Media interest and public interest are two different things. In classrooms on serious journalism, an episode out of Japan is often upheld to illustrate this divide. In mid-1988, it seemed that nothing was more important to the people of Japan than knowing in advance who President Ronald Reagan would name as America's next Ambassador to their country. Newspapers ran banner headlines predicting Mr X's possibilities over Mr Y's and TV channels announced prizes for anybody who could make the right guess. Day in and day out, there were 'breaking news' prompted by the outgoing Ambassador being spotted at a party or one of the possible 'winners' seen outside a Japanese restaurant in New York. One big newspaper (and mind, Japanese newspapers come very big) reportedly hired an agency in Washington to tap the telephones of State Department officials, and its competitor paid another guy to snoop on him to uphold 'ethics' in journalism.
The Japanese media's mindset was locked up in the post-World War II situation when an American Ambassador, as the political emissary of the US President, i.e. the chief of the victorious power, had de facto supremacy over Japan's King and Prime Minister. But, over the years, as Japan regained its economic clout and the task of defanging its military class was completed, the aplomb that surrounded the post of the US Ambassador got eroded and before long the Americans themselves lost all use for ritual reiteration of a forgotten agenda. As for the Japanese, it was their turn to take over American business corporations, car markets and Hollywood. Yet, every three or four years, the Tokyo media went berserk over the new viceroy. The hapless newspaper reading and TV viewing public had no choice but suffer the moronic competition.
The explosion of media interest over the so-called "IPLGate", which consumers are forced to recognise as a matter of life and death for India (the politicians said so and wasn't Parliament 'rocked'?), reminded me of this anecdote which was related to me while visiting a US university some years back. The backdrop to this was Shashi Tharoor's overstress on the point that an 'attractive woman' (later the lady herself humbly admitted to being one in a Tehelka interview) could be the world's greatest management guru. The public was entitled to be told of the details of the illegal 'sweat equity' (or was it 'sweet equity'?) to the minister's fiancée and left to make its own deductions. But, the handle that the media gave itself on the entire IPL empire was not about investigative journalism or even truth crusade - it was about misplaced morality.
I asked my teenaged son, the IPL circus' real target, "How can you watch a game that is so tainted….maybe it's fixed." He coolly shot back "it's like WWF -- dirty but entertaining." At that moment I was hit by a realisation: what kind of Indians are we rearing ? This is the generation born in the 1990s, wholly shaped by the neoliberal ethos which holds that everything, including morality, strikes its own market-dictated level. In my time, children were artless and unpolluted by too many realities; we rejoiced in the simple delights of life. Not these kids.
The media laments the corruption of cricket, indeed the duping of millions, but bark up the wrong tree. "IPLGate" is only the symptom of a cancer, which is the alien economic system which successive governments, beginning with Narasimha Rao-Manmohan Singh in 1991, have thrust on the Indian milieu. An IPL match is the embodiment of Mammom worship, the rape of the spiritual ethos of India which had once welcomed a gentle, dignified game like cricket. I may be sounding a bit like a yoga guru here, but slavish submission to the greed of a few, as the World Bank-led consensus would like us Indians to do, is definitely more treasonable than recalling the socialist emphasis in the Preamble to the Constitution of India. We stress on 'secularism' because it is politically expedient, but bury 'socialism', the other hallmark of the Indian State, because it's convenient to a few.
That's the story we miss. The whole gamut of issues that IPLGate has its origins in a flawed economic doctrine which was supplanted on India after four-and-a-half decades of phoney socialism failed to produce results. Since 1991, we have seen the media extend unquestioned approval to any new venture and go to any extent to cheer 'success', whether or not earned legitimately. Harshad Mehta, whose memory hits me every time I hear the words "Lalit Modi", was originally projected by Business India, Business World and the rest of the business press as a messiah for the investing community until the truth came out - accidentally. The MS Shoes scam, Damania Airways, Bailadila iron ore, Sankhya Vahini, right down to the SEZs now fast dotting the landscape, were beneficiaries of drugged silence. The media's antenna should have been up right in the early days of the IPL journey. Given the memory of the unseemly tango between big money and cricketers in the turn of the 1990s, somebody should have taken the trouble of visiting the office of the Registrar of Companies to check the antecedents of the entities that had brought so much money to the table. But nobody did.
Since Tharoor's resignation on Sunday night the whole focus has changed to Lalit Modi, BCCI and their respective shenanigans. Politicians and tax bureaucrats are merrily planting stories, even transcriptts of tapped phone calls, which are regurgitated by the hour. Lo and behold, the morning newspaper reads like the scriptt read out by the Times Now anchor on "NewsHour" the previous night. Much the same tamasha over the ITC scandal of 1996, when top bosses of that company were 'interrogated' by Enforcement Branch officials round-the-clock, even placed under police custody for weeks on end, but to produce other than a lot of news bytes which added up to nothing. Quite frankly, media houses in India lack skilled personnel to investigate economic crimes of the scale allegedly carried out by Lalit Modi or BCCI or, as some channels say, both. Our journos excel in being receptacles for interest groups.
Meanwhile, the Planning Commission has been forced to accept that 37 per cent of Indians, i.e. 430 million people, are currently living below the poverty line. There were two cases of heinous assaults on Dalit villagers this week. The media's apathy to this has bred a suprising, new market for the wisdom espoused by Arundhati Roy, the writer who is not embarrassed to articulate the agenda of the Maoists. Now, we have the same media which unabashedly campaigns for the Washington Consensus making money out of her interviews and articles. Why, simply because she now has a market where she isn't supposed to have. Now that's a case of convergence of media and public interest.
