The Hindu : The News according to Star

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Monday, Jul 28, 2003

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The News according to Star

By Sashi Kumar

Star News may be making a monkey of regulatory guidelines, but the Indian Media Group initiative is a case of making too much of a public cause of powerful private interests. There are also troubling questions about censoring the other side of the story.

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves... " — Julius Caesar

IN WHAT looks like a trial by the media even as the jury is out, the prosecutors could well find themselves in the dock. The issue is compliance or otherwise by Star News with the recently revised equity rule for a TV news channel uplinking from India. The thrust of the case against Star is that it is making "a monkey of whatever regulatory authority is in place," as a recent editorial in The Hindu (July 17, 2003) put it. But then, the reactive, ad hoc nature of such regulation through new "guidelines" and rules lends itself to no less. It seems to be a case of half a regulatory loaf being worse than no bread.

On the face of it, there seems nothing `illegal' about the way Star has gone about structuring its equity afresh. In seeking to subscribe to the new stipulation that an Indian news channel cannot have more than 26 per cent foreign equity, Star has taken recourse to two shell entities, Media Content and Communications Services (MCCS) and Touch Telecontent. It has packed them with Indian investors who together hold the mandatory minimum 74 per cent of a ridiculously low equity base of Rs.1 lakh — being raised now, we are told, to Rs. 4 crores. But when a business venture of such size and scale, which has been investing and billing hundreds of crores of rupees in the Indian market ever since the advent of independent satellite television in 1993, finds itself, mid-stream, having to divest the bulk of its equity holding in one channel in response to new guidelines, how else would we expect it to proceed? The idea of a broadcast regulatory Act was given up years ago. The Convergence Bill has been on the anvil for a long time, with no closure in sight. The Government's Conditional Access System (CAS) directive to cable TV hangs fire. This is part of the problem of seeking to legitimise a string of fait accompli, which marks the evolution of cable and satellite (C&S) television in India. When we expect Star to satisfy not just the letter but also the spirit of the new rules, we must objectively examine whether it has been given a fighting chance to get into the spirit of it.

It is one thing — the only thing for anyone who cares for journalism — to oppose Rupert Murdoch and all that he stands for in the media. It is quite another to use Murdochism as an instrument to protect and promote the business interests of a newly emerging indigenous media cartel. It is one thing to argue for a clear and transparent legal regulatory framework for the Indian broadcast media, which for a long time did not seem to have the constitutional (Article 19) protection that the press has enjoyed since 1950. It is quite another to use columns of print or channel time to push for regulation, deliberately narrowly construed, so that the reader is, willy-nilly, impleaded in what is essentially corporate media competition for market share. We were just about recovering from the excesses of the `advertorial' — news space in a paper being put on sale — in the inimitable style of The Times of India, which raised agonising questions about where news ended and advertising began. Now we are being treated to the sorry spectacle of the other side of an important story being censored in news columns. Standing the issue of `news versus advertisement' on its head, it has taken a full-page advertisement in the form of "An Open Letter" in some national dailies (see page 9 of The Hindu of July 21, 2003) for us to read the news according to Star.

Star, of course, fudges the issue by drawing attention to the popular impact of its bouquet of about a dozen channels, including such mega shows as "Kaun Banega Crorepati," when only the question of uplinking for Star News is at stake. More pertinently, the "Open Letter" advertisement asks whether Star acquires the stigma of a foreign investor only when its erstwhile partner Zee and news content provider NDTV are no longer with it. The more troubling part however is the revelation that letters to the editor sent by Star to India Today and The Times of India, in response to articles published on the Star News equity issue, were not published. The letters, carried in the advertisement, make the point that the two publications owe it to their readers to disclose their "vested interest" in the matter: India Today's affiliate company, Aaj Tak, is in direct competition with Star in Hindi news and The Times of India group's affiliate, Radio Mirchi, is a competitor to Star in FM radio. The Star ad highlights the issue of "conflicts of interest." What is clear is that some of our venerable media players, as interested parties in the fray, have failed to live up to the basic tenets of fair, balanced reporting and professional ethics. What is particularly galling is that it has taken someone from the Murdoch stable to rub this in.

One cannot, therefore, avoid being wary of the sudden emergence of the Indian Media Group (IMG) on the scene. This initiative for the first time cuts across the print and broadcast sectors and bands together many of the big players in some kind of pseudo deshi-videshi struggle. It seems to make too much of a public cause of powerful private interests. While there can be no quarrel with the group's call for a regulatory authority to administer a to-be-formulated policy for foreign investment in the media and to handle complaints, the call for stricter regulation is too narrowly focussed on uniform foreign investment rules across print, television and radio. Some of the regulations proposed by the group are disingenuous. One is outright atrocious: "To avoid de facto control by a foreign company, 51 per cent of the rights should vest in one Indian family or group." It sounds very much like a call to the state to come to the aid of the free market in protecting and sustaining monopolies in the news media. In any case, how on earth does a government ensure that 51 per cent of equity in a public limited company remains with "one Indian family or group"?

The logic that a uniform regulatory policy should apply to print and broadcast is faulty. It is not borne out by the disparate trajectories and stages of growth of the two media sectors in India. Nor is it borne out by the experience of several developed countries, which have no, or minimal, regulations for print but fairly detailed regulations for broadcast. The Indian Media Group must be seen for what it is — a high-profile pressure lobby seeking to enshrine its constituents' special interests as rights in a national media policy. While there is certainly a role in a democracy for such lobbying for a `consensual' policy, the Government must cut through the clutter of demands and keep the larger objective of the public interest in focus. This it must do in evolving a benign and forward-looking but effective legal regulatory system for the broadcast media. The system must be transparent and fair and must enable freedom of expression, diversity and competition to thrive.

Internationally, the two main planks of protective broadcast media regulation are restrictions on foreign investment and on cross-media holdings. It is noteworthy that some of those in the forefront of the campaign against Star News have themselves been fierce champions of liberal foreign equity participation in the print media. What is more, they have set the trend for cross-media holdings in the country. While the level and scope of foreign equity participation in the print media have, at least for now, been settled, we have not been through a democratic debate on the pros and cons of cross-media holdings in our context. Should legislative intervention or executive action become necessary in future to tackle this as yet another fait accompli, it is not hard to imagine another somersault of positions across the board.

There is a tendency in India to tail what happens in the United States on such matters. In the U.S., it would seem that the issue of cross-media holdings has been resolved for the time being with the three-two ruling by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) dismantling the bulk of restrictions. However, this decision has met with a good deal of opposition. The Commission has been inundated with letters and e-mails of protest from the public. There has also been mounting opposition in both Houses of Congress, so much so that it might require a presidential veto to keep the FCC's drastic alteration of the rules of the game intact. It is instructive and amusing to learn that in the acrimonious lead-up to the FCC ruling, even the Murdoch-owned Fox News channel, an exemplar of chauvinistic and hawkish journalism, ran the opposition's ad campaign: "Murdoch wants more. Much more... Unless we act now, Rupert Murdoch is going to get his way."

(Sashi Kumar, television journalist and entrepreneur, is Chairman of the Media Development Foundation, Chennai.)

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