Star suspect

The more competition there is in any field, the better for the consumer and, eventually, for the industry itself, right? So this newspaper has argued, maintaining that competition empowers consumers who then force underperformers to sharpen their act or bow out. Sadly, recent experience of the visual media in India seems to stand this wisdom on its head. The anxiousness to please the powers that be by Rupert Murdoch’s Star TV, as reported in detail by this newspaper, is nothing short of disgraceful. Can this deferential troupe, one eye fixed avariciously on obtaining permission for direct-to-home satellite transmission, be expected impartially and in a hard-nosed way to confront politicians and public figures for the enlightenment of a public whose credulity and patience have long been tried by Doordarshan? The Indian Express has, aside from those which had a vested interest in such a thing, consistently argued that the print medium should also be thrown open to foreign investors. Greater financial resources,it was believed, would give media publishers greater staying power and independence. But Rupert Murdoch’s brazenness and Star TV’s genuflections are proof that Indian viewers would be foolish to look to a shade more independent journalism from private television, and that certainly such good luck is not coming their way through the aegis of Rupert Murdoch. What has happened instead, as some observers say, is the purchase of India’s “creative classes” with this money. If buying up journalistic integrity and throwing media values to the winds is a necessary concomitant to foreign presence in the media, perhaps India could do without it.

It was probably naive to expect things to be different. Murdoch has a formidably negative track record to defend. Not only was he singlehandedly responsible for the `dumbing-down’ of the serious British Press, he also dropped the BBC like a hot potato from the Star network in China when the BBC’s uncompromising reporting became a thorn in Beijing’s side. In the current rushof stories on how Murdoch, part owner of Harper Collins, personally intervened to drop the publication of former Hong Kong Governor Chris Patten’s book — again for fear of offending China — his The Times has failed even to run stories on it. But other papers are awash with reports of how Murdoch’s employees had to constantly worry about offending his business concerns. Good business sense, but surely journalism of a poor sort?

Is this the future that the Indian media envisages for itself, and what the Indian public looks to from television? The choice, for once, is clear cut: between the Rupert Murdoch view of the media as just another industry where the interests of business must take primacy over all else and the more conventional view of commercially viable media which nevertheless has a special right and obligation to question things. Other countries have been singed by the Murdoch phenomenon. His bona fides as a benign influence on media values are not suspect: they are non-existent. He andhis tribe must be prevented from setting off a competitive degeneration here.