(The recent article in the New Yorker by Ken Auletta, "Citizen Jains", October 8, 2012 (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/08/121008fa_fact_auletta?printable=true¤tPage=all&pink=OyguV0#ixzz28hPlbFKd) inspires me to dig up this article from six-and-a-half years back.
When the Bombay Times and Journal of
Commerce was launched in 1838, its editor J.E. Brennan, had a rather lofty
mission in mind. It was a matter of great regret, he said, that England paid
little attention to India, which stood in great need for education, since its
“capacity for improvement is inferior to none”. The newly launched organ of the
British mission in India would, he affirmed, provide “the earliest possible
intelligence upon all subjects of politics, science and literature”. It would
record all “changes and promotions” in the civil, military and naval services,
and furnish for the benefit of the “mercantile community” both in India and
England, “the fullest and most authentic commercial intelligence”. And with
regard to the politics of Britain, “such articles (would) be extracted from the
leading organs of every political party as may present to the reader a
comprehensive view of the opinions and feelings of each”.[1]
As the years passed, the newspaper
abbreviated its name to the Bombay Times, while taking over and
incorporating a few other journals that had been launched to serve particular
sectional interests in the western seaboard town of raj. Dr George
Buist, a man of allegedly brilliant scholarly accomplishments was soon
appointed editor of the newspaper and served for a period of close to two
decades. In the aftermath of the 1857 uprising, commemorated now as the first
war for Indian independence, his strident demand that the British follow a
policy of “blood for blood” excited much resentment among the wealthy Bombay
residents who were principal shareholders of the paper. His frequent recourse
to the imagery of the jungle and his characterisation of the natives as
“ferocious tigers, treacherous barbarians and cruel savages” were deemed by the
proprietors to be “illiberal, impolitic and unjust”, tending to “alienate the
native chiefs and Her Majesty’s subjects from the British government” and to
“excite discontent and disaffection throughout British India.” But Buist
remained unrepentant, and had to be summarily removed from his post.[2]
His successor, Frank Knight, continued the
policy of buying up other newspapers in the city and broadening the reach of
the Bombay Times. In September 1861, he launched the journal afresh as The
Times of India, explaining the change as the logical outcome of the growth
of Bombay, which had become in all but name “the capital city of India”. It was
a city of infinite possibilities, whose future even “the most sanguine cannot
adequately forecast”, and truly “imperial” in its resources, “whether for
commerce or for war”. “While the city is imperial, its Press hitherto has been,
in title, only provincial, and in announcing ourselves as The Times of India
we are simply endeavouring to keep up with the march of events”, he said.[3]
A century-and-a-half on, The Times of
India (TOI) was preparing itself for a similar takeover of the public
imagination in India’s true national capital, Delhi, its one city with historic
claims to imperial status. But the times had changed and so too had the idiom
of expression. The Delhi edition of the newspaper on January 30, 2006 featured
stories so outlandish on its front page, that the first impulse of the reader
would have been to check whether another day of dedication to tomfoolery had
been invented, to compete with the hoary antiquity of All Fools’ Day. The idea,
it transpired, was merely to jolt Delhi’s newspaper reading public into an
awareness of the multitude of possibilities that the future held in store.
Underlining its intention to think beyond the constraints and limitations of
the present, the TOI had datelined its issue that day for the year 2025. Delhi
it said, stood “at a tipping point”. It was “waiting to be rocketed into a
higher orbit”, where it would share space with “New York, London, Paris and
more”.[4]
The daily’s stated purpose in carrying out
the hoax on 30 January was to drive the agenda of transforming the Indian
capital Delhi from a rather slovenly, unkempt city with distinct features of
the Third World, into a true world city. Two days later, the newspaper
announced that it would sponsor a cycle of festive events celebrating the good
life in the city of Delhi. It was to be an observance that would belong
uniquely to the city and in being seen as its principal patron, TOI was without
saying as much, making plain its intention to get into the knit of the city’s
life. After making significant inroads into a market in which it was earlier a
distinct also-ran, this was the TOI’s bid for dominance. Delhi’s traditionally
leading newspaper, which had first stigmatised its upstart competitor, then
sought vainly to emulate it as its leadership in the market was rapidly
whittled away, was left looking on, a helpless spectator.
The TOI Story
The career of the Times of India since the
early-1990s at least, has been a saga of how the race to the bottom is the most
profitable enterprise for a media institution. When newspapers were mired in old
habits of thought, clinging to outdated beliefs that they served a public
purpose, the TOI boldly proclaimed its exclusive devotion to the commercial
calculus. It tided over the storm of derision that it invited, striking out
along the path of squeezing out the last rupee of advertising revenue available
in the market. And it succeeded not merely in maximising advertising revenue
yield, but even in sharply boosting circulation and profitability.
Ever since, the TOI has been the role model
for the Indian newspaper in the age of globalisation. When the relevance of the
medium to its traditional constituencies has itself been called into question,
the TOI has not merely remained relevant, it has created new constituencies
along with the lifestyle paradigms it has propagated.
As a case study, the TOI is important for
understanding the media as a social and political institution in the new world
order. This is particularly true in the Indian context where Bennett Coleman
and Company (BCCL), the company that owns newspaper, is replicating what has
been done by large media conglomerates elsewhere – the subordination of
journalism to the whims of advertisers.
The
TOI- Hindustan Times Price War
An entry against the newspaper in the
internet based public encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, records that in 1907, TOI
launched the first price war in the Indian media industry, cutting its price
from 4 annas (or one-fourth of a rupee under the currency denominations then
prevalent) to 1 anna.[5]
An authoritative history of the Indian newspaper industry and its role in the
struggle for freedom from colonialism, puts a rather different spin on the
event. The TOI, it records was richer than the competition in the Bombay market
and shared the power of its Anglo-Indian patrons. But it was always under
challenge from the more nationalist minded Bombay Chronicle,
particularly when the sympathies of the English-reading public in the city
started shifting in that direction. Thus “when the Chronicle set its
price at one anna, the Times felt compelled to reduce its single issue price to
one anna in order to preserve its share of the market”.[6]
However the game was played in Bombay in
the first half of the 20th century, the early 1990s witnessed rather
different rules of engagement in the Delhi market, dominated till then by the
rather colourless and unimaginative Hindustan Times (hereafter, HT).
Owned by the Birla family, then perhaps India’s most powerful and influential
industrial group, the HT as a newspaper was of considerably lesser vintage than
the TOI. It had been parented by a factional leader of the Hindu Mahasabha
using the finances of the Birla family and, since beginning operations in the
1930s had been under secure and settled ownership. Though Delhi had become a
market of interest for three other major newspaper groups – the TOI, The
Hindu, and the Indian Express – HT’s dominance seemed assured and
safe, until the rules were radically rewritten.
In March 1994, the TOI sharply cut the
selling price of its single issue from Rs 2.40 to Rs 1.50 on all days of the
week except Friday. To guard against a catastrophic drain of revenues, the
Friday price was raised to Rs 6, but soon enough cut to Rs 2.90. By early-May,
the results as assessed by the TOI sales management team, were distinctly
promising. Circulation in Delhi city, they estimated, had increased by about
20,000 on a sustained daily basis. Perhaps a quarter of this increase had been
achieved at the expense of HT.
An unexpected hitch arose from another
quarter. Newspaper vendors, an organised and powerful lobby in Delhi, were
worried at a potential loss of income since their fees were computed as a fixed
percentage of the cover price of the newspaper. To assuage these worries, TOI
agreed on an ad hoc basis, to increase the vendors’ fee from 25 percent
of the cover price, to the equivalent of almost 40 percent. Whether an
assurance to revert to the old pricing scheme and eliminate these contingent
measures was also conveyed, remains unclear. The vendors certainly believed
that the revised price schedule of the TOI would be applicable for no more than
three months. The TOI management had other ideas. But three months into the new
deal, vendor organisations, claiming a breach of commercial agreement, began a
boycott of the TOI. It was conjectured on the basis of fairly reliable bazaar
gossip, that the HT management had actively stepped into the fray by then,
leveraging its relationship of goodwill with the fraternity of news vendors to
ensure that the TOI’s predatory forays were checkmated.
What followed were weeks on end, when the
street corners and town squares where newspapers were bundled and packed for
daily distribution, resembled battle zones. The newspaper vendors, with HT
officials and employees seconded as their principal advisors and strategists,
managed to disrupt every effort made to have the TOI distributed. An injunction
obtained from the Delhi High Court served little purpose against the raw muscle
power deployed. Editorial columns in both the TOI and the HT became the medium
through which the battle of ideas, such as they were, was fought. This was a
world totally disconnected from the rude ground realities of brawling newspaper
vendors and conniving newspaper managements. The vocabulary here was dominated
by lofty notions of consumer sovereignty, of dealers coddled with an assured
take from each copy they distributed, and the noble instinct of self-abnegation
that had led the TOI to slash prices and contemplate a catastrophic loss of
revenue in the interests of its readers.
Peace was finally established, but with a
newspaper scenario transformed beyond recognition in Delhi. Apart from the HT,
two other newspapers, the Indian Express and Pioneer, felt
compelled to match the TOI’s offering by way of cover price. Among the majors,
only The Hindu retained its older selling price, content in the
realisation that its core commercial interests lay in the distant south of the
country. With all newspapers published in Delhi facing a massive drain of
circulation revenue, the race began in earnest for the conquest of those
demographic segments among the city’s English-reading audience that would be of
maximum interest to the advertisers.
The golden goose of advertising
Needless to say, the TOI emerged the
decisive winner in that pursuit of advertising gold. It could not have been
otherwise, since the TOI by 1994 had long since internalised the most
significant rule of competition in the market for advertisements. Simply put,
the advertiser was king and the readership a distant abstraction that did not
have any immediacy to the newspaper, except as a burden to be borne. A recent
chronicle of the Indian media industry records that the history of the press in
the country can be written in terms of a significant point of inflection. The print
industry, for long mired in romantic recollections of its contribution to the
Indian freedom struggle, deluded in the belief that it had a role in
underwriting the quality of the public discourse, was shaken out of its reverie
by Samir Jain who entered his family business as a decisive player around the
mid-1980s.[7]
An account of the TOI’s breathtaking
innovations in the newspaper industry informs us that Samir Jain’s achievement
was to use “simple marketing principles and good business sense to transform a
down-in-the-dumps publishing company into a profit machine”.[8]
It is a testament to its essential simplicity that the same strategy, when
deployed in Hyderabad in 2000, encountered a rather better prepared opposition.
Both The Hindu and the Deccan Chronicle, with longer established
bonds in the city, pre-emptively slashed prices to retain and even increase
their market shares.[9]
Lifting
the public gaze upwards
Price competition had evidently reached the
limits of its potential in expanding market share. The focus then shifted to
the demographic character of the audience. Paradoxically, the segments of the
newspaper reading public that set much store by price are of relatively less
importance to the advertiser. People with high purchasing power and high
individual net worth tend to be insensitive to price variables in their buying
decisions. The TOI marketing strategy then devolved upon a simple principle: to
bring the universe of the high purchasing power demographic into the gaze of
the price sensitive buyer. It was the decade of globalisation, when the cult of
the celebrity acquired unparalleled proportions and the celebration of the good
life of the few became a source of vicarious delight for the many. And the TOI
was instrumental in the creation of this ethos.
Initial conditions were strongly in its
favour. The TOI had always been strongly entrenched in the city of Bombay (now
Mumbai), the commercial metropolis that was home to most of the country’s
principal advertisement agencies. Till the 1990s shifted the locus of urban
wealth towards newer centres less weighed down by the legacy of the past,
Bombay was the city that by far, disposed of the greatest purchasing power.
Enjoying a near monopoly in this market for decades, the TOI by 1994 was estimated
to have an advertisement ratio, measured as the proportion of total printed
area devoted to ads, of 55 percent. In comparison, the HT in Delhi and The
Hindu in Chennai enjoyed much more modest ratios in the lower 40s. This was
the initial advantage that endowed the TOI with the confidence that it could
launch a price war and stay the course better than the competition.
The gains of the price war would have
proved ephemeral though, if the TOI had not recognised that celebrity
narcissism was the wave of the future. And for those who were not fortunate
enough to share in the ethos of these charmed circles, the opportunity to gawk
from a distance was an acceptable substitute. Either way, the celebration of
the good life was just what the advertiser wanted.
In 1997, a media analyst wrote in the
respected professional magazine, the Columbia Journalism Review about
the “ad/edit chemistry .. changing for the worse”. “Corporations and their ad
agencies have clearly turned up the heat on editors and publishers”, he wrote,
“and some magazines are capitulating, unwilling to risk even a single ad. This
(was making) it tougher for those who do fight to maintain the ad-edit wall and
put the interests of their readers first”.[10]
The motivations of the advertisers were clear. The special virtues of a product
tailored to highly refined tastes, would look distinctly less alluring when
placed in an “editorial context” that bore reference to the seamy underside of
life, to a world where poverty and deprivation are rampant, and ill-health and
disasters -- both manmade and natural – extract an enormous toll in human
suffering. As the analyst pointed out: “Colgate-Palmolive .. won't allow ads in
a ‘media context’ containing ‘offensive’ sexual content or material it deems
‘antisocial or in bad taste’ - which it leaves undefined in its policy
statement sent to magazines. (T)he company (has said) that it ‘charges its
advertising agencies and their media buying services with the responsibility of
pre-screening any questionable media content or context’.”[11]
The TOI’s distinction was in being way
ahead of the curve when it came to adapting its editorial content to the need
of the advertiser. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the TOI began a shift of content
towards fashion, lifestyle and entertainment that had its loyal readership
thoroughly flummoxed, used as it was to an intensely political discourse,
intimately engaged with public causes. But even as many among the older
audience cancelled their subscriptions in disgust, the newspaper succeeded in
attracting new readers from unexplored demographic segments, like the youth and
the high purchasing power strata. The results were dramatic.
On December 22, 2003, readers of the TOI
began their day with a veritable display of triumphalism by their daily habit.
Blazoned on the front page that day was a message of thanks to the Delhi
readership, which had ostensibly made the TOI the city’s premier newspaper. And
as important as aggregate figures was the composition of the audience. “Over
three-fourths” of its readers, proclaimed the TOI, were in “the highest
socio-economic category”; “almost a fourth” were “executives, businessmen,
(and) self-employed professionals”; and the newspaper had established itself as
the “clear choice” of the youth, with about 40 percent of its readers being
below 24.[12]
The basis for the celebrations were the
findings of the National Readership Survey (NRS) for 2003, which had put the
TOI ahead of the HT in Delhi for the first time ever. In a pre-emptive
manoeuvre, HT put out a story through its own columns the same day, arguing
that the NRS findings were deceptive. “Circulation”, rather than “readership”,
was the more reliable index of a newspaper’s spread and influence it argued.
And circulation figures as gathered by the mandated body, the Audit Bureau of
Circulation, still accorded the HT a significant lead over all competitors in
the Delhi market.
The TOI hit back with another front-page
salvo the following day. “At the top”, it proclaimed in bold print, “there’s
room for only one”. And with an abundance of pedantic zeal, it sought to
explain to its readers what the essential differences were, between circulation
and readership, and why its claims to leadership in Delhi were absolutely
watertight.[13]
The celebrations continued for another day.
The edition of the TOI on Christmas eve moved the venue of the festivities from
page one to two. It featured two photographs, of the Dalai Lama and Hindi movie
star Amitabh Bachchan, posing with editions of the TOI, and a chorus of acclaim
from well-heeled businessmen and executives, about the pioneering new path that
the newspaper had embarked upon. For those who were still a little squeamish at
the cocktail of froth and celebrity vacuousness served up by the daily
supplement issued with the newspaper, the Delhi Times, there was a
celebratory article on that phenomenon of the publishing world. The Delhi
Times, wrote a breathless reporter for the TOI, was “where an infotainment
(sic) revolution is shaped and reshaped every day”. “In a day and age when the
newspaper has outgrown its pristine format to assume a millennial avatar, Delhi
Times – by being in sync with the pulse of its audience – is constantly in
dialogue with its readers”.[14]
And the bottom line flourishes
The financial performance of the Indian
media is generally difficult to monitor, since most entities are either private
limited companies, which are entitled to accounting confidentiality, or
unlisted public companies whose parameters remain the preserve of a select few.
A website specialising in media related matters does a significant public
service in collating the figures for India’s major media players on a fairly
regular basis. And the results that it has uncovered are little short of
astounding. In 2001 for instance, BCCL was the “second most profitable unlisted
company in India”, recording a net profit of Rs 2,059 million, which was well
over twice the figure registered the previous year. In comparison, other media
companies turned in distinctly anaemic performances. Kasturi and Sons Ltd,
publishers of The Hindu, declared a net profit of Rs 222.5 million and
the Indian Express group reported Rs 23.6 million. But the weakest performance,
expectedly, came from the newspaper that had suffered the misfortune of
encountering the TOI at its most aggressive. HT’s net profits in 2001 were down
by over 96 percent at Rs 5.8 million, and the company seemed rapidly to be
plunging into the red.[15]
The misery was by no means over for the HT.
Figures available for 2003 from the same source report that BCCL’s net profit
for the year stood at Rs 1,664 million, while Kasturi and Sons earned Rs 315.5
million. HT again was languishing at the bottom of the heap. Though its figures
were not quite as dismal as two years prior, at Rs 18.4 million, its net profit
seemed derisory in relation to the standard established by its main competitor.[16]
Matters did improve in the following years
though. In August 2005, the HT, which had been among the most ardent naysayers
in the matter of foreign direct investment in the print media, came out with an
Initial Public Offering (IPO) of shares. Early convictions having evaporated in
the heat of competition with the TOI, foreign entities including Citigroup and
the Henderson group, were expected to pick up sizeable chunks of the IPO. In an
analysis of the attractiveness of the offering, The Hindu Business Line,
a financial daily published by Kasturi and Sons, reported that the HT
bottomline had improved for a variety of reasons. It had managed “to come
through a difficult period with a substantial expansion in circulation for the
New Delhi edition”. Circulation had stabilised at the “one million plus level”,
contributing to “greater clout with advertisers”. Advertisement rates had been
raised in May 2005. And in March of the same year, the HT and the TOI had
agreed on a concerted rise in cover price of about 30 percent. The “price-cuts
that hurt profitability”, the analyst concluded, appeared “to be a story of the
past”.[17]
With the declaration of the truce, the two
media giants evidently accepted an uneasy coexistence. In terms of content and
target audience, they now looked like clones of the same cell. But the media
landscape in which the peace was established, was a very different place. Where
once Delhi had a choice of close to ten daily newspapers published locally in
the English language, the number of serious options had declined badly. Several
of the newspapers that used to offer competing menus and priorities to the
public right up to the early-1990s, contributing in their own ways to the
richness of the public discourse, were now hollowed out financially, compelled
to reach ever deeper to appease politicians and advertisers, merely to bring
out a day’s edition. BCCL itself ended its decade-and-a-half of rapid commercial
growth with a much leaner portfolio of publications. Its daily newspapers, the
TOI and the Economic Times, were far and away, the leaders of their
respective market segments. But several other prestigious mastheads, including The
Illustrated Weekly of India and Science Today in English, and Dinmaan,
Dharmyug and the Navbharat Times edition at Lucknow, had passed
into history. Increasing profits and financial clout was achieved in short by a
palpable loss of media diversity. That the ends of consumer sovereignty have
not been served by the price war in the newspaper market or by the aggressive
advertisement-oriented strategy of the TOI group, is a conclusion that for
many, seems indubitable.
The emasculation of the editorial function
This transformation of the newspaper in the
advertisement and circulation aspects, also meant initiating radical changes in
the editorial function, which had to adapt itself to the new imperatives of
providing a hospitable environment -- a “feel good” ambience – for advertisers
to display their wares. Earlier editorial priorities, which bore a relationship
to the world that the majority of people actually lived in, had to yield before
the demands of fostering the mania of entertainment and celebrity lifestyles.
The task should have been by all indications, especially difficult in the TOI,
which had a strongly entrenched journalistic culture and a team of writers and
commentators that with some justification, took pride in running the most
respected editorial page in the Indian media.
Samir Jain’s disdain for these traditions
was never a secret. Soon after assuming the office of Vice Chairman in BCCL, he
is known to have begun a sequence of duels with the editor of the TOI, Girilal
Jain (no relation) over the utility of maintaining an intensely political and
public-oriented discourse on the editorial pages of the newspaper. The Vice
Chairman’s view was that the editorial page output served no purpose other than
drawing the attention of the political and bureaucratic class, who needed
little education in any case and contributed little to the financial fortunes
of the newspaper. Girilal Jain, a man of strongly held views and ample
professional confidence, was indulgent towards the man who he knew would at
some stage inherit undiluted proprietorial authority. But as far as the
editorial processes of the TOI were concerned, he kept Samir Jain at arm’s
length.
The chemistry between management and
editorial soon deteriorated and shortly after the TOI completed an ostentatious
celebration of its 150-year jubilee in 1988, Girilal Jain was eased out into
retirement. From then on, Samir Jain’s writ ran unchallenged. He finally
stamped his authority on the editorial department in 1994, nominating a
director of the company to serve as editor of the TOI during a three-week
absence of the regular incumbent. At the same time, the editor’s understudy,
who would have been expected to assume charge, was asked to attend to the
management functions normally discharged by the director.
The message was clear: editorial was no
different in its importance to the newspaper than any of the management
functions. The final concern was only for the bottomline. Only those who were
prepared to abandon the conceit that they could make a difference to the quality
of the public discourse need entertain any ambitions of working with the TOI.
In the years that followed, the designation of the “editor”, an integral part
of a newspaper, was itself chopped and changed. It underwent various
transformations that were devoid of sense or logic, before the BCCL management
finally settled on having editors for each market, defined in a territorial
sense.
The Times Of India gets agitated over ‘human rights’
Early in 1997, the Enforcement Directorate,
an agency of the Indian government that is mandated to pursue and prosecute
offences under the country’s Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA) opened
investigations into a number of possible violations by BCCL chairman Ashok
Jain. The case involved opening bank accounts overseas without authorisation,
money laundering and other offences.
On March 30, 1997, the incumbent Indian
Prime Minister, H.D. Deve Gowda, was told early in the afternoon that the
Congress Party whose support in the lower house of Parliament he enjoyed, had
chosen to withdraw its sustenance. The decision conveyed in a letter to the
President of India by Sitaram Kesri, president of the Congress party, left most
observers mystified, including other elements within the senior leadership of
the party. Deve Gowda duly resigned after failing to win a vote in Parliament
and a successor was nominated from within his party, who the Congress then
undertook to support.
On May 1, 1997, this writer with two
professional colleagues, interviewed Deve Gowda at his residence in New Delhi.
The general impression was that he had lost favour with the Congress because of
the spate of investigations launched during his tenure into cases of political
corruption involving the party. When the issue was posed in this manner, his
response was simple: while in office his intent had always been to let the law
take its course. Out of office, his greatest source of satisfaction was the
belief that nobody could accuse him of ever having intervened in the due
process of law, even where the appeasement of political confederates would have
brought him rich dividends. The question was then posed, about Enforcement
Directorate investigations, into possible violations by “various individuals”.
There were reports that these inquiries were being blocked by the political
leadership, impelling some civic-minded individuals to file a public interest
petition in the Supreme Court of India, demanding that the investigation be
given free rein. As Prime Minister, Deve Gowda himself had irately once referred
to these petitions as a manifestation of “political interest litigation”.[18]
Out of office, Deve Gowda was less given to
the rhetorical flourish. “Public interest litigation is the right of every
citizen of this country”, he said: “If he or she feels that some injustice is
(happening), he or she can go seek redress through the courts. But so far as
this allegation is concerned, it has not come to my knowledge”.
The lapse of over nine years since then has
freed this writer from the assurance of confidentiality given as a professional
courtesy to the former Prime Minister. What transpired off the record, once the
tape-recorders were switched off, can now be recounted. Referring back to the
question that had been posed about “various individuals” managing to sabotage
the course of investigations, Deve Gowda brought up the specific case of the
FERA offences involving Ashok Jain. And he was categorical in asserting that
the singular reason why Kesri had withdrawn support, was Deve Gowda’s refusal
to do his bit in blocking these investigations.[19]
By March 1998, Deve Gowda’s successor had
also been unseated and a government of a completely different political stripe
installed in office. Yet the Enforcement Directorate could not be deflected off
course. The TOI meanwhile, had begun a regular front-page column titled “Human
Rights Watch”, borrowing the name of a respected international voluntary
organisation for the decidedly more mundane purpose of suppressing a criminal
investigation into an individual’s business transactions. There were horrifying
stories of harassment and torture, of the selective victimisation of particular
communities, and testaments of support for the victims of Enforcement
Directorate excesses, from businessmen and legal luminaries. These reports
began appearing from the time that the Enforcement Directorate raided BCCL
offices in Mumbai, Calcutta and Delhi in January 1998.[20]
In May 1998, the TOI management summarily
dismissed H.K. Dua from the post of “Editorial Advisor” that he had enjoyed for
a year. His appointment to this rather vaguely designated post – it was not
clear from the formal title he enjoyed, whether he was to advise the management
or the journalists – was integrally related to the TOI’s effort to reduce the
function of the editor to that of a cipher. To meet the formal requirement that
an identified individual should be ascribed with responsibility for news items
featured in any day’s edition of the newspaper, Dua was featured on the
printline of the TOI while he held the position of editorial advisor. It was a
clear case of responsibility without power, since the content of the news pages
in the TOI was by now almost entirely within the domain of the advertisement
department.
In March 1998, Dua’s name was removed from
the printline of the newspaper and substituted with that of Pradeep Guha, an
executive director of BCCL. Cut to the quick, Dua penned a letter to the BCCL
chairman on March 22nd, accusing him of acting in an “unfair,
illegal, arbitrary, administratively improper and malafide” manner.
Ashok Jain, he said, had called him from the hospitalisation he had sought as a
safe haven against the investigating agencies, to ask him “to lobby with
political leaders to seek their help in the FERA cases he (had) been facing for
some time”. Dua had then refused on the grounds that the lobbying function was
no part of his responsibilities as editorial advisor. A few days later, he
records, “Ashok Jain asked me to write articles in his favour to create a
helpful climate before the Supreme Court (took) up his cases”. Dua, in his own
narration of these events, responded with some asperity, pointing out that as
“editor”, he was committed to the defence of the public interest. And it was
not clear to him how the defence of Ashok Jain in a case involving financial
crimes, met that function.[21]
TOI takes on the Press Council
Dua was rubbed out of the printline of the
TOI in March 1998, but formally served his dismissal only two months later. The
indignity that was inflicted on him roused several other professionals to
action. Kuldip Nayar, a veteran journalist, then a member of the upper house of
the Indian Parliament, raised the issue in that forum as one meriting action
from a constitutional standpoint in defence of the right to free speech. And
the social scientist Rajni Kothari, one of India’s most respected public
intellectuals, condemned the event as “an attempt to humiliate the entire
editorial fraternity”. “The blame for this cannot be laid entirely at the door
of the management”, he said: “Journalists are also to blame, especially those
who put together the ‘Human Rights Watch’ columns in the newspaper”.[22]
With public indignation building up, the
Press Council of India (PCI) in August 1998 issued an unprecedented stricture
against the TOI, accusing it of “carrying on a campaign against the Enforcement
Directorate with the manifest intention of pressurising and deflecting it from
performing its lawful duties”. The Indian Newspaper Society (INS), a powerful
lobby representing the print media industry, responded within a week with “a
strong objection” to the PCI’s action. With little concern for propriety, the
INS president went on to question the credentials of the PCI chairman P.B.
Sawant, a former Judge of the Supreme Court of India, who had earned almost
universal respect for the depth and integrity of his rulings from the highest
judicial bench in the country. Sawant’s remarks, said the INS, indicated an
“ignorance of the ground realities of the industry as well as (an) absence of
understanding of the climate in which India has created a free and independent
media”.[23]
This controversy soon exploded into a
public exercise in vituperation. The INS took exception to further observations
by Justice Sawant that private ownership of the print media potentially
embodied a serious hazard to the public interest, which made other forms of
control, including cooperative ownership, worthwhile options to explore. The
PCI in turn, responded by dismissing the allegations of “hostility” and “bias”
levelled against its Chairman. These “unfortunate, unwarranted and completely
unjustified” accusations amounted to actions “against the Constitution of the
land” which allowed for a variety of ownership forms over public institutions.
Implicitly referring to the dissent that had been expressed within INS councils
over its decision to engage a distinguished public functionary in an unseemly
verbal brawl, the PCI characterised the attack on its chairman as a violation
of the “constitution of the INS”, which betrayed “ an outright partisan
attitude”.[24]
The controversy threatened to burgeon out
of control, but with Ashok Jain’s death in February 1999 while under treatment
for a serious heart ailment in the U.S. city of Cleveland, Ohio, the
belligerents decided to call a truce. If anything, the equations between the
editorial and business functions of a newspaper were left further embittered by
these inconclusive engagements. And in the years to come, the TOI was to
establish a new orthodoxy in the diverse manners in which the constitutional
right to free speech, and the right to access media time and space are
understood.
Pay your way: fundamental rights as commerce
In March 2003, the TOI announced a new
initiative that was professedly a part of its effort to stay current with
journalistic practices in rapidly changing times. For an enterprise as crass as
charging a fee for favourable coverage in the editorial space of the newspaper,
the TOI managed to adopt a rather lofty idiom of expression. The “Medianet”
initiative as it was called, was in the words of the TOI management, part of
their “desire to drive the market, to constantly break new ground”. The
function of a newspaper, as the explanatory note put it, was “to act as an
information provider”. That definition had “remained unchanged over time”,
though the character of information had changed. So indeed had the means of
information gathering – the network of correspondents maintained by the
newspaper and all its subscriptions to news agencies, were simply failing to match
the voracious appetite for information that was manifest among the larger
public.
The deficiency of traditional
news-gathering techniques was apparent especially in new areas of audience
interest – such as “lifestyle, fashion, entertainment, events, product
launches, social personalities and city happenings”. Public relations agencies
had a much more sensitive feel of the social pulse in these areas, and
journalism had recognised this reality. Once regarded as beyond the pale, PR
agencies had come in from the cold and were enjoying a new respectability as
legitimate sources of news. Yet no feasible method of regulating the flow of
news from this source had been devised, in the TOI management’s estimation.
Medianet was precisely such an effort.
Subtlety aside, this was a reference to the
pervasive journalistic practice of accepting and even actively soliciting,
monetary and other forms of gratification for news and editorial coverage that
might be of material benefit to particular individuals or entities. Through
Medianet, the TOI was, in deference to established rules of market competition,
curbing this corruption of the trade by institutionalising it. Objectivity and
integrity of editorial content would no longer be at risk from the
susceptibility of individual journalists to material inducements. The
organisation itself would bear that onus of vitiating news content in pursuit
of its monetary aggrandisement.
After making “infotainment” a staple of the
media industry, the TOI was now fostering a new hybrid entity called
“advertorial”, which would allow sponsors to feature stories of particular
interest in its news columns. All this would be done, the TOI management note
concluded rather implausibly, “without breaching the boundary wall between
advertising and content”.[25]
To make this vital distinction between “paid for” content and the rest of the
news, the reader needed supposedly, only to look to the bottom of the item in
question. A discrete legend printed there would alert him to the fact that a
particular item was being featured under a Medianet sponsorship.
A year later, a rival media organisation in
Mumbai that had been tracking the career of the Medianet initiative, reported
that the identifying legend had entirely vanished after a few months. There was
in short, no way that the reader could differentiate between an advertorial and
an authentic news or editorial item. It was also reported that Bombay Times,
the city supplement issued with the Mumbai edition of the TOI, had been
charging for featuring photographs on its front page at the rate of Rs 1,254 a
square centimetre. An art gallery owner in the city, while declining to give
precise figures, was prepared to admit that he had instructed his PR agency to
set aside a budget for coverage in the TOI. And the fast food chain McDonald’s
saw little amiss in conceding that the coverage of the launch of its home
delivery service, which featured a colour photograph of a topflight female
model, had been paid for. The Medianet rate card that had come to light then,
revealed specific rates for coverage in a purported interview on page one of Bombay
Times, and other tariffs for being featured on pages two and three.[26]
A commentator from Mumbai said shortly
afterwards, more in sorrow than anger, that for “millions of Indians (who had)
grown up with the TOI, its growing crisis of credibility is like watching an
old friend become mentally unbalanced from an addiction to greed and power.[27]
Whether he suffered any adverse consequences for daring to critique the new trends
in the media is unclear, but a professional journalist who ran a weblog in his
leisure time, often featuring trenchant satire on the bizarre new trajectories
in journalism that the TOI was exploring, had to close down his enterprise
under the threat of legal action. Pradyuman Maheshwari, a journalist with the
Maharashtra Herald in Pune, received his first legal notice for running a story
on his weblog reporting a deal that TOI had allegedly concluded with Reuters
for launching a TV channel. The story was perhaps two years ahead of time and
was soon picked up by other newspapers – testament to its underlying
journalistic competence and quality. But Maheshwari was soon served a legal
notice and lacking the resources for a prolonged battle, compelled to take the
story down and apologise. As a media analyst reported, “even the apology upset
the (TOI), and they told (Maheshwari) to take it down so there wasn’t a
backlash against the paper”.
When the public-spirited journalist carried
19 postings in the following weeks, including some that were bitterly critical
of the Medianet initiative, he received a much longer legal notice. Among other
things, Maheshwari was accused of being “constantly engaged in criminal
conspiracy” against the TOI and causing the organisation “grave harm and loss
of reputation”. Now thoroughly intimated and alarmed at the lack of public
response, Maheshwari shut down his blog.[28]
Medianet is now business as usual in the
TOI group. The wave of adverse notice that it generated has subsided and the
bottom line of the company endowed with greater lustre. Profit finally is the
most effective solvent for all the ethics and principles that journalists may
in their quixotic fashion, still choose to cling on to. And the momentous
debates, which went up to the highest judicial forum in the land and generated
subtle and often pathbreaking enunciations on the right to free speech, the
right of access to media space and time, and other matters of great public
import, (see the following piece, Free Speech and the Right to Commerce)
have all been reduced to the single imperative of profit. The fundamental
rights are a live and vital charter for those who can pay their way to it. The
others may just have to wait for providence to endow them with ownership over a
newspaper.
Box 1. The TOI Empire
On 30
January, 2006 the Times group announced the launch of Times Now, a satellite
television channel covering news and current affairs. Launched in association
with the international news agency, Reuters, Times Now came as the finale of a
rapid process of diversification which had seen the group venture into FM
radio, music publishing and retailing, internet commerce, and the lifestyle and
entertainment segments of satellite TV broadcasting. By extending its reach
into the final frontier of television news and current affairs, the company was
fully geared to consolidate its position as India’s dominant media entity,
capable of leveraging its diverse strengths in print, television and radio for
the ultimate in commercial synergy.
Some
of other brands owned by the group include The
Economic Times (a leading financial broadsheet),
the Navbharat Times (a Hindi
daily broadsheet), the Maharashtra Times (a Marathi daily broadsheet) and Times FM (a FM Radio venture).
On May 30, 2005, the TOI group
launched Mumbai Mirror, which it advertised as the country’s first daily newspaper
in the compact format. The newspaper is distributed free in various parts of
the city and apart from drawing a fair volume of advertisement support, has
been instrumental in the TOI group’s strategy of checkmating competition from a
Mumbai edition of the Hindustan Times and the newly launched Daily
News and Analysis, backed by a
conglomerate of prominent media houses.
The TOI group also owns what it
likes to call two “power brands” in the magazine segment. Femina, the country’s longest-running
magazine meant for women readers and Filmfare,
the most recognisable though not perhaps the oldest
magazine on the Indian film industry, continue to be profitable propositions,
which is why they have survived the holocaust in the magazine market that
consumed some of the group’s other products. Since foreign direct investment
was allowed in the print media industry, these two magazines have been spun off
as the property of a subsidiary company owned by the TOI group, in association
with a British media house.
Aside
from this very minor qualification, it is a measure of the company’s success
that it has managed a massive and rapid process of expansion and diversification
without diluting its ownership structure. It has retained the character of
family ownership that has for long been an entrenched, and seemingly eternal
feature of the Indian media industry. Other firms that were as zealously
guarded in terms of ownership have chosen to go public to adapt to the
financial realities of what is called, rather wishfully, the marketplace of
ideas. But the TOI retains its closely held ownership character and continues
to be ahead of the curve as far as the rapidly changing media environment is
concerned. It manages effortlessly to adapt to every commercial contingency and
indeed, over the last decade-and-a-half, has set the pace of change and
established a commercial environment for the print media industry that other enterprises
have vainly sought to adapt to.
Box2. Keeping up with the Jains
The Times of India was founded on November 3, 1838 as The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce. Daily
editions began in 1850 and by 1861, the newspaper had acquired the identity of The Times of India. By the late-19th
century this newspaper company employed more than 800 people and had a
significant readership in India and Europe. Originally British owned and
controlled, its last British editor was Ivor S. Jehu, who resigned the editorship
in 1950.
In terms of operational control, the TOI group is
today managed by two brothers, Samir and Vineet Jain, who hold the respective
designations of Vice Chairman and Managing Director. In terms of family
genealogy, the brothers are great-grandsons of Ram Krishna Dalmia, a
businessman adventurer who bought the newspaper and all associated publications
off its British owners in 1946 for the princely sum of Rs 20 million. Possessed
by a fatal streak of vainglory, Dalmia imagined himself at the dawn of Indian
independence, as the vanguard of a new social order, arguing his quirky and
quixotic cases on politics and economic policy through the newspaper he had
acquired. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru reacted with an instinctive animosity
towards the socially reactionary agenda that Dalmia quite unabashedly espoused.
And when the BCCL owner was found to have done his case no favour by his
decidedly unsavoury pursuit of business interests in insurance and civil
aviation, he suffered the ignominy of conviction under the law. The TOI group
remained under government oversight under a rarely used provision of India’s
company law, until the Jains succeeded in gaining control of the company. The
story is recounted with the unavoidable veneer of filial affection by one of
Dalmia’s daughters in a recent book. (See Neelmia Dalmia Adhar, Father Dearest,
The Life and Times of R.K. Dalmia, Roli Books, Delhi, 2003.)
[1] Quoted in Margarita Barns, The Indian Press, A History of the
Growth of Public Opinion in India, George Allen and Unwin, 1940, pp 228-9.
[2] Ibid, p 258.
[3] Ibid, p 270.
[4] The basic philosophy of the newspapers’ campaign for the Delhi
market is available on the web at the following address: http://chalodilli.indiatimes.com/articlelist/1393834.cms.
[5] See the chronology available at the following web address: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Times_Group.
[6] Milton Israel, Communications and Power, Propaganda and the
press in the Indian nationalist struggle, 1920-47, Foundations Books,
Delhi, for the Cambridge University Press, 1994, p 23.
[7] Vanita Kohli in The Indian Media Business, records the
advent of Samir Jain in two section heads in her chapter on the print industry.
“Then came the business..” says the sub-head on page 22, registering the
momentous impact of Samir Jain’s entry with the following section, which bears
the heading: “That Samir Jain changed”. A bitter business rival of the TOI
group is quoted grudgingly conceding that the entry of this individual was
among “the biggest milestones in the newspaper business in India”.
[8] Vanita Kohli, p 25-6.
[9] A reasonable account of how TOI’s strategy of a price war in
Hyderabad was checkmated by rival papers with deeper roots in the city is
available in this October 2000 report, sourced on the web at http://www.reachouthyderabad.com/newsmaker/bs15.htm.
An assessment by a media monitoring enterprise in July 2001, just under a year
since the TOI launched its Hyderabad edition, provided the following summation:
“TOI launched its edition here late last year. … Most of TOI’s key moves in a
new market, were by then, very well known… TOI was pre-empted much ahead of
their launch. Deccan Chronicle was given a complete makeover… (And) even
The Hindu wore war paint in anticipation. Almost a year and three
Resident Editors later, TOI in Hyderabad seems poised for a long haul. It has
barely 5 percent of the city’s English readership universe….” This account of
the Hyderabad newspaper market and various other print media battlegrounds is
available at: http://www.exchange4media.com/e4m/mediaresearch/research_detail.asp?section_id=2&news_id=3577.
[10] Russ Baker, “The
Squeeze”, Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 1997. As
illustration, the following case is cited: “A major advertiser recently
approached all three newsweeklies - Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News
- and told them it would be closely monitoring editorial content. So says a
high newsweekly executive who was given the warning (but who would not name the
advertiser). For the next quarter, the advertiser warned the magazines'
publishing sides, it would keep track of how the company's industry was
portrayed in news columns. At the end of that period, the advertiser would
select one - and only one - of the magazines and award all of its newsweekly
advertising to it.”
[11] Ibid.
[12] The Times of India, New Delhi, December 22, 2003, p 1.
[13] “The ABC of NRS”, The Times of India, December 23, 2003, p
1. In explaining the issues involved, the TOI could not resist a gratuitous
sneer at HT, which had apparently just a few months prior, debunked the rival,
Indian Readership Survey and upheld the NRS as the exemplar of rigour and
accuracy. The IRS in 2002 had put the TOI in the top spot in the Delhi market,
while the NRS had stuck with the established order of precedence. Though this
discrepancy may have been on account of differences in sample sizes and
techniques, there have been other instances when the two rival surveys, which
are backed by competing consortia of media organisations, advertisement
agencies and market research firms, have reported starkly different results.
This has led to some suspicion that the exercise of measuring a newspaper’s
reach and the demographic constituencies it serves, is not entirely an
objective process. With the disposition of large volumes of advertisement money
riding on these results, they could be permeable to influence from the
organisations that sponsor them.
[14] “DT: A constant celebration of life”, The Times of India,
December 24, 2003. page 2.
[15] The website in question which tracks key issues in the South Asian
media is www.thehoot.org. The story
cited, is titled “Most profitable Indian media companies” and is available at: http://www.thehoot.org/story.asp?storyid=Web210214166108hoot12302002684&pn=1.
[16] The story can be found in a story titled “India’s most profitable
media companies”, available at: http://www.thehoot.org/story.asp?storyid=Web202159222135Hoot43904%20PM1512&pn=1.
[17] “HT Media: Invest at cut-off”, The Hindu BusinessLine, July 31, 2005;
available at:
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/bline/iw/2005/07/31/stories/2005073100751100.htm
[18] The full interview was published under the title “I never
interfered with the due process of law” in Frontline (The Hindu group of
publications, Chennai), May 30, 1997, pp 25-7.
[19] Obviously because of the sensitivities involved in a case involving
one of India’s leading media magnates, this case went largely under-reported.
Ashok Jain himself went on record on a few occasions to deny all allegations of
wrongdoing. He also was rather bitter about the lone newspaper that seemed then
to have space to devote to the case, The Statesman. But he was candid
about admitting his close relationship with Sitaram Kesri in the interview that
was published in July 1997, three months after Deve Gowda’s ouster: “He (Kesri) is an old friend of the family. My parents were
very helpful to him early in his political career. Subsequently, he rose on the
political ladder completely on his own. My father died about 20 years back and
Kesri has been a treasurer of the Congress party under three-four prime
ministers. I can't remember having played any role in helping him rise in
politics in the last 20 years. It was entirely on his own. He is not indebted
to us in any manner for that. On the other hand, in the last 20 years, I can't
recollect a single instance where Kesri has helped us”. The original source of the interview is
unknown, but it is available on a site maintained by Outlook magazine,
at the following website, which requires registration: http://www.outlookindia.com/fullprint.asp?choice=2&fodname=19970716&fname=interview&sid=1.
The veteran politician George Fernandes, then in opposition and perhaps able on
that account to speak with relative freedom, observed in an interview
dated February 28, 1998, that “the Deve Gowda government fell for no reasons
other than Sitaram Kesri's 40-year-old relationship with Ashok Jain of The
Times of India. Kesri, in fact, was on the board of directors of one of
the group companies as far back as 1967. Deve Gowda refused to oblige the
Kesri-Jain combine on several issues… Deve Gowda had to fall. It was that
simple”. This interview is available at the time of this writing at: http://www.rediff.com/news/1998/feb/28george.htm.
[20] Few concurrent reports on this campaign by the TOI group are
available. Sudha Mahalingam, a correspondent with Frontline, closely
followed the Enforcement Directorate investigations and at considerable
personal risk, unearthed valuable facts that have now become part of the public
record. Some of her reports are still available online and particular reference
may be made to “Rights and Wrongs”, Frontline, March 6, 1998, pp 99-100,
available at: http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/fline/fl1504/15040990.htm
; and “Citizen Jain”, Frontline, July 3, 1998, available at: http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1513/15131110.htm.
[21] Again, the most reliable recounting of these events which is
readily accessible is by Sudha Mahalingam in Frontline, June 19, 1998,
pp 86-8; available online at: http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1512/15120860.htm.
[22] Ibid, p 88.
[23] Ajit Bhattacharjea, “Pressures on a profession”, Frontline,
September 11, 1998, pp 114-5; available online at: http://www.flonnet.com/fl1518/15181140.htm.
[24] Sudha Mahalingam, “The Press Council vs the INS”, Frontline,
December 4, 1998; available online at: http://www.flonnet.com/fl1524/15240970.htm.
[25] The entire concept note of Medianet is available on the web at: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?artid=39286961.
[26] Hemal Asher, “Is this journalism”, Midday, May 11, 2004; available
at:
ww1.mid-day.com/news/city/2004/may/83022.htm.
[27] M Raja, “Dirty laundry at the Times of India”, Asia Times Online,
May 18, 2004; available at: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/FE18Df05.html.
[28] A thorough account of the episode is available at the Online
Journalism Review, published from the Annenberg School of Journalism at the
University of Southern California. See: www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050315glaser.
