HOW CAN JOURNALISM TOUCH A NATION'S CONSCIENCE?

BY PALAGUMMI SAINATH Rural Affairs Editor, The Hindu
Presented at the 2007 Magsaysay Awardees' Lecture Series
Magsaysay Center, Manila, 28 August 2004

There are essentially two streams in what we call journalism:
1. Journalism
2. Stenography

The latter is by far the bigger stream. It reduces a noble field to the service of power, to articulating the worldview of the powerful. The latter can reach more of the nation than the former, but it can never touch the conscience of the nation.

Corporate-led media see journalism as a revenue stream. They can up its efficiency. They can make it very slick. This is the dominant 'journalism' of our time. But if we're talking about journalism that can touch the conscience of a nation, that has got be the journalism of dissent. A journalism that questions and interrogates for the public good, not private profit.

Touching the conscience of the nation, if you wish to put it that way, entails a minimum duty. Journalism of that kind must 'signal the weaknesses in society.' It has to 'comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.'

Good or great journalism will be judged by how it relates to the great processes of its time. That's why the Tom Paines and the Mahatma Gandhis are so important. They addressed he greatest processes of their times. Colonialism, racism, the plunder of nations and the enslavement of whole nations. Journalism that touches the national conscience is journalism that always has a deep organic connection with society.

So what the great processes of our time? In India, inequality is the foremost. But the corporate media celebrate it. India now ranks 4th in the world in the number of dollar billionaires she has. But ranks 126th in human development. We address and celebrate the former everyday on our channels and in our newspapers. We barely look at the latter.

This is the paradox: a tiny Indian press during our freedom struggle fulfilled a gigantic social function. It took on the world's mightiest empire and sought to articulate the aspirations of the voiceless. Today, the gigantic Indian media serve a very narrow social function. Corporate and elite interests. That's why the connection with society and the great recesses of our time is so vital.

Easily the greatest process unfolding in India of our time is the largest agrarian crisis we have had since the eve of the Green Revolution. The story of this has been covered by the corporate media illustrated everything I wish to say about why that stream can never touch or challenge the conscience of a nation.

Journalism, which touches the conscience, is based on this principle: journalism is for people, not shareholders. Say this and immediately someone will spring up to say: we cannot run on losses. This response has several wrong assumptions" one, that good journalism is necessarily loss-making and two, that people are idiots. What's difficult is that the costs of the game have rendered it almost exclusively corporate terrain.

Junk discredited old baggage that simply plays to the powerful. Conventional journalism is the service of power. This is buttressed by doctrines that serve to give established power the final word in all reporting. Take, for instance, the much misused and abused phrase: Objectivity.

There are two kinds of "objectivity." The Doctrine of Objectivity-and personal objectivity, or personal honesty. The latter is very important. Journalists are not brain-dead robots. Being honest about our treatment of the subject, which also means recognizing we are all products f different value systems, is important. Doctrinal objectivity -- the pretence that the reporter is someone walking a tightrope with no feelings or views, that's a fraud. It was a doctrine that came up to serve established power and it always ends up giving the powerful the last word. It also pretends that the truth is equidistant from opposing and contesting biases. Which is simply not true.

Gandhi was unsparing in his honesty (even with himself). But he had very clear biases. He was against colonialism, against imperialism and said so. No Indian journalist before or since has spoken to the hearts of people the way he did. He set forth a principle in social action that I think applies very well to journalism. This is what he said:

"I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man [woman] whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him [her]. Will he [she] gain anything by it? Will it restore him [her] to a control over his [her] own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions?

"Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away."

I find it works: to touch the conscience of others, let alone that of a nation, you must have one of your own.