The last time Subir Ghosh wrote a book with Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, the two of them got legal notices from Reliance Industries Ltd., and no doubt, this was meant to make the two journalists feel nervous about choosing a corporate behemoth like RIL as their subject. Sadly for RIL, their legal notices have had quite the opposite effect. Ghosh and Guha Thakurta are back with Sue The Messenger, which looks at how “issues of defamation and SLAPPs  are now increasingly taking the shape of a distinct trend in targeting of writers and journalists,” Ghosh told Newslaundry.

Ghosh said it was Reliance’s attempts at intimidating them using legal machinery after Gas Wars: Crony Capitalism and the Ambanis was published that inspired the duo to write Sue the Messenger. Gas Wars led to four legal notices from two corporate groups, but what struck Guha Thakurta and Ghosh was that they were not alone.  Jitendra Bhargava’s The Descent of Air India and Tamal Bandhopadhay’s Sahara: The Untold Story were caught in similar legal wrangles at around the same time.

“These were the three books that apparently had legal problems with the concerned parties, who probably took offence to the contents of the respective books,” said Ghosh to Newslaundry. “Also Infosys slapped defamation notices against three newspapers, over coverage that was not perceived to be favourable for them and which was thought to be defamatory. So we thought that it was time for us to sit up and take notice, and then we did our top of the mind recalls of writers, journalists who have been slapped with a defamation notices or legal notices for the last few years.”

In his introduction to Sue the Messenger, Ghosh notes:

“What was earlier intermittent, was now increasingly taking the shape of a distinct trend in the targeting of writers and journalists. … While more writers and journalists are increasingly writing about corporate corruption and crony capitalism, it is also being increasingly seen that corporates have been intimidating writers and journalists with, what are described as, SLAPP suits.”

Rarely are acronyms so perfectly aligned to their meaning as Strategic Litigations Against Public Participation — or SLAPP — suits, which shrink the space for free and fair investigative journalism. Defamation suits and legal notices threatening defamation are tactics used by corporates to intimidate journalists and writers whose work reveals chinks in the armour constructed for a company by their publicity machinery. Last year, the Committee to Protect Journalists’ annual report noted a rise in businesses “using their financial power to silence journalists through lawsuits that chill critical reporting”.

Ghosh and Guha Thakurta felt it was time readers understood the kind of harassment that is fast becoming part and parcel of investigative journalism. “There are a huge number of journalists who are doing an incredible job and if such people are not allowed to do their jobs or are persecuted for doing their very job, the public is blissfully unaware of such things happening,” said Ghosh.

Sue the Messenger, self-published by the authors, offers the reader a look at how big businesses like Reliance Industries Ltd, Sahara India, Essar, Karuturi Global and Indiabulls have put all their might into discrediting and silencing journalists who have offered a critical view to their corporate practices. For Ghosh, “the most representative of all the cases highlighted in this book [Sue the Messenger]” is the chapter on The Caravan’s article the Essar group’s efforts to manipulate publications into carrying favourable reports. It reveals just how easily corporates gain access to media houses and can influence news.

The book’s opening chapter looks at how RIL first courted journalist Hamish McDonald, then cold-shouldered him when he wrote one unfavourable report and finally banned his book The Polyester Prince: The Rise of Dhirubhai Ambani in India. The book was branded defamatory even before its Indian edition was printed.

Writing Sue the Messenger was fun, said Ghosh, but there were many hurdles and challenges. “Nobody has any clue as to how many [SLAPP] notices are sent out in a year, who sends it to whom,” he said. “These incidents, the ones mentioned in the book, had some records mostly because either the Supreme Court had passed some judgment on these issues or they were high profile cases among the media.”

Ghosh said the ground reality is that the editorial policies of most media houses are affected by corporates, either through influence or by the heft commanded by advertising. “When I started in journalism, the price of a newspaper was Rs 2,” said Ghosh. “In the last 25 years, it has gone up by only three rupees. So obviously somebody is subsidising it, and the ones doing that are the advertisers.” This means advertisers get to call the shots. “They [the advertisers] are obviously in a position to pull the strings and call the shots. It’s not the public; heck the public is not even paying for it,” he said.

According to Ghosh, independent media can only exist if the organisation is financially self-sufficient or readers/ viewers actually start paying for the news they consume. “If you are getting everything for free, you won’t be in the position to tell [a] news establishment ‘Give me this kind of news’ or ‘Give me that kind of news’,” he pointed out.

The silver lining, as far as Ghosh is concerned, is that there is a profusion of publications and news channels today. However, one of the challenges that media outlets face today as a consequence is establishing a distinctive identity and attracting viewers’ attention. One of the ways that modern Indian journalism has attempted to emphasise its independence has been with sting operations. Ghosh, however, is determinedly against it and described it as “entrapment journalism”. “Why is there this imperative need to do stings?” he asked. “Only because you want to break a story? You might be required to use this method, but that should only be in those extreme cases. I have never done it, and I hope I never have to do it.”

The author can be contacted on Twitter @AratrikaH