Despite disappointing delays, there can be no doubt that the Supreme Court and the High Courts have remained a strong bulwark against an executive which is determined to cut the media down to size, Supreme Court senior advocate Chander Uday Singh said in Chennai on May 3.
Mr. Singh was delivering the Lawrence Dana Pinkham Memorial Lecture at the convocation of the Asian College of Journalism’s (ACJ) class of 2022-23 and the presentation of the ACJ Journalism Awards for 2022.
The present National Democratic Alliance government, led by the BJP, believed that a brute majority in the Parliament was justification enough to tame and bend the media to its bidding, Mr. Singh said. While outright censorship would not work in the 21st century, the government, “borrowing from the modern autocrat’s playbook,” has adopted a variety of strategies to control the media, he added.
Media monopolisation
Mr. Singh made the case that this had started with the delegitimisation of the media, with Union ministers using words like “presstitutes” to describe journalists, shunning press conferences, and using government advertising as a tool to make the media pliant. He warned that the concentration of media ownership had gone from mere corporatisation of journalism to the monopolisation of the mainstream media by big, “friendly”, corporations.
While many who stand for journalistic independence had to leave the mainstream media due to pressure, Mr. Singh said that the government had also ratcheted up the pressure on independent media houses and journalists through a malevolent mix of social media attacks, cancellation of licences, investigation by government agencies, and filing of multiple FIRs.
The senior advocate said that the “crowing glory” of this assault was the recent amendment to the Information Technology Rules of 2021, which enabled the creation of a “fact check unit” by the government. It was not surprising that India has slipped further to the 161st rank in the World Press Freedom Index published on Wednesday, he observed.
More opportunities
Though the situation might sound bleak, he told the graduating students that difficult times provided more opportunity and greater possibilities of unearthing a scoop. Mr. Singh recalled how the media had bounced back with unbridled optimism after the censorship faced during the Emergency.
Though the courts appeared to be succumbing to the pressures of an overbearing executive, they pushed back when things started to get really bad, Mr. Singh said. If anyone had any doubts about the judiciary’s will and intent, they should be dispelled by the Supreme Court’s recent judgement striking down the ban on the MediaOne television channel, he added.
Quality journalism
Media Development Foundation (MDF) trustee N. Ram, who is also a director of The Hindu Publishing Group, also told the graduands that though the freedom of the press was under attack, there were still many spaces and opportunities to do quality journalism.
He said that ACJ’s curriculum design, first-rate faculty, infrastructure, placements, and importantly, the values imparted during the programme, were factors that have made it the premier postgraduate journalism institution in South Asia.
Sashi Kumar, chairman of the MDF and ACJ, said that the role of journalism institutions was becoming more critical in a scenario where part of the media has become complicit, part of the media is embattled, and part of the media is fighting bravely to keep the media independent. He added that ACJ had seen record placements this year.
Journalism awards
The Asian College of Journalism (ACJ) Journalism Awards for the year 2022 were presented in three categories. Arunabh Saikia of Scroll won the award for Investigation Journalism for his story on Adani Enterprises’ coal mining in Chhattisgarh’s biodiverse Hasdeo Arand forest. The K.P. Narayana Kumar Memorial Award for Social Impact Journalism went to Neel Madhav and Alishan Jafri for their story on hatemongering Hindi YouTube Channels, published in The Caravan.
The Ashish Yechury Memorial Award for Photojournalism, awarded for the first time, went to Tanmoy Bhaduri of Context for his work on the hardships faced by children growing up near the coalfields of Jharia, Jharkhand.
Special mentions
The special mentions in the Investigative Journalism category included Himanshi Dahiya’s story for The Quint on the struggles of those children in Gujarat who are forced into marriages and pregnancies and The News Minute’s report on how a non-governmental organisation was collecting personal information of voters, posing a major threat to privacy and fairness of elections.
The special mentions in the Social Impact Journalism category included Andrew Fidel Fernando’s story on economic crisis in Sri Lanka for the Fiftytwo.in, Parth Nikhil’s story for the People’s Archive of Rural India on inadequate access to public healthcare in Uttar Pradesh, and C.S. Sivanandan’s story for Malayala Manorama on the struggles of children with disabilities.
In the Photojournalism category, the special mentions were Shobhana Radhakrishnan’s story for Citizen Matters on life in single-room homes in Chennai and Shefali Rafiq’s story on the poor menstrual health suffered by tribal women in Kashmir.
