All India Radio and Doordarshan become the stranglehold of every ruling party

Advani: A well-documented chargeEver since Mrs Gandhi led the Congress(I) to power last year, All India Radio (AIR) and Doordarshan seem to have reverted to the heady days when the leader was all. Last month, Lal Krishan Advani, Bharatiya Janata Party general secretary and former Union minister for Information and Broadcasting, brandished statistics to back up his accusation that the two government-controlled mass media were "peddlers of a personality cult, and purveyors of partisan propaganda".Advani displayed a neat table analysing AIR's 9 p.m. English news bulletin for the first fortnight of the new year. On nine days out of 15 the main lead story was about the ubiquitous Mrs Gandhi, and in the second week, six days out of seven, the prime minister grabbed the first lead. She thus got 20 per cent of news time. Other Congress(I) ministers and leaders together got about 29 per cent of the total time.The Opposition, on the other hand, inevitably received short shrift at AIR's hands. According to Advani, all the opposition parties lumped together got a measly 5 per cent of the total coverage.This is not all: the AIR bulletin usually opens and closes with five or six headlines, but, of the 89 leads of the fortnight, not one was about an opposition party or leader, not one spoke of a non-Congress(I) government, not one talked of any development unfavourable to the Government.The ruling party's stranglehold on AIR and Doordarshan is nothing new. Shankar C. Bhatt, former director of news services at AIR, is quite explicit in his appraisal: "There has been no period when there was complete editorial independence." But the organisation was not such a willing tool in the days before Jayaprakash Narayan launched his Sampoorna Kranti movement.As the country and its rulers shuddered in the turmoil, radio and television increasingly became mouthpieces of the Government, trying to calm the storm with bland platitudes. During the Emergency, the loudspeakers and television screens disseminated dreary exhortations to the nation that was on the move.Bhatt: Never independentTransfers: The first few months of the Janata regime were, according to Bhatt, the most free in AIR's history: "For the first time, there was comparative independence." But even the Janata soon began meddling, although, concedes the former director, it didn't descend to the depths the Congress had plumbed. Says Bhatt: "There was no personality projection during the Janata period. Now they are extremely blatant."The minions of the media are made to toe the official line using the transfers whip. Sources cite the sorry example of R.S. Shukla, assistant news editor in Bhopal during the Emergency. He was transferred before the '77 Lok Sabha elections, but was afterwards restored by Janata.Then the Janata faction war began and Shukla was shunted again. The Lok Dal interlude saw him restored, but with the Congress(I) in power, Shukla found himself hitting the high road once more. Janata, for all its vaunted allegiance to media freedom, was not averse to using the transfer whip to take care of awkward employees.Again, sources say that a few months ago, K.N. Joglekar, director of news services, AIR, was removed from the post, and Pratap Kapoor brought in because a mistake in the reporting of the Moradabad riots was taken as an example of deliberate mischief.Some officials feel that autonomy, at least for the news services, would go a long way towards renewing AIR's credibility. Also, if the political parties could arrive at some consensus on the problem of transfers, the staff would be free of that exhausting apprehension which is so detrimental to quality. Political interference unfortunately seems to have become a fact of media life today.Even A.K. Dutt, information secretary, conceded such meddling in his address to the_ seminar on 'Radio Reporting in Today's India", which was held in the capital recently. At the state level especially, said Dutt, there was "a lot of ferocious bullying". Incredibly, he failed to understand the "sense of exaggerated panic" in the minds of officials. Unless the politicians keep their hands off the microphones and the television cameras, the leaders will continue to be the message.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Nov 25, 2013 14:38 IST--- ENDS ---

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All India Radio and Doordarshan become the stranglehold of every ruling party

Ever since Mrs Gandhi led the Congress(I) to power last year, All India Radio and Doordarshan seem to have reverted to the heady days when the leader was all.

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