As a child growing up in Kolkata, we got our news primarily from the English daily The Statesman.
The Statesman, with its ponderous title and equally ponderous editorial style, vestiges of a British-colonial legacy, was a paper that I really looked forward to, because it was my window, not only to the city's happenings, but also to the world's.
The Statesman was a serious newspaper; there was not a shred of entertainment in it. Even the gentleman who delivered the paper every morning at 6:00 a.m. looked very soberly mustachioed; he never cracked a joke and I never saw him smile.
He just delivered, just as The Statesman just delivered the news.
Starved for entertainment, I would turn to publications like Stardust and Filmfare, and now and then we subscribed to these Indian equivalents of Entertainment Weekly and People Magazine.
I couldn't imagine a Stardust and a Statesman combined into one single publication.
But things have changed. What was valid twenty years ago is invalid today in the Indian journalism scene. The Times of India, India's and the globe's largest-selling English language daily, primarily sells entertainment and secondarily serious political and social news.
When I go to the Times of India website, there is Bollywood news front and center. I have a nagging suspicion that TOI has appropriated the roles that the Stardusts and Filmfares used to play in the past.
Lately, this tendency of the nation's most-read newspaper--to blithely ignore the responsibilities of serious journalism and focus on entertainment--has come under attack, mostly in the Western media. The
New Yorker's Ken Auletta had
blasted the
TOI for taking the easy route to survival in an era of declining popularity of print journalism globally.
Indian newspapers in general, says Auletta, have become pimps in the marketplace of entertainment. They have "dismantled the wall between newsroom and sales," and The Times of India has
celebrities and advertisers pay the paper to have its reporters write advertorials about their brands in its supplementary sections; the newspaper enters into private-treaty agreements with some advertisers, accepting equity in the advertisers’ firms as partial payment.
In a recently published
book on the contradictions inherent in modern India, economists Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze, have similarly chastised Indian journalism for not bearing its moral obligation to serve the interests of the millions of Indian poor.
If selling entertainment and brands is key to the success of papers like The Times of India, then there has to be a justification of this choice. Indians are especially adept at creating magnificent rationales to justify all acts of pimping for the sake of lucre, even if they are pimping off, as goes a folksy Indian saying, "their mothers and daughters."
The owner of the
TOI rationalized his paper's decision to devote more space to Bollywood and cricket and less to news of poverty, exploitation and corruption in India, by
comparing a newspaper to a "temple."
The objective of a temple was to use entertainment of rituals and frivolity of festivals to lure worshippers into the sanctum sanctorum of the temple where the more serious matter resided. Likewise the TOI
[Uses] the outer sections of [the] newspaper — the dramatic news, the sports pages and the colorful supplements about beautiful ladies and men in red pants — to lure readers inside to serious news, and finally to the sacred editorial page.
[One wonders about the men in "red pants"]
The belief system on which this rationale rests is borrowed from Bollywood. For eons now, the Indian film industry has argued that their priority is to entertain, not to make the "man on the street," think.
This works well for the entertainment industry, but to make it the motto of journalism degrades the "temple" of journalism into the temple of doom.
What sits inside the sanctum sanctorum of the "sacred editorial page," one might surmise, aren't the Jain brothers, but a figure like Mola Ram.
