Speaking truth to power: Different choices

As I write from faraway Washington D.C. the contrast could not have been more stark. The press in the United States, almost without exception, is engaged in a rancorous battle with the current US administration, shining the light on and speaking truth to power. Such is the exasperation of the White House that President Donald Trump took to Twitter on the morning of June 6 to launch a no-holds-barred diatribe against the media. He tweeted: “The fake MSM is working so hard trying to get me not to use social media. They hate that I can get the honest and unfiltered message out.”

This tweet came a day after presidential aides tried to draw a distinction between the tweets labelling them as a social media phenomena and government policy. Mr Trump undercut them the very next morning essentially saying that my TWEETS MATTER. He went on to rub it in by directly hitting out at the most influential networks and print publications. He again tweeted: “Sorry folks, but if I would have relied on fake news of CNN, NBC, ABC,CBS, washpost or nytimes I would have had zero chances of winning WH.”

Ironically, these tweets came on a day when 73 years ago Allied troops under the command of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower (later President) stormed the beaches of France, commencing the liberation of the European mainland. The flower of American youth fell to a barrage of German fire, but by sheer force of will they established a bridgehead. The battle for the beaches of Normandy, immortalised in the movie The Longest Day, was far from President Trump’s mind when he tweeted a commemoration of that epoch-making struggle many hours after the media harangue.

The President had identified his enemies by name but even the most powerful man in the world can only rant his frustration at the American press and their unwillingness to play ball with him. He cannot set the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the various other law-enforcement acronyms after them. For institutions in the American democratic paradigm are mature and robust, and they will not do the President’s dirty work.

Mr Trump learnt it this hard way. His firing of FBI director James Comey has backfired on him so badly that the White House has been scrambling to do damage control and put out rapidly spreading bushfires that threaten to engulf those around him.

The story so far has been that President Trump ostensibly asked the FBI director to pull the plug on the investigation into Russian interference into the US presidential election process and the alleged meetings that Trump campaign staff members had with senior Russian officials, including the Russian ambassador.

What the content of those meetings was, whether or not it was in any manner criminal in nature all this would emerge as the investigation unfolds, but the revelation that former national security adviser Michael Flynn was less-than-forthcoming about these Russian connections to vice- president Mike Pence has already cost him his job. Mr Comey’s testimony on June 8 before the Senate Intelligence Committee could well become the trigger for the commencement of the impeachment of Mr Trump.

All this has come to a head in less than 150 days of the Trump presidency thanks to the relentless and dogged pursuit by the American media which possibly is in the throes of its finest moment post-Watergate. The American press is no babe in the woods. It is a corporate media, but it believes in the “doctrine of institutional mistrust” that should underpin the relationship between the various stakeholders in a vibrant democracy. This is what I call the unkept media.

From the capital of capitals, when one turns one’s gaze eastwards towards the world’s most populous democracy — India — one is confronted with a bizarre spectre where the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is brazenly throttling the freedom of speech and expression. The raids on NDTV and its promoters Prannoy Roy and Radhika Roy are nothing but a crude attempt to muzzle an alternative point of view that is troublesome to Modi and Co. by misusing the instrumentalities of the State — namely, the Central Bureau of Investigation, Enforcement Directorate and the income tax department, to name but a few.

The fact that a spurious case ostensibly relating to a banking transaction, that too with a private bank — which is not even a complainant in the matter — has been fabricated and deployed to unleash the “might of the State” on the oldest and perhaps the most venerable English news channel only serves to underscore both the hubris and the insecurity of the NDA government. The fact that the CBI raids were perpetrated a few days after a BJP spokesperson was literally ordered off the channel by one of its most soft-spoken anchors for allegedly insinuating that the channel was running an agenda against the government is definitely not a coincidence.

However, what is most disappointing is the reaction of a large section of the Indian media. They chose not to cover — forget to protest — against this atrocity by the State.

On the contrary, certain propaganda vehicles of the government masquerading as television news channels that Arun Shourie has correctly, characterised as “North Korean television channels” and the governments bots and trolls in the social media were deployed to justify the crass actions of the State. Even the Editors Guild of India gave but a pro-forma statement that can be lamented for its tepidness for it did not contain even a hint of temerity. The News Broadcasters Association, which holds itself out as the custodian of the freedom of the press and self-regulation in the broadcasting space, did not even have a pro-forma condemnation of the CBI raids on its website. A new phenomenon has emerged in the past 36 months in India — the spectre of the kept media.

Rather than speak truth to power, now you have “kept television channels” and their associates in the print space falling over each other to justify, whitewash and even glorify every wrong of the government.

If the American media is basking in the glory of its finest hour, sections of the Indian media are sloshing around in their most ignominious moment.

Lal Krishna Advani, as the information and broadcasting minister of the Janata party government from 1977 to 1980, had once famously remarked about the Indian press during the Emergency: “You (journalists) were asked to bend, but you chose to crawl”. Today sections of the Indian media are behaving worse than that. For they are no longer fit to be termed as the press, but are unashamed propagandists of the government.

However, what this kept media does not realise and would be well-served to internalise the prophetic words of a German pastor, Martin Niemöller, immortalised on a plaque in a Holocaust museum in Jerusalem:

“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.”

That is the intrinsic DNA of sycophants.