Guest post by MONOBINA GUPTA. DelhiUniversity teachers are fighting back to hold on to the fast vanishing autonomy of academics and academia. For me, this is a significant moment. Not just because the teachers are setting an example in their refusal to submit to the destructive moves disguised as ‘reform’, slammed through by well-connected and powerful authorities at the top. I must confess to my own selfish reasons for celebrating this moment. As a journalist, I can’t but think of all that we too could have held on to had only we walked this path of resistance, stalled the first assault on the newsroom, resisted the first strike, shrinking what I would describe as our ‘journalistic territory.’

Had we moved in that difficult yet honourable direction, we too might have guarded our space, not allowed non-journalists to take it over, bit by bit. Is it too late to recover and reclaim what was once an autonomous, if not a radical newsroom? Maybe. Maybe not.

For journalists like me who entered the newsroom in the 1980s, it’s the transformation of that space that I find both fascinating as well as frightening, in equal measure. Tune out the deafening noise of  24×7 news – cut the frills – journalism emerges in all its bare bones as the craft it really is or should be: an incisive tool for chronicling and analysing events. Ring side spectators or distant observers, members of the media, under all circumstances, are supposed to have their ear to the ground. In an ideal world, these couriers of news – mostly nasty and brutish these days – shouldn’t be attuned to corporate boardroom culture or its fiat. 

Ideally, the newsroom shouldn’t descend into forbidding silence, look like clones of sanitised corporate offices, which more often than not, serve interests essentially at odds with the interests of journalism. But that’s like an ‘ideal’ situation, one which we have allowed to slip out of our grasp.

I begin writing this piece with the DelhiUniversity academia’s efforts to ‘take back’ the classroom because it seems to resonate with the possibility of what we, as journalists could have achieved, had we too tried to ‘take back’ the newsroom. But that moment is long gone.

In the last three decades, the newsroom has shifted from being an active, noisy, argumentative space to a passive, quiet domain that privileges consensus over debate. In this stifling metamorphosis lies a much larger socio-economic narrative, with changes in the newsroom converging with economic changes in the post-liberalisation era that started in 1992. As economic restructuring took off and work places started reinventing themselves, culturally as well as aesthetically, the world of journalism too, went into a transformative mode.

The grubby office space where reporters drank tea, ate samosas, read newspapers, tossing them on top of an already scattered heap was transformed into a savvy, sanitised workspace. Many offices since have barred eating inside newsrooms. Barriers, where none existed earlier, were erected at the entrance of the newsroom. No longer could the handout wallah, the rubber chappal shod ‘jholawallah’ enter the newsroom, telling the guard the name of the reporter he/she wanted to meet.

Somewhere in the late 1990s the impact of corporate culture was becoming more and more evident. The charm of the media, its erratic hours, flexible rules started disappearing. I remember The Telegraph made signing the attendance register mandatory – failure to do so could incur pay cut. I also remember how Kewal Verma, Delhi editor, refused to sign saying journalists were not babus. Our hours were decidedly odd – holidays could be scrapped any time if developments broke out. Considering the nature of the profession, rules in the past were kept easy to deal with. But by the middle of the next decade media had imbibed a strict corporate culture where not punching cards could prove costly, where visitors to top media offices had to pass through layers of identity screenings. Also, market strategists had come to play a crucial role in deciding content.

But I am moving too fast. Let’s move back to the late 1980s, when I joined The Patriot, which has since shut down, as a trainee city reporter. I recollect the special newsy ambience – the sprawling hall, clacking of keys of our manual typewriters, chunky teleprinters rolling out reams of paper, cigarette smoke filling air. As evenings wore on, bottles and glasses would appear to keep company of late-night correspondents typing stories of the day!  Some of that hedonistic, often disastrous wildness, the damaging excesses of what came to be accepted as journalistic license, had to go. And sure enough, they disappeared once corporatism became the underlying ethos of media offices. I only wish we, and not ‘outsiders’, had done the ‘purging’.

As time passed, teleprinters and typewriters disappeared and computers moved in. I remember the excitement the day Patriot got two computers, and we, journalists, scrambled to lay our hands on these machines. Modern technological advances, no doubt, immensely helped journalists to hone their skills. But easy and some would say even lazy news gathering, emerged as by-products of these gains, chipping away at the heart of journalism.

Subtle at first, the changes rapidly unfolded in different ways, twisting and reshaping newsroom culture. Restlessness and passionate views, unless they meshed with the views of powers-that-be of media organizations, were unceremoniously thrown out of the window. Slamming politicians and activists, the new newsroom mantra, encouraged as ‘irreverence’, was touted as a hallmark of a good journalist. So far, so good. The problem came when that same mandate of irreverence vanished when you were dealing with managements, when journalists were allowed to be nothing but reverential to the powers that acquire more and more control over them. As journalists moulded themselves to this new culture, the magic of the internet and 24×7 television made it easy for proprietors to turn the financial squeeze on reporters on the ground. Reconciled to being managers, editors yielded without resistance. Unike DelhiUniversity teachers, they retreated to the safety of hefty pay packages and lofty designations.

Newsgathering soon came to be substituted with sedentary gazing at TV visuals and jotting down from the net. Why bother to trudge to the police station or the site of a mishap (unless the number of deaths shot up), when somebody is supplying information inside your newsroom? The quintessential and still curious reporter spent her own money to travel and get the story. Travel allowances dwindled and the signals from the top were loud and clear: take the easy option. Sleek packaging, smart alecky headlines were what mattered, not content.

Sloth settled in once proprietors had managed to tame editors into quiet submission, turning them into faceless, invisible and yet powerful people inside organisations, pressed into the service of revenue maximization departments. The path was paved for ‘reforming’ journalism and most importantly, journalists.

The mind boggling exposures of the recent Saradha scam bring home the frightening truth that ‘reformers’ have indeed succeeded in ‘reforming’ the fourth estate. From business tycoons to real estate sharks, media ownership today is an irresistible proposition. In their lack of resistance, journalists have rolled out the red carpet for this breed of new owners, also emboldening in that process the well-entrenched traditional ones, to turn the newsroom into a zone of passive silence and complicity.