What journalists and lobbyists won't tell their friends

Journalists and lobbyists have no law to answer to. The Radia tapes episode exposes how the highly individualistic professions redefine ethics on a daily basis

The Radia tapes have, for a month, been the source of much mortification. The first reaction from the media, however, tells us far more than the subsequent replaying of 104 leaked phone conversations, incessant reportage on the details of the 2G spectrum scam, and hours of frenzied debate about media-corporate relations. The truth is that initially, no one was surprised. No one, not even the later indignant anchors and dismayed columnists, was really taken aback that journalists were debasing themselves in conversation with ‘sources’, or that business interests were so directly influencing political portfolio decisions. No double take, no gasp.

In newsrooms across the country, along with some mild empathy, there was a bit of a nervous giggle. Reporters recalled their most verbally servile, flirtatious, or deceitful moments on the phone with sources, and thanked the heavens they were not covering the telecom industry, or were not important enough for their phones to be tapped. Several of their own conversations might have sounded worse than that of Barkha Dutt’s or Vir Sanghvi’s, but by virtue of being neither Barkha Dutt nor Vir Sanghvi, perhaps the most they could offer their sources was the assurance of “a positive story”. In exchange for, at the most innocent level, an exclusive interview at a later date, and at the most corrupt, some wads of notes delivered home on a Sunday or priceless stocks quietly transferred overnight. Not everyone may cross the line, but when somebody does, the industry meets it at most with a shrug or snigger. We’re all adults, we know this stuff happens, many an editor said after Open first published the transcripts. Yes, it’s a shame they got caught on tape, and press freedom became debatable again.

Sevanti Ninan, media commentator and editor of the online media watchdog The Hoot says, “Ethics are negotiable in India, all right and wrong are relative. The media is no exception,” says Ninan. “There are some societies which live by the rules more than others do. We are not one of those societies.” The Radia tapes controversy has, in fact, morbidly reaffirmed our deeply Indian cynicism about quid pro quo. And the two professions that have been shown to lie comfortably in this realm of grey are: journalism and lobbying. These are worlds where information is everything, but the process—how information is got, shared and what it is used for—is disquietingly individualistic.

The in-your-face, hard-to-ignore, on-the-ball Indian media has entered living rooms across the country, but the news gathering process is stunningly invisible. Journalists may share phone numbers and email ids, but they rarely discuss work methods—how they got the tight-lipped source to share incriminating evidence, or why a victim chose to tell all to one TV channel over the other. The scoop comes first, and journalistic process often ends at establishing facts or drawing confessions. The nit-picky whys and hows become irrelevant in the shock and awe of the expose.

There are laws for businesses and legislators, but for the media, there are only informal dos and don’ts, passed on through bosses (if they care), mentors (if they have the time) or media organizations (to avoid being flooded with law suits). R. Sukumar, managing editor of Mint, says that all his employees confidentially disclose to him their stock holdings, and sign a code of conduct. Any reporter who misrepresents himself to a source, misquotes them or does not authenticate crucial information, will find himself sitting in front of an Ethics Committee of senior journalists that will decide the penalty. “I have fired three people already for violating the code of conduct,” says Sukumar. “A monitoring body or a law will infringe on press freedom, but editors must develop and strictly impose good reporting procedure in their organizations.”

But who is to impose this code of conduct if it is violated by an editor? Both journalism and lobbying are highly individualistic, prone to redefinitions of ethics on an almost daily basis. For instance, plagiarism is a serious crime in the press, and a reporter can lose his job for a lazy copy-paste. But when Arun Poorie’s editorial on Rajnikanth’s film Robot—presumably written by a ghost writer or an intern—was a direct lift from a Slate article, nothing happened. A weak apology to the amused author of the original article does not show that plagiarism is taken seriously. It only shows that any thumb-rule of reportage can bend for heavyweights.

In the case of the Radia tapes too, the key conversationalists, were editors. In a recent Press Council debate on media ethics after the Radia episode, several senior political journalists said they had covered major political events for decades without ever having talked to a lobbyist. In a letter to The Hoot, The Telegraph’s Radhika Ramaseshan wrote, “Since when did a PR (public relations) person become a ‘source’? By definition, the veracity of the information a PR person purveys cannot be trusted obviously because she represents interest groups.” Good, old-fashioned political reporting, she says, is about getting “the information from the primary players”, not middle men, or this case, woman.  

As opinion makers and often one-time ground reporters, the top bosses of media organizations are well-connected to the country’s lawmakers and businessmen. Niira Radia contacted Barkha Dutt, Vir Sanghvi and Prabhu Chawla instead of beat reporters who covered the Congress or DMK because they were seen as intimate with the members of the Congress party. Radia perceived them as influential insiders, and as is evident in their promises to Radia, Dutt and Sanghvi believed it themselves. Senior journalist Poornima Joshi from Mail Today says this is a reminder of how not to do journalism. “No matter what the allure—money, exclusive stories or a chance to sit at the high table—you do not use the access you have with the powers-that-be to lobby for big corporate houses.” When Dutt and Sanghvi insist that they’re not fixers and did not actually pass on any messages they said they would, they may be telling the truth. But in “stringing along the source”, they gave the impression that they were on sale. For a profession whose impact depends on public credibility, this is a big blow.

Being too close to the source also affects the necessary skepticism that keeps journalism accurate. Unlike a reporter who must mollify his sources, keep them pleased and string them along to maintain a work relationship beyond one story, the editor in the newsroom is detached enough from the source to take a reporter to task for a biased or influenced story. In the print media, says Ninan, “editors do meet top guys in industry or government, but they expect their reporters to also meet them, and actually do the stories themselves.” It is one of the best checks and balances within a media organization. But we may have lost this layer, especially in TV news. “Today, the editor is also the anchor,” says Ninan. And with that seemingly innocuous change, the reporter and editor getting rolled into one, the bias-filter has been lost.

The other grey area, far less visible than even journalistic process, is how lobbies work in India. Lobbying is done to bring about policy changes to enhance or benefit a particular sector. It’s common for governments and stakeholders to interact in several ways: when the annual budget is drawn up, when standing committees of parliament invite expert opinion, or when NGOs are consulted while drafting laws for the right to education, or rural employment guarantee. “Basically, lobbyists tell the relevant ministry that say, providing tax incentives or allowing foreign investors to their sector will create a larger public good, and along the way, the industry will also make a profit,” says Sankar Venkateswaran, India director of SustainAbility, a UK-based think tank that is pushing for the inclusion of lobbying in the corporate responsibility agenda.

During the License Raj, says Venkateswaran, the government was approached by individual companies for benefits. “Lobbying is actually a very polite word for the wheeling-dealing that happened then,” he says. In today’s free market economy, companies from particular sectors appeal for benefits as a group, through industry lobbies like NASSCOM , ASSOCHAM, and CII. “Even if you’re going to make profit as an industry, if you’re lobbying for special treatment, you have to ensure that the public good—gas, spectrum, minerals—are not exploited. That’s the social contract of corporate responsibility,” says Venkateswaran.

This social contract, however, becomes less transparent when a lobbyist represents individual companies like Radia did for Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani. Niira Radia has perhaps shown us the return of License Raj-style negotiation. “In a resource starved country like ours, lobbying is where massive corruption thrives,” says Venkateswaran. “It is common to use the media to create an environment that benefits a specific business interest. But it becomes murky in India when the media is also willing to bend, or is not objective.”

Neither journalism nor lobbying is directly regulated by law. The Press Act is primarily a labour law, and does not bother with journalistic procedure. The Indian media too has long fought any legislation that seeks to control content. Industry lobbies are legally registered but there is no rule about individual lobbyists working to benefit individual companies. Venkateswaran says, “You can only monitor that which is out in the open.”

Both professions have been tainted today, and their covertness has caused much queasiness and introspection. 

The bone-chilling takeaway from the Radia tapes is that if not for the leak, none of this—the bedfellow attitude of top journalists and the exploitative lobbying—would have been in the public domain. But the crucial difference between journalism and lobbying is that the former is supposed to represent public interest and the latter, vested interests of special groups. This is why we expect more from a journalist, and despair when they have fallen short. In the absence of systems and processes, self-regulated or legally binding, the burden of the free press is simply borne by a few honest journalists.

(Written for Tehelka magazine)