Media as dutiful wife

The problem with the current situation is media continues to be among the least liberalised & most protected businesses, while a few big media moguls woo the govt for their interests.

File photo of Indian newspapers | Commons

I have for long had this radical solution for an India-Pakistan problem: bring the negotiating teams of both countries to Delhi’s Ashok Hotel, lock them up in a suite and tell them that they have to eat the food from the ITDC kitchen until they sign the final agreement. It is reasonable to presume that by the third meal or so both sides should be willing to sign on anything, even parcel away Kashmir.

But something obviously remarkable has happened to our economy so even this crumbling fuddy-duddy of our public sector has found favour with the high and mighty. You can understand why the Government of India chose Hotel Ashok for the Prime Minister’s lunch with Clinton.

Governments are known for doing boring things. What needs to be underlined is the fact that the hotel was also the venue of two of the media’s biggest, sexiest and the most glamorous events in the past year. First of all, television anchor and mega star Rajat Sharma held a party that attracted the who’s who of Delhi and where Prime Minister Vajpayee and Rupert Murdoch supped together at the head table. Then, the Samajwadi Party’s Member of Parliament and man-about-town Amar Singh hosted Murdoch’s most vicious Australian rival, Kerry Packer, at the same venue. With elephants, horses, pretty young things clad in the kind of clothing Rekha wore in Utsav; and Amitabh Bachchan flitting between tables to see that the guests were looked after, it was a welcome fit for a king. In fact, in comparison, it would have made Clinton feel unwanted.

Don’t waste too much time figuring out why the richest and most influential sections of the media have suddenly discovered new charms at the Ashok. I think the answer is simpler, just sizable public sector style discounts and also the Freudian expression of the subconscious linkage of the media with power.

What makes Murdoch and Packer both visit India within a fortnight except the prospect of buying into a booming Indian media and entertainment industry? Of the two, Murdoch has burnt his fingers a bit, having invested in Star TV in the hope of making money through direct-to-home telecasts which he once believed would be cleared through methods that usually work in Third World countries. His initial strategy was to buy out the creative classes with generous dollops of programming contracts and consultancies and so he had obviously realised later that the Indian establishment is tougher, more obstinate and even obnoxious than he has seen so far. So, now spending hours in the company of Delhi’s politicos and the Prime Minister, he has decided to shake hands with the same establishment, burn fingers and all.

While the big papers celebrate the meeting of the Packers and the Murdochs as intensive opening up of the Indian media market to global players, let me pause for a moment and wonder whether this amounts to a great free market opening up or the beginning of a new and dangerous crony capitalism in Indian media. Surely, Murdoch sitting at the head table with Vajpayee for nearly two hours and Packer surrounded by the cream of Delhi’s bureaucracy and politics do not indicate any liberalised opening up of our media markets to a couple of businesses. It does imply the most powerful media moghuls in the world are wooing the Indian establishment to bring about a selective, case-by-case opening up that will give the local partners an unfair advantage compared to competition, whether indigenous or international.

This paper has unequivocally and firmly advocated the opening up of our media markets to globalisation. It has also argued that the winds of reform should not be confined to the electronic media. If that is sauce for the goose, it is also sauce for the gander and foreign investments and inputs should be as good for the print media as for its younger, swankier and most visible electronic sibling. So why am I whining now?

The problem with the current situation is that while a couple of big media moghuls woo the government and its ministers in their selective area of interest, media by and large continues to be one of the least liberalised and most protected of businesses. The government controls all of the terrestrial television and radio rights. The satellite channels have to submit to the many complicated, undefined laws and a regime of arbitrary controls and the print media stands in a league by itself, closed to all foreign investment and shut out from foreign competition as well as opportunity.

The government takes pride in making a break from the past on Nehruvian economics. It is ludicrous in its insistence, going on and on promising to protect the print media from foreign influences. In Parliament and in cabinet, these self-styled King Canutes go around as if print media were somehow the lost vestiges of nationalism or a symbol of national honour that we need to protect from foreigners while throwing the rest of the economy open to them.

Yet, the same media that roots so strongly for globalisation elsewhere becomes so self-righteous when it comes to facing international competition. By and large, the Indian media’s approach to globalisation and reform is the same as that of the Indian male towards women’s emancipation.

You want everyone else’s woman to be liberated but yours, preferably staying at home, doing kitchen chores, tossing you a nice meal, sending the children to school and waiting for you to return from work like a dutiful wife.

So ridiculous and so self-defeating is this approach that even the print medium’s web edition run by the same newspapers thrive on foreign funding and protects all Nasdaq listings. What is the newspaper’s website after all, but the newspaper’s content? If anything, the newspaper’s website showcases even more of the content than the main edition can pack, given its limited space. How then does the government justify actually encouraging foreign investment in websites for the same content, influencing the same audiences while choking print under a half-law of 1955 vintage? The truth is that much more than the opening up of satellite television, it is the arrival of the web edition that has opened a window if not a backdoor for investment in print media. So what else is the government trying to protect now?

So ossified is our thinking on this, so fixed our notions, that many of us in the business of print media fail to see this change. This protection from foreign investment is only notional and part of the great Indian ostrich mentality. While print campaigns to keep the evil foreign competition out, it is being eaten up rapidly by the television and dotcom businesses mainly on the strength of what seems like limitless foreign capital. Many are losing audiences, advertising and, most of all, talented, committed professionals to the world of dotcom wages and employee stock option plans (esops). Yet we smugly think that we are safe because the 1955 cabinet resolution protects us from foreigners. We might as well bury our heads in the sand and stay like that forever while the waves of change reshape our markets and take away our mindspace.