It’s about the reader, really

Few issues in recent times have raised as much dust as the government’s decision to open up the press to FDI. The debate has touched upon the threat to national sovereignty, the hypocrisy — in welcoming FDI in other sectors but not at home — the double standards being applied to different kinds of media, electronic versus print, and so on…

Okay, let me confess — this is how far I got with this piece. As you can see there was a clear intention to write about FDI, to debunk the case against it — not because I am particularly in favour but because the arguments about undue foreign influence seem so absurd. The reasons are many but to mention one that is little considered — about the media having been always unduly influenced by the foreign.

We have freely borrowed formats from the West. Just look at the magazine market. Good Housekeeping and other women’s magazines of the times spawned counterparts in Femina and Eve’s Weekly; Nari Hira was inspired by the fanzines of the West to start Stardust; our present-day leading news weeklies were modelled on Time and Newsweek and I can’t recall more than one general features or men’s magazine that did not aspire to be an Esquire.

It is the ingenuity of the Indian mind that it takes from the outside and bends it to his/her purpose. But formats are powerful things, determining priorities, treatment, stereotypes, and so on. If we’ve lived with them, why fear a more blatant form of foreign involvement?

But to point this out was not the reason for my wanting to write about FDI in print. The reason for my attempting to venture into a subject already much discussed was really to present a perspective different from that put forward by the publisher or proprietor, which has so far dominated the issue.

It was to speak as a media professional and express the hope that an infusion of funds could perhaps bring with it greater professionalism and a better deal for that cornerstone of the press, the journalist. And that’s when I found myself assailed by a strange sense of deja vu.

Surely we have been here before? And then I remembered. The mid-eighties when industrialists like the Singhanias and the Ambanis came into the newspaper business, igniting hopes of big budgets — a computer on every desk, quality printing and decent salaries.

Needless to say the fall was as precipitous as the hype. The two newspapers the Ambanis took over have all but disappeared from the market. The Singhania’s Indian Post changed hands and eventually shut down (if anybody’s listening, you still owe me some money!). And then I remembered also the recent internet boom. The dotcom explosion.

The high expectations. And the hard fall.

Utterly discouraged, I abandoned the effort and surfed the net instead. I came across a piece written on FDI in print that asked, ‘Who the Hell Cares?’ In my mood of disillusionment I read on. The writer made the point that though the arguments were all about nationalism and public interest, the fight was simply between publications that had money and hence a competitive edge and those that didn’t. The former were against FDI, the latter for.

And while the amounts and number of publications affected were likely to be minuscule, thanks to the clout of the players on both sides, readers were bound to be subjected to debates and arguments in which ‘‘they are least interested’’.

Why exactly, I wondered, should the reader be in the least interested? Why when all editorial trends of the last decade have been driven in his/her name? For close to a decade we have lived with a dumbing down of the media, infotainment, marketing gimmicks and society journalism. All in the name of the reader.

And now that the prospect of foreign investment looms close, the press is again being redefined, this time as the keeper of the national interest. FDI in print may not be the hot issue that the column inches devoted to it make it out to be. But at the very least the debate represents an opportunity for readers to finally speak up and state just what they need from the Indian press.