‘Mainstream media adapted to either adulation or silence’: Francis Cody on media credibility, self-regulation

Francis Cody is an associate professor in the department of anthropology and the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto. He’s also the director of the university’s Centre for South Asian Studies. His research focuses on politics, language and media in southern India.

Cody’s latest book, The News Event: Popular Sovereignty in the Age of Deep Mediatization, explores questions of law, technology and violence in the context of journalism and populist politics. In this interview, he discusses the challenges faced by journalists and media organisations in India that are critical of the government.

Defamation suits are used by powerful corporate groups and political leaders to impede the media in exercising their duty even-handedly. The menace of vexatious litigation dissuades journalists from reporting significant events contrary to the interests of the governing economic and political elite. This portends the castration of Indian journalism.

What does your research tell you about this trend?

Yes, the potential threat of a defamation suit certainly works to limit the domain of what is reported in the news media. As a legacy of the colonial legal system, in India, there are two different kinds of defamation: civil, where punitive damages are sought by the offended party, and criminal defamation, where the accused faces incarceration, in theory. 

What I found, over the course of my research on Tamil language and English language journalists working in Chennai, is that criminal defamation charges were routinely filed against those who wrote critically about the government, especially when J Jayalalithaa was chief minister.

For example, the Times of India once faced a charge of criminal defamation when it published an article about the remarkably high number of lethal automobile accidents in the state of Tamil Nadu. The Chennai city public prosecutor found the article defamatory because it implied that the chief minister was uncaring, because she was not adequately concerned with public safety on roads! 

The fact remains, however, that very few criminal defamation cases lead to conviction because the constitutional standards for free speech upheld by Supreme Court precedents are, in fact, fairly robust. The process of having to attend monthly hearings at the Chennai sessions court was, in fact, the punishment for those journalists accused of this offence.

For many journalists, attracting a defamation case was experienced as a pain that would get in the way of their work. But there is also another tendency that developed as a response to the low rate of conviction. Some journalists appeared to seek legal reprisals for their reporting as a means of shoring up their own fame by attracting the attention of the reading public. It turns out that being accused of defamation could actually have the opposite effect of censorship – it could spur on further reporting about something the government or those individuals in power would rather not publicise. 

…This phenomenon extends even into the realm of civil defamation suits, where the accusation of defamation might lead to great scrutiny of the accuser and greater renown for the journalists who have been accused. A recent example of this kind of “amplification” at the national level in 

India is that of the Wire being sued for defamation by Jay Shah for an article they ran about his unexplained rise to riches under a government where his father was a prominent minister. The defamation suit itself did a great deal to draw widespread attention to the Wire and to its reporting on Jay Shah. 

So, while the threat of defamation can certainly have a “chilling effect” on reporting, it is perhaps not as straightforward a story as your metaphor of “castration” would suggest.

India’s position in the world press freedom index, according to the 2023 report, shows a downslide. The report by Reporters Without Borders says India is ranked 161 out of 180 countries.

What does this augur for Indian democracy? Is media freedom becoming a dispensable luxury in India?

The state of journalism in India is certainly cause for grave concern. Journalists are systematically threatened with violence, both legal and extralegal, when pursuing stories that show the government or corporate giants in bad light. Perhaps more perniciously, the mainstream news media has adapted itself to either adulation of the central government or simply silence with regard to the many problems faced by the country without having been explicitly told to do so.

The situation is a little different in the states with regards to reporting on regional news, and it depends a great deal on what state we are talking about. But many of the same dynamics apply.

All that said, however, I do regard the logic of “freedom indexes” with a degree of scepticism, if only because freedom, to my mind, is not an easily quantifiable quality. Such indexes can very easily obscure precisely the kind of unstated docility before power that I mentioned above. I must admit to being a little unclear about the methodology employed in rating countries on this index because I have not studied the indexing process as such. But I am certain that the compact between mainstream journalism and profoundly antidemocratic forces of capital is indeed global and, while perhaps more easily perceived in places that score poorly in freedom indexes, not for that reason inoperable in countries that would score very well. The soft self-censorship of the market is a pressure felt by everyone in the news business.

The state’s propensity to muzzle the media was always real. The Tamil Nadu government invoking breach of legislative privilege against the staff of the Hindu in 2003 is one instance. In what respect is the current Indian scenario different from past situations? What does this point to?

The state’s propensity to muzzle the media was always acted upon through the use of a range of legal and financial instruments. The case of the Hindu being accused of breaching legislative privilege, which I write about in some depth in my book, is particularly interesting and instructive because the law that was used was, in fact, devised to protect free speech.

Legislative privilege is meant to assure that members of the legislature can speak without fear of reprimand. But this was used by the government of Tamil Nadu under the leadership of Jayalalithaa in an attempt to censor the Hindu. This was yet another classic in which the propensity to muzzle the news media became big news itself, drawing many readers, who might not have otherwise, to read opinions critical of Jayalalithaa.

The Hindu’s editor in chief at the time, N Ram, was kind enough to walk me through this series of events in an interview. And he was very clear that it was because of the paper’s close connections to state power outside of Tamil Nadu, and because of what he saw as the basic decency of the police at the time, that the situation resolved itself relatively easily and without anyone being detained for what was a cognisable offence. 

Mr Ram noted that the case would be different now, already when I interviewed him some years ago. Checks on executive power that were in place in the early 2000s, even when there was a great deal of censorship at the time, have been eroded. And while many mainstream news organisations make it a point to maintain good relations with whichever government is in power, some parties, like the DMK, have historically been much more tolerant of criticism from news media than others, even as they have sought to shape the news landscape by investing in journalists friendly to their party. 

Most importantly, the judiciary appears less willing to confront abuses of power and so the scenario has indeed changed even if the specific laws used to muzzle the media have not.

Writer Perumal Murugan being forced to renounce writing and withdraw his published work was a low point in the history of freedom of expression in India. He received threats from caste activists in Tamil Nadu. In Kerala, Sangh Parivar outfits tried to stop Mathrubhumi from serialising S Hareesh’s novel Meesha. 

Tamil Nadu has a long history of anti-upper caste movements and Kerala is renowned for its renaissance credentials. How significant are these trends? And to what extent is the tradition of tolerance now undermined in the southern states of India?

These trends are significant because they point to an important strategy being developed by the Sangh Parivar to mobilise dominant communities in southern India through the rhetoric of offence and outrage. Fictionalised depictions of women’s sexuality provided the pretext for such mobilisation in both cases. This speaks to the relative ease with which accusations that artists are “dishonouring” a particular community and “their” women can be turned into a political campaign.

I would not take such claims of taking offence as truly representative of wider community sentiments. But these events provide for provocative political publicity nonetheless.

In the case of the attack against Perumal Murugan, there was a particular regional dynamic at play, where the Hindu right saw possibilities for electoral gain by appealing to the dominant Gounder community. This was aided by the remarkably poor judgement of a local revenue officer who demanded that the author sign an agreement to withdraw the book in the name of not “disturbing the peace.” The agreement was then followed by Perumal Murugan’s much publicised Facebook post where he declared himself dead as an author, leading news outlets around the world to cover the story as an example of growing intolerance in India. 

Again, a move to censor writing is what led to many more people being interested in the author than would have been otherwise. In this case, a strong judiciary allowed Perumal Murugan to resume his work through a powerful judgement on free speech handed down by the Madras High Court. But we cannot, in the future, assume that the judiciary will take such a brave stance against the tyranny of claims to hurt sentiment and I foresee future attempts to weaponise such claims for political gain. 

Of course, the governing political parties in both Kerala and Tamil Nadu at the moment are playing a large role in containing these threats to traditions of tolerance. 

The judicial curtailment of media freedom has been noticed of late in a number of controversial cases. Case in point is courts issuing gag orders proscribing the media to report the details of the trials of controversial cases. The media reporting the trial in progress in such cases can serve the cause of justice. How serious is this issue and how can media freedom be ensured in this regard?

There are a number of means by which courts limit news media coverage of events in the courtroom. Gag orders are common enough and the threat of contempt of court charges looms over a great deal of legal reporting. Less obviously, the ban on video coverage of proceedings in the high court system does a lot of symbolic work in preserving the image of aloof majesty that many judges aspire to.

Limits to legal reporting can have different effects depending on the context and the style of reporting. In my book, I discuss a case where a Tamil language newspaper was threatened with contempt of court, specifically with “scandalising” the judiciary, because it printed critical commentary on a case where some judges treated a Dalit woman before the court with disrespect – addressing her in the singular first person, for example. The judges were extremely unhappy and sought to dissuade others from writing critically about their behaviour in this case, where reporting was on the side of justice that was not being delivered by the court.

But not every curb on the media is detrimental to the cause of justice. For example, the practice of withholding the name of someone who has approached the court in a case of sexual assault is an important limit on reporting that serves the victims of such crimes, even if it is not always respected by the news media. 

Media trials can indeed adversely affect the course of an ongoing investigation in some cases but in others, the media can certainly compel greater accountability from both law enforcement and the judiciary.

What are the factors that diminish the dignity and credibility of the media? Is it poor professionalism? Or the subhuman media competition in the wake of the proliferation of channels that compromise media ethics to boost TRPs? Or, is it the easy willingness of media houses to be co-opted into the centre of political power and economic clout? 

Do you envisage the Indian media regaining its professionalism and journalistic ethics in the near future?

As I respond to these questions, I’m reading about how Republic TV was claiming to air footage of an explosion near the Pentagon when the image in question was, in fact, AI-generated and floating around Twitter with no verifiable source. They had even brought in an “expert” to discuss the ramifications of an explosion that never really occurred. 

News media credibility is at an all-time low and this is not just because of AI or Twitter. It has more to do with the media competition you mention in your question, and this cannot be fully disentangled from the following question about the economic clout that follows from political power.

“Truthiness” in the service of power is often more lucrative that truth in the face of power, and standards of verification are so low as to be almost non-existent. But the commodification of news media – leading the value of news texts and images to be derived more from their capacity to circulate than from what they actually reveal about the world, what the political theorist Jodi Dean terms “communicative capitalism,” more broadly – has a rather long story. 

News has been both a vocation and a business for some time, although in India, the transition from the world of carefully regulated news to a plethora of politically backed channels was rather rapid. Now, when we add the fact that nearly anyone with access to simple recording equipment and the internet can start a YouTube news channel, the question of professionalism is more vexing than ever before. 

The positive side of the proliferation of low-cost digital media, however, means that disciplined online news organisations can provide quality reporting with relatively little overhead. In south India, the News Minute comes to mind as one such organisation that is inspiring more to come up, I believe.

To what extent does the old idea – that the journalist fraternity should impose responsible restraints and regulations upon themselves – still hold? Given that there is no sign that this is in the offing, would you advocate the creation of external mechanisms of regulation? Would such a mechanism, if put in place, be safe from state manipulation under an authoritarian state?

It is imperative that the journalist community should impose responsible regulations upon themselves, and this should be the case both within news organisations and among them. Of course, the Press Council of India has played this role in the past when, for example, it showed how much paid news went into election coverage in an attempt to curb this practice.

But in recent years, the self-regulatory power of such institutions appears much denuded. Now, the state would like to regulate what it deems “misinformation” spread through inline sources. But there is very good reason to believe that such regulation will not be pursued in an equitable way.

My book highlights the need for internally imposed limits to reporting through the case of a caste vigilante wanted for the murder of a young Dalit man. He managed to secure interviews on three mainstream Tamil news channels even while the police were unable to apprehend him. Responding to the willingness of news channels to air someone wanted for such a heinous crime, VCK MP and intellectual Ravikumar noted that some organisations like the BBC impose strict guidelines about what can be shown on television. Whereas the Tamil media appears to have no such regulatory mechanisms.

Returning to our previous question, the quest for high TRPs often appears to trump any sense of media ethics. But it really must be a self-imposed regulatory framework rather than government regulation that does this work.

Media houses are scared of reporting unbiased or negative stories about the governing party and government, for fear of having to face investigative agencies such as the Enforcement Directorate. Even freelance columnists are now under this dark shadow. Free expression and exchange of views on issues of national significance are becoming increasingly rare, if not impossible.

How can media houses practise media dharma in such a context?

The ED is only one among many agencies that are increasingly used in attempts to silence critics of the government, as the recent raids on the BBC India offices illustrate so powerfully. I have already discussed some of the other means the state uses to try and curb the freedom of reporters to do their work. For major newspapers, I should add that the threat of withdrawing government advertisements also plays a decisive role in determining how far editors are willing to go in reporting on state malfeasance.

Many of the means used by state actors to curb reporting, like the withdrawal of government ads, are not wholly new to the current regime, as I discuss in my book. The role of freelancers and smaller news organisations is very important in this context. While certainly subject to some of the same forces, especially legal harassment, I do think that in the age of networked digital media, those operating within a sphere where the business stakes are low have much greater freedom to practise media dharma.