Last Wednesday, a Chennai-based reader, M.D. Menon, came up with an interesting proposal regarding my salary as the Readers’ Editor. He felt that half my salary should be paid by the readers or at least a group of readers who want the institution of the Readers’ Editor and the other half by The Hindu. He even worked out a tariff that had an annual member category and a life member category. He also suggested that the cost of the paper should be raised by 25 paise on the days the paper publishes the ‘From the Readers’ Editor’ column. He wrote: “I believe that as long as you are paid by one party [alone], there is a conflict of interest.”
We need to contextualise the role of an ombudsman in the news media. Though an ombudsman is appointed by the management of the news organisation, the management provides independence and autonomy to the Readers’ Editor while he or she examines complaints and queries from the readers. Further, to ensure accuracy, there should be a formal visible correcting mechanism. Course correction is binding on the news organisation.
Double billing
I have been part of the ethical journalism debate since 2005 and I have worked closely with Aidan White, the founder of the Ethical Journalism Network. He said all the revenue in the media is from the readers. They pay to buy a newspaper, their subscription drives the advertising revenue, and even governmental support for the public interest media is funded through tax revenue, which is essentially readers’ contribution. From the management to the editorial, everyone in the news business is paid only by the readers.
The Readers’ Editor is no exception. In the judiciary, though the salary for judges comes from governments, we know that the money is from the people in the form of either direct or indirect taxation. Hence, to charge readers for doing my job would amount to double billing.
One of the major lessons that I learned from working closely with Mr. White is how to serve and be effective in a fast-changing world without losing any of the core values that define journalism. He observed: “In a landscape where global media and supranational organisations are weakening the grip of the nation state, when politics is scarred by extremes and corruption, when many in the media business have lost all sense of mission, we have to rethink our attitudes on how media and journalism contribute to democratic life. How can journalism properly empower a public who are starved of the information they need to hold governments to account, while at the same time overwhelmed by a surfeit of information from the trivial to the surreal?”
Role of an ombudsman
Mr. White said increasingly, we are permitting media output to become the fast food of the mind: ubiquitous, colourful but of doubtful provenance or nutritional value. The role of an ombudsman is to bring back that missing nutritional value and make clear the provenance of anything that is published in the newspaper. From social media frenzy to intolerant governments and a legal and regulatory framework that is unashamedly tilted towards the executive, there are multiple factors that hamper good journalism. At the Highway Africa conference in Grahamstown, South Africa, in 2012, I spent nearly four hours discussing with Mr. White the way forward. While dealing with complaints from readers, along with the written terms of references and various published codes for ethical journalism, I have often drawn from that engaging conversation.
Mr. White made a distinction between remarkably sensitive yet non-sensational journalism and the harm-inducing shrill reportage which ends up as a force multiplier for the government. Force multiplier journalism sacrifices the citizens’ right to know at the altar of executive diktat and contributes to the shrinking of democratic space.
Mr. White taught me to do the simple things right: promoting open debate, providing reliable information, exposing wrongdoing, and explaining the impact of events on the world in which we live. The bedrock of democratic pluralism is provided by open governments, political freedom, an effective judiciary and the imperatives of ethical journalism. In this context, it is very clear that there is no clientelist relationship between the management and the Readers’ Editor. Hence, I have to decline Mr. Menon’s generous offer.
readerseditor@thehindu.co.in