 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. We have with us here reputed commentator and the rural affairs editor for the Hindu Mr. P. Sainath and with whom we shall discuss issues related to the media and in particular the nature of media discourse today. Welcome to NewsClick Mr. Sainath. Mr. Sainath, A. K. Anthony, the defense minister recently said the other day that there is a transparency revolution going on in the country today and which has not spared anyone from any of these four states be the polity that is the executive and the legislature, the judiciary or the media. But in your opinion is this scrutiny substantive enough or is it superficial? What you are watching is Hamlet being staged without the Prince of Denmark. The biggest day, you are watching saturation coverage of nothing much. The largest entities like say corporations and corporate corruption which are central to all your giant scams that are going on are completely absent in this. The demands are made over a bribe here or a bribe there or nothing to do with the massive explosion of corruption scandals as corporate power has grown in ascendancy in the last 20 years. So, you are talking about corruption in the abstract in the right now about the different all the four states being covered that is absolute nonsense the there is total silence for instance on corruption in the media. It is just a couple of newspapers that have actually written about it spoken about it otherwise it is just been completely blotted out of existence and even if you were to say look at the radio tapes they have been given a decent burial. Now, the radio tapes weren't so much about the media in my opinion. The media appeared as you know little bit players or comedians in the whole show what the radio tapes showed you was who was running this country. What kind of corruption was possible where corporate houses could determine who would be minister which portfolio he would get which minister would be shifted to which portfolio and everything that they discuss happens and then you have Mr. Tata running to the supreme court to see that the tapes cannot be made public right. You know absolutely no outcry over this in the media what about this why are they so scared of investigating that corruption. Now, once you get specific you are going to get into a lot of trouble about what is being covered of all the scams that are you know the UPA that are there are two a day. One scam that is virtually disappeared for instance and nobody wants to look at it is the Devas Antrix Spectrum scam complete silence. Too many people too many beautiful people the class we call the PLUs people like us too many of them are implicated and you get into the Devas ISRO spectrum scam it is going to lead you very very high institutionally and individually. There is no discussion of this it is in the abstract about somebody fighting corruption. So that in one sense what is being what is being the focus is merely malpheasance that is some misbehavior or you know untoward thing that a minister or someone in power does well let me put it with in greater clarity what you are looking at see what are the sources of corruption in India. Now everyone has his own corruption story I would say there are many and you have to grant that but I would say there are three sources without fighting which you are not going to get anywhere special one is structural inequalities in Indian society right and that includes caste gender everything but that the structural inequities of Indian society are one of the major sources of corruption because of powerlessness and power the ability to hold people to ransom that comes from your structural inequalities. The second source is the policies which have always in independent India favored the powerful but which in the last 20 years have deepened these inequalities at an exponential rate. So policies that are positively designed to favor corporate interest and therefore you have seen a corresponding explosion of corruption but we are not making the connection. The third source is what I call India Indian societies culture of arbitrariness and impunity you know a judge bans buns because his car got caught in the traffic on the way to the airport you get away with this that culture of impunity and arbitrariness it also reflects in some of the civil society's groups activities where they demand the right to rewrite the constitution have a panel and we will decide who will sit on this panel that is also part of the culture of arbitrariness that sense of entitlement of the upper classes right. So these three sources if you are not able to battle or combat these you are not in the anti-corruption game in my opinion you are on the fringes. The corporatization of the media you yourself have written you know extensively on that you know the symptoms of this corporatization in terms of the paid news private treaties and but could you elaborate for us again in the last 20-25 years what you have seen is you have seen a kind of globalization of media also in a period where it is finance capital that is in the ascendancy in the 80s still the 80s we spoke of media monopolies that is no longer relevant the media monopolies are now a part of much larger conglomerate monopolies okay. Now AT&T, General Electric, SeaGram all these giant monopolies you have these giant conglomerates which are into a million things Gulf and Western isn't about you know a hundred and fifty lines of production so the media are part of these are part of those. Now until this January NBC which was the fourth largest TV network in America and once the world's largest television network was owned by for several years by Radio Corporation of America which was the seventh largest contractor to the Pentagon every western missile has Radio Corporation of America in its head that guidance computer the guidance computer is RCA who takes over everything General Electric which was the second biggest contractor or surely one of the largest military contractors in the world what implications does that have for the content and conduct are you then going to have NBC fighting against weaponization against expanding arms markets yeah the what you call the military industrial complex is actually now a military industrial informational cultural complex now this doesn't mean that their routine media functions cease to operate but they operate very differently from how they did 30 years ago there are spaces there are zones of autonomy fast shrinking take the largest 10 media houses whether in the world or in India please go and visit their boards and see how many journalists are sitting on the board journalism is an irrelevant trivial byproduct of what they do it's not irrelevant it's important but it is a byproduct of what they do it has to serve what they do now in the Dainik Jagaran board you find the head South Asia head of McDonald's you find a representative of the board of General Electric and a member and another guy who's been a member of the board of Raytheon Corporation most of these guys cannot speak or read Hindi but what's it got to do with journalism they are there for a conglomerate to maximize profit and they're they're good at that the third thing is that the media in is interlocked into hundreds of other sectors okay now here is the key for you and your viewers to understand what's happening in India how is it different from the conglomerate media at the global level there is a specific Indian character according to me we are seeing a phenomenal convergence of corporate world media world political world and family business now the marines are a phenomenal example of this convergence family business ministerial power the information and communication business and business and business as business so these four are converging very fast you can look at it in Punjab you can look at it in in in Maharashtra the owner of one of the most powerful newspapers in the state of Maharashtra is your union agriculture minister who also owns the largest agricultural supplement in the agricultural newspaper in Maharashtra called agro one the guys he's also the head of bcci so he's in that business he's in the cricket business he's in the agriculture business he's in big agri business he's in the newspaper business and he's the union minister for agriculture some some suspect he also has ties with the big real estate business as well I think he owns the big real estate business okay Lokmat the fourth largest newspaper group in the country and not only the fourth largest group in the largest in Maharashtra one brother is a member of parliament in Delhi the other brother is a minister in the Maharashtra cabinet who used to be a minister of state but got to be a minister of full cabinet rank what happened for his promotion it's called the Ashok Nama the Ashok Chawan paid news game happened in that period and the gentleman got a promotion from being nothing to going up the paid news thing is worth in Maharashtra alone at least a thousand crores in the last assembly election okay it's it's it's literally it is manufacturing content paid news is the death of journalism it is driven by corporate interest it is driven by corporate greed and profit and there is outlight outright lying to the readers and viewers is a perfectly normal practice in television in some of the economic channels each line and reference to your company is sold and paid for I always say of the Indian media that it is politically free imprisoned by profit now what are these how are these guys going to take positions on corruption when the owner of the company and the owner of that media is in the dock on the 2G scam the head of the family that owns Sakal is your union agriculture minister is involved in one scam after the other in the IPL you know for Sharad Pawar IPL BPL APL are all there's no big difference right it's all money so he's in it now how will how will those newspapers how will those newspapers take up the issues of corruption because the convergence has happened and that brings us to a more contemporary relevant issue only last week we saw you know very strong editorials against what appropriators newspaper appropriators claim you know interference by the government in terms of the recommendation that has come from them Justice Majithi of wage board actually many armed forces officers were telling me this morning they were laughing about the campaign against the wage board being launched in the times of India and by this institution the Indian newspaper society the armed forces officers were pointing out to me that they are writing that what these people want is more than what our javans get on the border they said when the pay commission for those guys was on there was not a word in the media they were editors who said why should it be increased now they have become patriotic and are worrying about the javans on the border when they have to pay their punes a little bit more secondly there is complete falsification of figures and deliberate alarmism built into it that the pune will learn for you know there are journalists in top newspapers of this country in Mumbai in a city of Mumbai's cause journalists with three years experience who regularly feature on the front page of newspapers who take home less than sixteen thousand rupees a month now their salaries structure is inflated and shown wrongly a large part of your salary is called variable performance component and they tell you on the start that you can never get more than 60 percent of this tv m or vpc a different newspapers call it so so you start out with a salary package of 28 000 30 000 you are taking home 15 16 000 now it is true that in the same newspapers in the same newspapers there are journalists next to those journalists who are earning phenomenal salaries now you are able to give 1 percent phenomenal salaries and make huge profits by creating huge inequalities between between different categories of within categories of journalists now if you had a wage if you and i are both assistant editors i might be earning more than you in terms of my seniority i might be earning more than you in terms of the incentive payment or whatever given to me but it cannot be five times what you are earning if we are both in the same category second is notice that this entire campaign is being conducted without any opportunity for the other side to reply zero opportunity the editorial page has been used advertisements are being used to bombard the public and you you haven't even heard what the other argument is you know when armed forces officers are finding it funny they want to know what the position of the journalist is because we don't see anything newspapers that are making this one they would have to yes they would have to end up paying their top 1 percent less if they implemented the page board but they would still be making very huge profits most of them most of them