The Hinduøs reader’s editor gets going

BY dasu k| IN Media Practice | 29/03/2006

When Narayanan says his brief is correctional not adversarial he brings down the status of his job by a few notches. Journalism should seek to expand the area of its freedom.

Dasu Krishnamoorty

It is a month now since the country’s first readers’ editor has started work in the Chennai office of the Hindu without much media ado. In the drumbeat that heralded K. Narayanan’s appointment, the Hindu informed its readers on how the new office is designed to serve as an interactive bond, as an exercise in self-regulation providing greater access and accountability and how Narayanan will be the independent, full-time internal ombudsman of The Hindu. Theoretically, it should be a gain for more than 3.75 million of Hindu readers who now have their own man keeping a sharp eye on the content of the newspaper, on the functioning of the editorial department and on the degree of objectivity marking information appearing in the newspaper.

The Readers’ editor is not an institution familiar to readers in India and it will take months before they decipher its meaning and negotiate the new arrangement to their advantage.  Narayanan too will take time to gingerly step out of the present corrections mode and elevate the mechanism to provide a running dialogue with the readers. Barring the highly forgettable Times of India’s brief honeymoon with an ombudsman, Narayanan has no Indian experience to go by. What happened at newspapers elsewhere that employ a public editor will help Narayanan anticipate problems and explore avenues to impart more power to his readers. Happenings at the New York Times and the Guardian (discussed below) sometime ago indicate the kind of snags that Narayanan may have to grapple with.

The Hindu terms of reference aim to give Narayanan a free hand but the fact that the paper has several editions and bureaus outside Chennai poses problems of monitoring their working, specially the high-profile reporting contingent in Delhi, not used to oversight by anyone except the editor. Readers of The Hoot are familiar with how the New York Times ace reporter Judith Miller could not be called to account on her WMD reports because she was a close friend of the publisher. However, Daniel Okrent’s (public editor at that time) criticism of the Times’ reporting on Iraq’s weapons in the run-up to the war led the paper to print an extensive editor’s note addressing the matter. Narayanan perhaps knows that the Hindu too has holy cows.

The exclusion of editorials and articles from readers’ editor’s scrutiny is a serious lacuna that curtails the jurisdiction of both the readers’ editor and the readers. This limited jurisdiction denies readers the right to get insights into the editorial mind. Look at how the editor-in-chief condemns the sycophancy of Congress persons, even as his paper carries two editorials in less than a week applauding Sonia Gandhi for "Turning outrage into applause" and "Second renunciation." Is this bias hiding behind policy? The greater danger is that this performance indicates unofficial guidelines for the newsrooms and bureaus. Maybe, the RE will raise this question because his brief includes not only reporting but also writing.

Also, how can you stop the readers from questioning the editorial silence on the judgment of the Allahabad High Court on the minority status of the Aligarh Muslim University? Or the irrelevance of an editorial on John Roberts assuming office as the chief justice of the US Supreme Court? Narayanan’s suggestion that complaints about editorials can be directly addressed to the editor through letters to the editor column begs the question. When Narayanan says his brief is correctional but not adversarial he brings down the status of his job by a few notches. It is the nature of journalism to seek to expand the area of its freedom.

Now about NYT and the Guardian. The New York Times published last December, after sitting on it for more than a year, a story on how the National Security Agency wire-tapped US citizens inside the country without legal sanction. NYT’s public editor Byron Calame could do nothing but complain in his column that he had experienced "unusual difficulty" in getting the top editors to explain why they sat on that story for more than a year. The executive editor and the publisher stonewalled his requests for information about news-related decision-making. Narayanan may find it difficult to know what stories the bureaus sat upon, either voluntarily or at the behest of the editor. It is impossible for the readers to realize that they had missed an important story unless they read more than one newspaper which is not the norm in India. And, if the employer has a stake in self-censorship relating to certain issues, there is hardly anything that the readers’ editor can do.

At the Guardian, Ian Mayes, its readers’ editor and chairman of the Organization of News Ombudsmen, ran into trouble with Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s greatest thinkers, after the newspaper had carried (31 Oct. 05) an interview with Chomsky by Emma Brockes. The interview implied that Chomsky had thought that the massacre at Srebrenica had been overblown. Brockes parenthesized the word "massacre," suggesting that Chomsky   had reservations about what the word meant. Chomsky wrote a letter to Mayes complaining that Brockes had invented contexts. His letter was published next to a letter of a survivor of the massacre. This juxtaposition only strengthened the Brocke’s version of Chomsky’s understated reaction to the massacre.

After the letters, appeared an article (5 Nov.05) by a columnist Norman Johnson smearing Chomsky. According to the Independent on Sunday, Mayes stopped responding to Chomsky’s protests. Irate readers who had read of this slight to Chomsky sent mails in hundreds to Mayes. Mayes dismissed them as emanating from a lobby. But editor Alan Rusbridger said it was difficult to respond to such a quantity of email. When Guardian published a correction, that again became an issue demanding a correction to the correction. However, the paper withdrew the interview from its web edition. The whole episode left a lot of bad blood between Guardian and Chomsky.  

In the Indian media where introversion and internal democracy are poorly visible, Narayanan will find it difficult to get senior editors and bureau members to answer questions readers raise from time to time. There are no precedents of democratic functioning to guide. As of now, the Hindu does not have an editors’ code. Especially after Ram had repeatedly claimed that his paper will separate fact from comment, the Readers’ Editor will be hard put to explain the difference between news and news analysis. How will Narayanan treat complaints about news analyses -- editorial or reportorial? And, Narayanan cannot respond to it by silence in the manner of Ian Mayes.

In the latest (27 March) column, Narayanan responds to charges of bias, not very convincingly. Explaining why Deve Gowda claimed more attention than his son, Narayanan says, "They (the desk) cite Deve Gowda`s stature as former Prime Minister, chief of a major party, and a leader with secular credentials, as the reasons for what they did." But does not Narayanan think that any salience on the basis of ‘secular’ credentials constitutes bias? Without answering this question he moves on to point out the absence of analysis. In response to charges of anti-Bush bias, NYT’s public editor got two eminent columnists, Todd Gitlin and Bob Kohn, to present two different perspectives on bias. Narayanan is aware that a reporter can inject bias in the act of choosing from a multiplicity of facts, of restructuring them and of supplying the context. Location and display help the desk to do the same.