Where are the penpushers?

JOURNALISM is not dead, and media - that catch-all term which connotes everything from sanitary towel ads to Internet porn to singing contests on television to edit page thundering on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) - is thriving. The closing century of the millennium that was, saw media become a mammoth industry, more immediate than family and friends, more powerful than governments.

But the journalist, it seems to this humble hack, became a rapidly endangered species in the course of the same century. At least in India. I am not a great believer in "I" journalism, but this column is going to be a bash at describing what I see happening to my fraternity. However extraneous journalists may be becoming to the industry, a media column should occasionally take passing stock of the tribe that is supposed to form the backbone of the media.

A year after I came into journalism, Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency. For a cub reporter it was a both fearful and exhilarating experience. There were the spineless who grovelled, there were the foolhardy ones who disappeared because Youth Congress(I) president Ambika Soni (yes the same much-mellowed Ambika Soni who now graces Congress(I) press conferences) was reported to have pointed a finger at them, and there were the dogged ones who taught their greenhorn colleagues how to write copy that would tell it like it was and still get past the censors in Shastri Bhavan.

It was a time for blank spaces in the editorial column and threats from the high command to the editors who dared to carry those blank spaces. When you went on an assignment, perfect strangers would tell you confidently that your editor was going to be arrested soon. But journalists were still recognisable as such, and when the Emergency ended went back to being a mainstay of the free press. They were the hacks who collected news, wrote their copy, got on to their two-wheelers and drove back to their unpretentious homes, not to parties that featured in the society columns of the next day's newspapers. There were no society columns then.

Today the journalists I once worked for are not recognisable as such. One former editor of mine (who had sort of walked into journalism even then, disdaining it as he did so) is a minister in the present Government. Another editor I worked under is the business representative of his paper and is thought to be a trusted adviser of the current leader of the Opposition. The bureau chief in the newspaper I worked for is now an advisor to the Prime Minister. My first editor is on the board of Prasar Bharati as well as a member of another committee appointed by the Government.

Some of the bureaucrats one knew in the course of being a reporter are not recognisable as such either. They have become indisputably, and glamorously, a part of the media. Four or five are running TV channels which is considered a plum media job to have. One retired secretary of the Government of India hosts a TV show. Yet another retired secretary is a prolific writer in newspapers on the subject of Internet policy and information technology. A former foreign secretary is a columnist. A former managing director of Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) is a columnist on telecom for an internet portal.

Some of the best-known news or current affairs personalities of the media are people who have never been journalists. Prannoy Roy for one. Rini Khanna for another. Priya Tendulkar for a third. Tejeshwar Singh for a fourth.

In the old days, journalists and retired journalists wrote columns in newspapers. Today these are written by members of the Congress(I) bureaucracy, by television anchors, by fashion designers and chefs, by wives of biscuit barons, by merchant bankers and market analysts, and by medical doctors.

A former finance minister wrote a column for a while when he was a mere MP. Now former Prime Minister Inder Gujral is the latest to join the tribe of on-demand columnists. Ask him a question at Satyam Online and he will give you an answer. To get a mere journalist as a columnist is pretty downmarket. And, decidedly unglamorous.

And what do journalists do? Some sturdy ones soldier on as just plain journalists and make their mark as such. The majority have disappeared into anonymity in their respective newspapers, sidelined into humdrum jobs. Those are the ones who have not kept up with the changing times. The successful ones do more glamorous things. They sit on the National Security Council or on sundry government committees. They pop up on juries of beauty contests along with businessmen and actors. They anchor TV shows while editing newspapers. They write soft porn and become publishing stars. They run for elections. If they lose them they go right back to being journalists. About the only thing they have not begun to do yet is act in movies though one does act in a TV serial. But I guess that cannot be a long way off either. Goodbye journalism. Hullo media.

SEVANTI NINAN

E-mail the writer at sevantininan@vsnl.com

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