It was a far less wired world, and a world in which news trickled down idyllic lanes. In 1921, information highways were the stuff of a genre now known as science fiction. But it was a remarkable year which produced one of the most defining aphorisms for all kinds of journalism to come. The tersely worded code found its way in a piece that was published in the centenary edition of The Manchester Guardian (predecessor of The Guardian). Writing in the paper, legendary editor CP Scott set the ground rules: “Comment is free, facts are sacred”. Period.

The wired world of 2012, with all its information highways and networked societies, presents a test case for the sanctity of facts. The magnitude and frequency of information which today’s mass media is dealing with, are unprecedented. So is the expansion of media. But how accident-proof are “facts” on these highways of information bombardment? Has technology made life safe for “facts” in the click-happy world?

The mounting evidence on this is not too encouraging. Media watchdogs, and even discerning consumers of news and views, have been bringing to the fore the daily casualties and acts of outraging the sanctity of facts in media reports and analysis. So sacrileges are common, factual sanctity hasn’t been technology-enabled. An information churning society (and to an extent, information-consuming too) may not be a fact-conscious one. The media has not been alone in its flirtatious ways with the facts, accomplices have been on-board. Sample this recent breach on three fronts.

Last month’s (July 2012) issue of The Caravan carried an excerpt of Shashi Tharoor’s latest book Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty First Century (published by Penguin India, 2012). In the excerpt, Tharoor is seeking to analyse the nature, calibre, understaffing and the limitations of India’s diplomatic service, the Indian Foreign Service (IFS). While explaining the recruitment to IFS, Tharoor writes: “…eventual selection seeks to produce, according to the IFS, ‘bright young men (or women) of 21 to 24 years, who have the requisite intellectual ability, breadth of mind and mental discipline’ for diplomatic service. (The age limit has now been relaxed to 28)”.

The Breach: The facts have been given short shrift here. Mr Tharoor’s definition of “now” is certainly not your idea of time. The fact is that the age limit for recruitment for Civil Services, including IFS, was relaxed to 30 (and not “now”, but far back in the late Nineties) by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC). And UPSC’s rules regarding it are too clear to leave any scope for confusion, and can be summed up as: The candidate must have attained 21 years of age on August 1 of the year of examination and must not have attained 30 years of age on that date (General category). The upper age limit will be relaxed by 3 years for OBC candidates and 5 years for SC/ST candidates. The upper age limit is also relaxed in favour of certain categories of civil servants working under the Government of India and Defence Services Personnel.

The Partners in “Factual” Crime

1. Mr Tharoor gets violent with the facts here. A man who has spent a large part of his life in studying and pursuing international diplomacy (though not as an IFS officer), or for that matter anyone attempting an analysis of IFS recruitment, should have known better. It’s not a question of nitpicking, but shouldn’t Mr Tharoor reply to a basic question: what about people who could inform themselves about the IFS on the basis of Mr Tharoor’s slickly marketed book (accompanied by a launch in the five star ambience at Taj Palace, Delhi)?
2. The editors at Penguin India: Editors in big publishing houses are giving fact-disdaining company to editors in media houses. If such an error in Tharoor’s manuscript lies uncorrected, it tells you a thing or two about where facts are placed on Penguin’s editing desk. Or are the blue-pencils stopping at wiki-notes type of dubious references? Well, school children are stopping at that too. Dangerous times.
3.  The editing desk at The Caravan: The line of defence from the magazine could be “but we were carrying a book excerpt, can’t fiddle with it”. This is where a magazine stops having an identity of its own. Shouldn’t you expect a magazine which introduces itself as ‘A Journal of Politics and Culture’ and has modelled itself on the lines of The New Yorker, to spot the factual blunder, ask the author for correction and inform the readers if the error went uncorrected? That’s what it takes for a publication to come into its own as a repository of credibility and editing excellence (particularly when a monthly publication doesn’t have the excuse of “the tyranny of deadlines” in as demonic proportions as dailies have). For the “wannabe New Yorker” in the Indian Press, it would help to remember what Ved Mehta (who was a staff writer with The New Yorker for 33 years, 1961-94) said about the rigours of editing in the New Yorker of his days. In November 2009, while interacting with the staff of The Indian Express for the paper’s Idea Exchange feature, Mehta said: “Not a word appeared in The New Yorker which hadn’t been scrutinised by 16 readers. And many of these readers were master proofreaders, grammarians. When you picked up The New Yorker, you got the most finished piece of writing that was available at the time.”

In more media-specific terms, accuracy in reporting has not been a beneficiary of technological leaps. The fact-checking mechanisms in newspapers, news channels and magazines have not kept up with the amount of news and views pouring in and the deadlines to be met. This may set terms for the clichéd speed versus accuracy debate. But asking wrong questions may get wrong answers. Why cast the debate as if speed and accuracy are mutually exclusive? Core competence lies in combining the two with the rigour of research and a depth of understanding and knowledge. To put it briefly, “speed with accuracy”. It’s not only the media watchdogs which are engaging with the menace of fact-slaughter in media, public intellectuals have also been addressing the issue.

A case in point is how Amartya Sen articulated his concern on this count in an insightful piece for The Hindu early this year (The Glory and Blemishes of Indian News Media, The Hindu, January 7, 2012). What’s important is that he emphasised the need to adopt damage control mechanisms that could help media houses retrieve the credibility that goes for a toss in cases of factual distortions. He wrote:

“So what can the media do to deal with the lapses from accuracy in reporting? I don’t know the answer – my main intention here is to raise the question – but one thought that is fairly straightforward is to get all the newspapers to agree to publish corrections of their own stories as a regular feature (and highlight them online, along with the corrected accounts). This is done with much effectiveness by The Guardian and The New York Times, and some Indian papers already have such a section (the host of this essay, The Hindu, has had this for many years), but the practice can be made more universal among the papers, and also more active and more well-known.’’

One of the benchmarks for judging the health of the news media should be found in answer to this basic question: as a child, what were your primary intentions (or the motives of your parents and teachers in prodding you to do so) for reading newspapers (or watch/listen to news)? The answer is simple: to know what’s happening around you, knowing facts and knowing them accurately. (Language could be another educational motive). That’s a simple but demanding benchmark, and retains its core relevance in this age of information deluge. It has been nine decades since Scott codified the sanctity of facts as a tenet of journalistic ethics. But as with all ethical questions confronting human affairs, the puzzle resurfaces: who will straighten the crooked timber?

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