 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today, we are going to discuss with me Sainath, one of the most well-known names in Indian journalism about the media and COVID-19. Of course, we'll also take up his other issues which he keeps writing about which is most well-known regarding what's impact on the gradient community, the rural areas of India, which generally do not figure in mainstream media. Sainath, if we look at the media issue right now, apart from the media as an industry, which as you have been saying is one of the largest and most profitable industries in India worth more than 2 trillion rupees and so on. If we leave that out, this particular season is also the way, the way government has been trying to look at media and the kind of news it wants. And it seems that one point to want news which is only what it gives should be published and also going after others who are critical. And in that sense, the number of FIRs have been filed against people who have said critical things. And the third part of it, the commonizing of fake news is not being prevented by this kind of issues. It's only when critical voices come out and if they make a mistake or they don't, then you have FIRs and various things fine. So how would you look at the whole issue of what is the reporting that media can do under various additional constraints which have been put under COVID-19 now, Epidemic Act, fake news, all these things are now being used against the media in different ways. Well, one is that some of those constraints have been self-imposed at a time when you really need to be telling the public what's going on. You've laid off hundreds of excellent journalists, reporters who are pretty good and partly because they are independent minded. They're the ones who get the shaft when something like this happens. So we don't know how many journalists have been laid off but we know it's in hundreds. Whole editions, the entire Sunday supplement desk in one place, the entire bureau in another place, people have been laying off. This, by the way, has precedence. You've done it after 2008, the Wall Street collapse. You've done it as media marches towards its digital, you know, Shangri-La. Yeah, and you've done it in the best of years at high profits. When the COVID thing came along, it gave them an excuse to say, look, we are helpless. We have to throw these guys to the sharks. That's it. Yes, some of them have done so because of being seriously in financial trouble. But many of those layoffs were planned anyway and were being routinely conducted there. The second thing is about government. See, probably, you know, even on corporate mainstream media, you've had the acceptance of this term and people keep using it. Crony capitalism. My thing is that we all know what capitalism is, I assume. Have you ever wondered who's the crony? We are the media. They're the cronies. Please know that in crony capitalism, the cronies are the media. The most important thing about Indian billionaires, the 121 of them listed a year ago and maybe now 106 or something, is that they are what some progressive economists call rent-thick billionaires. Rontier incomes. They capture huge public resources as a favor from government. Like I get the oil and natural gas, the fields, etc. Then I subcontract to thousands of people and do little myself. And I just keep the most core profitable business part of it myself. And outsource everything else. It also helps when you come to layoffs and everything else. We don't know who these people are. It's not our job. They're not our employees. Now, the thing with this approach is that it makes your billionaire class, which is a very important, very important segment of the Indian ruling elite. Do not underestimate them. In 2018-19, their cumulative wealth of those 121 individuals was equivalent to 22% of your gross domestic product, giving an entirely different emphasis to the word gross. 22% of your GDP. Now what makes, because of their rent-thick wealth, because of their dependence on public resources, they are never ever going to seriously conflict with government. It's their government. Second, who owns these enterprises? They're all gigantic corporations. Now the richest man in the country is the biggest media owner, Mukesh Bhai. He's the biggest media owner. So I'm saying the relationship between government and media has to be understood in this sense. I also put it in another sense because of the present government. I've been saying for several years, your country is ruled by an alliance. It's ruled by an alliance of socio-religious fundamentalists and economic market fundamentalists. And this happy marriage, I mean, the bed they cohabit is called the corporate media. And there are many people who are part of all three, all these three forces. There are, I mean, our prime minister and our home minister are very much part of both camps, socio-religious fundamentalists and economic market fundamentalists. Now you have economic market fundamentalists who are also the very clever, clever young guys who came out of Harvard and Wharton, etc., we know, who are still saying the same things that, you know, they've been trotted out to tell us what went wrong when they have never got it right in their lives. In 2017, your chief economic advisor and another important man of Nithya Yoga, Vivek Debroy and Mr. Arvind Subramaniam went head-to-head with Thomas Piketty on television in Nithya Rastancho and declared inequality is not an issue. Those words, go and look at the clip. And flaunting wealth is not an issue. Now the kind of corporate owners of the media are people who have benefited enormously from that growing inequality. And you're saying, say someone like Arun Jaitley, he was a market economic market fundamentalist and a Hindu religious fundamentalist. So there are many people in both camps. And the media have really been the cheerleaders, the canvas for this. Let's come to COVID and let's look at how there are five things that stand out in how the media has functioned on this. The first is the incredible surprise, you know, the injured innocent surprise of the existence of a species called migrant labor. They were shell shocked by that on March 25th, hours after he made that, the prime minister made the announcement, you know, old gentleman, ex-IS officer, Deva Sahayam, said it so nicely. He said, even a small infantry brigade asked to go into a major action is given more than four hours notice. A nation of 1.3 billion was given a four hour notice to shut down their lives. So we, and I am arguing that though it may not be in their interest, that's debatable. The action of migrant laborers was entirely rational. You know, Saira, I would interrupt you at one point because this brings up something you have been talking about for a long time, that media does not cover certain things because they're not consumers. They do not consume for the advertisers and therefore they are of no interest to the media owners or the media itself. So migrant workers, agriculture, poorer sections do not figure in the pages because they know they are not people who will consume and bring in advertisements. In 2006, 2007, when I was in the Hindu and a Chennai-based newspaper was covering Vidarbha more than any newspaper in Maharashtra. Young journalists in the times dying to cover it, wanting to go there, pleaded with their management and asked them, look, this is a Chennai-based paper. The Marathi newspapers are reproducing them. We should be covering this. They got a memo which told them dying farmers in Vidarbha do not buy the times of Vidya, the elites of Sobo, South Bombay do. This is what they were told by their management. Now this time, there's a difference. There is a difference. You saw the same lack of ability for sure. But your question specifically, look, when I joined journalism in 1980, almost every newspaper had a labour correspondent. And several newspapers had agriculture correspondents who actually covered farming. By the late 90s, agriculture correspondent is one who covers the agriculture ministry. And if it was someone like Pawar, then he covers only the agriculture minister. By the 2000s, you're covering agriculture ministry and agribusiness. This is who you are covering. Please read even now who are the people who are quoted, who are the people who are treated as authorities, agribusiness seed manufacturers, Fikki, all these guys, and then your agriculture ministry. You don't have a full-time farm correspondent worth the name anywhere in this country. Two, you don't have a full-time labour correspondent because the labour beat in the media is now called industrial relations and covered by the guy who covers the industrial bodies like Fikki, Ashok M, whatever. So it's not surprising that they were so shocked by suddenly migrant workers wanting to go home, not having food at home for them or their families, and therefore even willing to walk. Look at the numbers. They haven't, you know, if you go back before March 25th, please have your research fell in news click, do this, ask them to look on any of our major channels, especially the English ones. Do you find a single discussion, one discussion, on migration's migrant labour in those 10 years after the 2011 census showed us that we had witnessed the greatest migrations in our history. Surpassing partition between 2001-2011 and an urban rural growth differential which was at its highest in 40 years and the first time in history since 1921 that urban India added more people than rural India. All these were headline news. They were never published as such except one or two articles in the Hindu and never discussed. So suddenly you're looking at millions of people on the highways and wondering where did they come from, where did they come from. The second you're forced to wonder, because that includes your jamadharini, your cleaner, your plumber, your electrician and suddenly you can't get anything done. Your services have gone. The migrant labourers, they knew, they knew that they should have no faith in their governments, in their industrial factory owners and in us the middle class employers. We immediately stopped their monies, housing societies, turned them away from the gates because contagion and stuff like that. So this was the first thing that they were blown out of the water by the scale of what happened and were not simply unable to comprehend what was going on and I can also give you another index. I received in the last month 200 calls from media all of them wanting to talk about migrant labourers because they know nothing about it. The tragedy of that, the flip side of that is that it isn't just migrant labourers who are suffering. Their suffering is visible, it's open, it's real, it's massive. Look Prabir, when you don't have a single correspondent full-time to cover labour of all kinds, farm labour, industrial labour, when you don't have a single correspondent and crafts persons, when you don't have a single correspondent to cover farming full-time from the perspective of the farmer, you are saying 75% of the population do not make news. Why the hell should I have someone to cover them? And dying farmers don't give me revenue. If I make money out of covering you, I cover you. I make money out of covering volume, I cover volume. It's as simple and rational as that. You look at the media and labour. After the initial shock about migrant labourers, after that terrible shock of it, look at how they are behaving. Some of your most prominent editors are on TV saying, I could never waste a good crisis. This is the time to ramp through major irreversible labour law reforms. And indeed, the politicians are taking their advice. Mr. Adityanath, Mr. Shivraj, all of them are taking that advice. 12 hours to 14 hours a day, this is what the labour law are now trying to save for the next three years. That's right. To hire and fire. But what is almost astounding, the gall of it, to talk about 14-hour day. Again, the media have not commented once, that it is something overturning a gold standard that was fought for and got in a hundred years the entire day. That is news, that is front page, six or eight column headline news that overturned the labour standard of worldwide labour standard, the gold standard of labour law. Second, they have also suspended all by three or four laws because those three or four laws they probably would run into serious trouble in the courts. So they have suspended everything else and ordinance in Uttar Pradesh and elsewhere suspends laws which are constitution based. There has been no legislative process for this for the 12 hours or anything. It's just something that the government has declared by law and you have the media saying and you have editors saying this is the chance to push through labour reforms. I want to point out something. If you look at your television and you read your newspaper, you are reading far more about 30 million jobs lost in the United States than 122 million lost in a single month. Now normally the media are very respectful of CMI of the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. It has done other work whose numbers they can favourably use. But this time they are just playing down the CMI's figure saying of those hundreds and these are non-farm jobs Praveen. These are not farm sector. You are having 91.3 million of those. Are your small vendors, Kirana stores, your hawkers on the street. Praveen, many of them, those shops, little shops are not going to reopen. The cities and elites will now move in to withdraw the space from the hawkers from the elite suburbs. They will be out. The other part of the media which I wanted you to talk about, explain to us that all these acts which are now in play from the Epidemic Act to the Disaster Management Act, they also have clauses don't spread panic and therefore that becomes a provision under which criminal action can be taken, FIRs can be filed. Now we see a whole bunch of FIRs and criminal action against a certain set of people and the well-known ones, those who are critical of the government or those who are actually also targets of communal propaganda, which a certain section of the Sangh Parivar indulges in all of this time. We also see selective use of this and also see no use of this against obvious hate, speech and hate propaganda being unleashed by what you call the Hindu fundamentalist right or I will call really the Hindu sectarian right at the moment. I think there isn't any doubt, I mean there's no doubt in my mind that between what we'd like to see come out of the lessons of the pandemic and what is going to happen, I think there is going to be a huge rise in authoritarian power and its use, the consolidation. Praveen, it's much bigger than just a couple of laws. You are looking at the dismantling of the parliamentary democratic system. Let me tell you this, no elections matter, no governments matter, no opposition matters. The cabinet doesn't matter, one gentleman addresses the nation and tells it what to do and he's on every channel whenever he does that, he's on every radio station whenever he does that. You are actually seeing governance by one person who never holds an open press conference in his entire six years of, has never held a press conference, open press conference where people can ask him questions. Not a single press conference. Not a single one open press conference with, you know, he's had meetings with select editors and things like that. That also very occasional. Even in, well he's been interviewed by film stars. About mangoes I believe. In the US, you have government officials fearing that every morning press conference of Trump, wondering how he's going to screw them up by the next absurdity he states. He can't stay away from talking to the media and there are questions asked of him. Here no, this is the one democracy in the world where the leader does not feel obliged to be accountable, asked questions by the media, nothing. You're witnessing the bypassing of parliament, opposition, government. Now just look at the press conferences that are held. You have a junior health ministry official tell the journalists about railway tickets and whether they are free or not free. Where the hell does this come in from? No major secretary of government, no minister, I mean Harshvardhan may keep showing up in PPE suits, but no minister is sticking out his neck and saying anything about the lockdown in anything or willing to converse with the media about it on record. It shows you how much your governance has now narrowed down to one individual. Power is absolutely concentrated. So the media part of it, the FIRs obviously they're against those who are critical like the one filed against that poor guy in Varanasi, which they haven't done anything about and they've completely dropped because it is so absurd when he showed Musahar children eating grass, a particular kind of this thing in the prime minister's constituency. You have a guy in Coimbatore who is issued an FIR, all sorts of charges against him, inciting public disaffection because he says that doctors and nurses in the hospitals are not getting proper PPE equipment, which they themselves are saying and begging the media to understand that this is what is happening. I think the scope for more and I think that what happens in favor of the authoritarian sections is that they will now get a lot of public legitimacy and sanction for drastic and draconian action saying that this is necessary in this period. So I think you're going to see an increase of that and governments are generally more worried about how the world looks at them or BBC or CNN rather than how Indian journalists look at them. So this is how that media picture is going but please do not also forget. The collaborative element and the collaboration role, there are channels in your country which every evening at prime time, the rest of the country may be fighting what is wrongly called a war on COVID. I don't like that word and for many reasons it's absolutely wrong. But there are a dozen or more channels which are fighting a war with Pakistan every day. They cover Pakistan a hell of a lot more than they cover their own country. So you have absolutely, these are people who don't need to be intimidated into saying what the government wants. Is that about pieces? We had Sudhir Chaudhary who has produced a video which essentially tries to say the all kinds of jihad in which also there is a corona jihad. You've had that for some time. It predates the corona virus. You have the fake video tapes, morphed video tapes attacking Kanhaiya for which he is still facing Kanhaiya Kumar. You know those video tapes which were forged or whatever. You have that for which he is still facing problems. You have a number of other such things of fake stuff and I find a problem with the word fake news. It sort of suggests that these are done by actors outside the mainstream media. The mainstream media has been doing this for years on a much larger scale. I think the word is something else. Tell me what about the fake news that the New York Times carried endlessly until the U.S. got into a war with Iraq. That happens of mass destruction. What do you call that? What do you call that? Genuine news. Actually they have started now the Wuhan Bioweapons Laboratory and so on. Which is the same vein? In no country in the world, which comes to your question, has the extent to which the propaganda of corona, in other countries of the world there is racism, there is all these things. In the United States in the initial days, you had Chinese looking people beaten up and the joke in the Midwest was, this virus is called Kung Flu. Which is one of Trump's associates said it to one. And here but nowhere is this kind of sectarian waiting at the highest levels of government across the huge spectrum of the media, the kind of fakery, communalization, vitiation of the atmosphere, incitement of violence, nowhere else in the world do I believe. I have not seen another large country where the media is pushing this agenda. I think there is also the collaborative element. Last question Sainath, what should media people do who do not subscribe to the three problems you have already said. One is crony capitalism or the cronies being the media itself. The second is communalization of the media and the third is authoritarianism in the country and of course all the three go together, authoritarianism in the country and the growing curbing of all democratic institutions and federal institutions that you see. I think that if the good guys in the media want to have a chance of anything happening which is not temporary, not transitory. One is, I think we need, I'm looking at the top level and at our level. One, you absolutely have to have a revival of the union movements in journalism. I escaped a lot of things that have come to the younger generation after me because I came into journalism when they were really strong journalist unions. If I had been victimized where I was working, there were thousands of people across the country in the unions who would be there for me, stand up for me, come out against the victimization like a fire under the ash of their own employers. That was the confidence and courage with which we went forward in my generation of journalists. Your paid news scandal, all these were able to happen because of the collapse of journalist unions with the introduction of the contract system. Contract killers, contract assassins, contract journalists, everything else. So you had during the height of the paid news, a very fine journalist has never committed a corrupt act in his life telling me that he had to put his name to an article, an interview with the senior cabinet minister. He said, I am the eighth month of a 11 month contract. I've got a mother in hospital, etc., etc. Do you want me to be a hero? I could not ask him in any conscience to be a hero. So you need to reverse that. You've got to have security of tenure and safety of that journalist. You have to first determine that freedom of the press is not freedom of the purse. It's not freedom of the owner but it very largely is about freedom of the journalist. Not entirely but about very largely freedom. Really the freedom of the pen, so to say. Yeah, so that is the one. The second thing at the other level, at the political level, I don't believe anything will change more than temporarily if you cannot fight confront monopoly and corporate power. Along with the common power that has now synced with them. In the 60s and 70s, there were major anti-monopoly battles against the banks. In the banks, for instance, out of which the bank unions and everybody came up. There were major movements against what was called the jute press. A lack of a lot of public consciousness also came out of that. So you have that. So you've got to fight. You have to be very clear that your battle is with corporate power. And that monopoly you have to dismantle. And that you need anti-monopoly legislation. It won't be the first time you've passed it. In the history of India, independent India, there have been two press commissions. Not councils, press commissions. You look at the submissions before that. These were headed by rather conservative, retired Supreme Court judges. All of them discussing and some of them actually theorizing that the biggest threat to press freedom in India comes from business house ownership. And that we need to leading this. So this is one set of things that we have to do. The immediate thing, see, I'm saying that if you want to look at who are the journalists who are attacked. There is very clear evidence on who are the journalists who are attacked. Now, in the present situation, it's widened. The arc has widened. But historically, the journalists who are attacked and killed. I did the introduction for the CPJ's report on this in 17. A very large number of journalists killed. I could not find one English speaking, city based, urban journalist in the corporate elite press. Not one. That tells you one of two things. It tells you that either they're not doing anything that provokes anybody to such harsh action. Or we are completely complicit with what is or that by our class and caste backgrounds. We have a certain social insurance. I know for sure that being in the Hindu and doing what I did on paid news much more than farm suicides. Paid news. If that had been done by a Taluka district level stringer, that guy would be dead. It was never a threat for me. There's a certain class and caste background. Social privilege protects you in some sense. However, that social insurance, after these guys come to power, the premium on that insurance has tripled. And you see a journalist of that class, of that seniority of a city like Gauri Lankesh. Murdered in this most, I mean an entirely reprehensible campaign of Calamity before her murder and after her murder also. Now look at the people. I think there are lessons for all of us journalists and otherwise to see who gets scared. One, Narendra Dabholkar. He ran a magazine for 25 years. I've contributed to it. Journalist, rationalist. MM Kalburgi. Academic, columnist, rationalist. Gobind Pansare, art rationalist, trade union leader, historian with the greatest book, wonderful book on Shivaji. Communist party leader and trade union leader and aggressive rationalist. Gauri Lankesh, rationalist. The point I'm trying to make you premiere. It's not just secular people who are in danger. Rationalists are particularly in danger. Fundamentalism fears rationalists. Fears reason. Fundamentalism fears reason. And it's there for rationalists. Rationalists, it goes after them. They are the ones at the highest thing. We need to promote reason and rational thinking. Not pander to obscurantism and we ought to actively fight it when it's there in the media, in the columns, in the editors, etc. Whether it's the Gomutra protection against COVID or otherwise. And just come back for a moment to labour laws, to labour if you had any sense of reasoning. After you have covered these migrant labourers, one of the things you found out three things. I think that COVID-19 did us the most faithful autopsy of neoliberalism in India. It showed you how fake and fragile the whole structure was. How close to starvation and destitution half a billion people are. How quickly you can push them over the edge. And it showed you that the conditions of labour, which 93% of which anyway have no rights being in the unorganized sector. And then you have media bosses and editors targeting the remaining 7% who have some pathetic rights. Saying this is the, now where is in our media in the liberals, etc. Where is that sense of reason that says treating labour that way got us into this position in the first place. Treating labour that way had them leave. And actually you're not able to say it openly. I'm still waiting for someone to say that cancelling the migrant trains. Cancelling the migrant trains after those guys are paid and bought tickets. This is quelling a slave rebellion. You're holding back the serfs for the lords. It is quelling a slave rebellion. And at the moment when the people need their media the most. I think I will leave you with this line that in 2 years the Indian media will be 200 years old. I date Indian media not from James Augustus Icky and whose tabloids were concerned about with who the governor general's wife was sleeping with the shit like that. I would take Raja Ram Mohan Roy's Miratullah Barasthi. And by the way he didn't have a paper, he didn't start his paper in Bengali but in Persian. Farsi, he started in Farsi. Language of the elite of the Mughal court. From day one he addressed issues of social reform, of social challenge. In 24 months from now you will be 200 years old. I will say that in the last 5 years we have seen the lowest point of the Indian media in terms of their accountability and connection to the public and that they are entirely on the side of power and privilege not even on the powerful as a whole but on the side of the corporate elite primarily. And you can see that in every sector from IPL in sports the owners of IPL are who? Mukesh Ambani, Shah Rukh Khan, at one time Mr. Vijay Malia to Mr. Modi and Shah in politics. You have never had a less... You spent 19 months in prison in the emergency program. Only 12 months. Okay, 12 months. But you completed your year there. I was pretty lucky. I was a leader of a student union in the south where we never suffered. We never suffered. And I will leave you with this point. One thing about us, I mean we were so privileged in that too. That was the South DMK government. As long as that government was there we were yelling and fighting with the DMK and suddenly when they went that was when we began to understand what the emergency was about but we never suffered the way our counterparts up north did. But it meant something to us. We never suffered but it meant something to us that others did. And I'm saying to all the journalists, media people, academics, intellectuals, workers, unions who watch news click. All frameworks from now, whether on hunger, whether on food, whether on labor rights, that framework has got to be a framework of justice. It's got to be food justice, health justice, labor justice. That has got to be the framework in which we fight. Not on charity, not on okay a little more of a little more doling out of welfare but it's got to be on the basis of justice. And the Indian media for 150 of those years did pretty well. The Indian media, they did well. There are things to be proud of there but they are at their nadir. They have never been worse. They have never sunk so low. On that note, Sainath, I'm going to leave you and our audience and we will definitely come back on 200 years of Indian media and Ram Mohan Rai when the time is propitious and the day comes to celebrate the 200 years. Thank you, Sainath, for being with us and thank you, our audience, for being with us, seeing us in this COVID times.