Opinion - Readers' Editor : Online & Off line

Balance: Readers’ perceptions, and the practice

I thought I had seen it all, heard it all, and was probably getting smug, when the new storm struck, less in volume this time but fiercer in intensity. Some expressions in some of the mails made me wonder: why can’t exchanges be civil, on issues, instead of becoming personal and abusive?

The question of partial or partisan coverage of news was dealt with in two earlier columns (“Preferences and Prejudices”, October 1, 2007, and “When readers find an incomplete picture,” December 10, 2007). The issue was the reporting of developments in Nandigram, the West Bengal village that witnessed continuous violence over land acquisition for industry. My conclusion in those columns was that “choice (of news) has to be just, fair and balanced and should not lead to a feeling of manipulation … Readers have multi-layered access to news and omissions get noticed and commented upon …” “What was really happening (in Nandigram)? The reader was left to guess … The reporting was selective ….”

As readers would have guessed by now, the uproar this time was over how The Hindu looked at what had happened and was happening in Tibet. That there is a very active pro-Tibetan group campaigning against The Hindu is known. After an initial burst when I started working as Readers’ Editor, it ceased haranguing me but continued with its mail campaign in its wide network.

This time, however, the attack was not from this front (some were from obvious sympathisers though), but from readers genuinely interested in The Hindu. As Anoop Saha (Noida, U.P.) put it, “The complaints are from long-time readers who have grown up with the paper, many of whom share its progressive ideals … The mixing of propaganda is an insult to readers’ intelligence … Powerlessness of readers (can) bring the same kind of frustration (as) when we see the Murdoch corporation manipulating truth through its empire.”

Rahul Basu (Chennai), who with 20 other academics had protested the Nandigram coverage, referred to the partisan coverage again. He added, “I would defend The Hindu Editorial Board’s tilt towards the Left as a matter of policy, but news coverage must be fair and balanced and seen to be so. The Hindu practises convenient self-censorship.”

“Baffled and disappointed,” (Ram Naganathan, Piscataway, NJ, U.S.), “ideology trumps integrity,” (Sriram V., Farmington Hills, MI, U.S.), “I read The Hindu online every day and when in India read it in print … biased, misinformed and sort of ridiculous.” (Eileen Weintraub, Seattle, WA, U.S.), were a few of the many comments.

I compared the reporting of the events in other Indian newspapers (English) and also The Guardian and the New York Times with that in The Hindu from March 15 to 19 and could not but note the wide gap which led to the readers’ protests. (The angles given to the stories and their display are not to be questioned; that is editorial privilege). Overall, these points struck me as noteworthy:

1. Reliance on Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency. Its reports should have been balanced by inputs from other news agencies, but their use was scanty and selective. No doubt they too would have had their angles and biases but that would have been another side of the picture. Why was The Guardian, otherwise used extensively, ignored (except for an eyewitness account which was not very informative)?

2. The Hindu’s perceptive correspondent in Beijing, Pallavi Aiyar, made no contribution, except to report Prime Minister Wen’s press conference.

3. The statements of the Chinese Prime Minister and the Chinese envoy in Delhi were fully reported. The Dalai Lama’s were truncated versions. Many readers noted that his remark on “cultural genocide” was edited out.

4. The most surprising feature was the total absence of Tibet in the “Letters to the Editor column” — in which otherwise comments appear even as events are unfolding and continue for days. A few letters appeared after an article and an editorial were published and ceased abruptly.

The readers’ comments and my observations on them evoked a response from the Editor-in-Chief. The following are the main points he made:

We have an arrangement with Xinhua. We have also used western agencies and PTI. The violence reported and confirmed editorially was by Tibetan discontents, some hundreds of them. The Chinese authorities seemed unprepared at first but moved to stop the savagery in Lhasa and violence in some Tibetan areas. The riots were easily overcome. The violence in Lhasa, by every account, was by protestors, who included monks. No specific incident of violence by the police or paramilitary forces has been reported by any credible news source or eyewitnesses.

The comments in the column fail to look critically at the abundant editorialising in the guise of news. If the content in The Guardian, The New York Times, and Western news agencies is analysed, the problems of professional news reporting on the Tibet developments can be better appreciated. They were full of editorial judgments and loaded phrases and were often inaccurate (such as death toll). Their websites published wrong photographs or photographs with wrong captions. The Dalai Lama’s statements were edited because he is a separatist and tended to justify the savage and murderous riots in Lhasa. Not many letters were received other than what we published.

Nobody asked Pallavi Aiyar not to report in The Hindu on Tibet. She has been on leave during the relevant period.

(Pallavi Aiyar covered the Prime Minister’s press conference on March 19. She also wrote a comparative study of China and India, on March 19, in Asia Times Online. There were references to the Tibet developments. Her editorial page article in The Hindu on April 3, 2008, placed the Tibet developments in a new perspective, from the angle of the Chinese people.)

What readers look for is accurate and consistently reliable information. That requirement has to be met, and the feeling should not be allowed to grow that there is propaganda of some sort.

“The only answer to all this can be journalism of high quality, rooted in well-defined principles, clear-sighted, ethically and professionally sound, determined to put editorial values first, responsive to the needs of readers and the market within clearly worked out journalistic parameters .…” I am quoting from The Hindu editorial of August 23, 2003.

readerseditor@thehindu.co.in

© Copyright 2000 - 2009 The Hindu