there is this thing, space for independent journalism, the net people. I would suggest don't romanticize the net, utilize it. As I said, the biggest monopolies in history are the digital monopolies. They have replaced the big oil companies, the Walmart's, and the street companies and the car companies. They might one day own some of those monopolies. But also the thing is that the net, as many people have said many times, the internet guarantees you a voice. It doesn't guarantee you that anyone will listen. People have corralled it off. There are run-tier classes between us, so you can have 50,000 followers and likes on Facebook. You can't reach more than 2% of them, unless you're paying Facebook for it. So I'm saying that that kind of mediation. On this issue of Facebook, today we have half the population of India below the age of 25 or 26. The median population of India is, say, 27. And in the run-up to the coming elections, we're going to see the use of the social media. Facebook, WhatsApp, the proliferation of fake news. So I mean, it happened in 2014. There's every reason to believe that it'll be scaled up perhaps many times that kind of operation in the coming six or eight months. So how would you sort of confront or how would you engage with this kind of a situation? See, the thing is this, that by the way, I think it's important to record that social media are not socially owned. They're incredibly privately owned. So it's in fact a misnomer. It's not social media at all. Social media makes it seem as if this is a platform for all of society. It isn't. Like the internet was described as a universal commons, which is dominated by six corporations. The super information highway, the problem with which was all those super highway men out there who now own it. So that point is very clear. So the thing is this, that yes, it's going to get a lot worse. And I'm trying to say that that process has got to be, since you and I and a lot of people who know or sense that things are going to get really bad. Do not have the means, the resources, the verbedal. You've got to do three things. It's not just enough to operate on the net. You've got to be operating through public action. You've got to be. That's why, you know, otherwise, we could be addressing the idea of a special session of parliament on Twitter and not have to mobilize actual people. How many times have we been told you're not a journalist? You're an activist. You know, this is, well, I have been told that a few times. Yes. But this is, by the way, the whole, the whole redefinition of journalists that has taken place under corporatization. Your greatest journalists in this country's history were Gandhi, Ambedkar, Bhagat Singh. Many people don't know that Bhagat Singh was a journalist who worked in four different papers, wrote in three different languages, taught himself English. These were your journalists. Now, if these were the people who were my journalists and I'm proud. How many journalists have produced collected volumes of hundred works like a Gandhi and an Ambedkar have? What were they? They were activists? What were they? They were Indians. They were human beings. They were citizens. They were journalists. They produced much more journalism in five years than you and I have done in a lifetime. I'm proud to be in that August company if you choose to place me there. However, I did test these labels and it's because the definition of who is a professional journalist, and I am a professional journalist of 38 years experience, that has been left to the corporate world. So today, if you cover displacement, you cover the Salem highway, the Salem corridor, or you cover the Tuthukudi firings, or you cover the displacement of people in Chattisgarh, or the Polavaram Dam, you're branded an activist. If you sit 30 years in your newspaper office, polishing a stool with the seat of your trousers day in, day out, churning out yard upon yard of corporate press releases as news, you're a professional. And you do that for three decades, you're a veteran professional. That is exactly the kind I do not want to be. And I don't need the certificate and legitimacy of anybody. You know, my readers know who I am. And your work will speak for itself. They'll speak for itself. Thank you very much, Sainath, for coming here, giving us your time. Wish you and wish Pari, the People's Archive for Rural India, all the best. One thing, I mean, I just want to say again that the March of November 28th to 30th, which will take place, people will come from different parts of the country and assemble 50 to 100 kilometers around Delhi and then march those three days into Delhi. This is a march on a call given by the All India Kisan Sangars Samithi Coordination Committee. They made this call, 201 organizations, made this call on July 14th. It's their march, it's their call, it belongs to the farmers and the laborers. I'm just concerned about how we in the middle classes can make ourselves relevant to this process in the midst of so much distress. Thank you so much once again for being with us. This is the conclusion of the second part of this interview with Sainath. In the first part, we discussed the agrarian crisis. In this part, we've discussed the media. Thank you very much for being with us and keep watching NewsClick.