The role of media in governance was recognised as early as 1841, when Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher wrote, “Burke (Sir Edmund Burke, MP, Paymaster of the Forces, statesman and philosopher) said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all” (On Heroes and Hero Worship). Probably, Carlyle was one of the first to realise that the press, as the Fourth Estate, acted as the conscience keeper of Government, holding the Government accountable for its follies and keeping citizens informed of prominent issues. In fact, according to Carlyle, by spreading facts and opinions and raising its voice against tyranny, the press was instrumental in the birth and growth of democracy. Our own freedom movement owes much of its success to the vernacular press, that made the Indian public aware of the ideals of liberty, equality and freedom and kept them abreast of the thoughts and doings of nationalists like Gokhale and Gandhi.

The Vernacular Press Act (1878), and similar legislation like the Newspaper Act (1908) failed to control Indian language newspapers. Post-Independence, the print media acted as the guardian of democracy; often taking the Government to task and exposing corruption in Government by its reporting on scandals like Bofors and Tehelka. Much earlier, the thought of American freedom was first mooted in a series of newspaper articles entitled Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies in 1767 that espoused the principle of ‘no taxation without representation.’ Samuel Adams, one of the Founding Fathers of the US, created public resentment against unequal British policies through newspapers. Significantly, US whites had a literacy rate exceeding 90 per cent, contributing to the power of newspapers.

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Thomas Paine’s Common Sense that fostered the revolutionary spirit in the US was circulated on the distribution networks of newspapers, selling over half a million copies in its first year, because of newspaper endorsements. At its apogee, print media had immense power to mould public opinion, champion worthy causes and shine an unforgiving light on corruption. In actuality, the role of the press has been mixed; the Indian press espoused many worthy causes but lost its backbone during Emergency days. Examples of yellow journalism i.e., dissemination of fake and sensational news to boost circulation abound; an extreme example of yellow journalism being the deliberately sensationalized reporting on the sinking of USS Maine by US newspapers, primarily by editors William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, that goaded the US into a war with Spain.

The advent of radio and television during the last century reduced the dominance of the press over news media. By the beginning of the twentyfirst century, cable TV, broadcasting 24×7, became the prime source of news for most Indians. The power of television can be gauged from the fact that India has approximately 1,000 TV channels with around 22 crore households owning TV sets, exposing about 100 crore viewers to TV. News sites and news aggregators began appearing in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Web logs, now called blogs, became an immensely popular way for ordinary citizens to update the world about their lives and views. In the last decade, social networking sites like WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook ushered in the era of social media.

In a paradigm shift, articles, pictures and opinions are increasingly being shared on social media making it a new avenue of journalism ~ democratizing news reporting outside the small elite coterie of journalists controlling the print and TV media. With all top world leaders being on Twitter and an emerging trend of announcing all manner of important decisions on Twitter, social media is mounting a serious challenge to traditional news media ~ despite accusations of not observing the basic tenets of journalism and peddling fake and malicious news, at the instance of troll factories. The main advantage of digital media is that digital media is ‘dynamic’ in the sense that all content gets updated constantly. Additionally, digital media contains graphics and interactive displays and is accompanied by reactions and criticisms of viewers making it a living, breathing coverage, which is far superior to traditional print media which is only text with static images, with no updating, correction, or interface.

However, despite its inherent advantage, digital media suffers from lack of credibility because taking advantage of the anonymity afforded by the internet, half-truths masquerade as news on digital media and extreme views are peddled with the intent of inciting passions. The situation has come to a pass where TV anchors often conduct media trials, the most recent victims being Aryan Khan and Rhea Chakraborty ~ innocent individuals, who were defamed and pronounced guilty on primetime TV. The menace of social media now extends to attempting to influence judicial verdicts and defaming upright judges. Speaking on the topic of “Vox Populi vs. Rule of Law: Supreme Court of India” at the Second Justice HR Khanna Memorial Symposium, Justice JB Pardiwala recounted the danger posed by social media: “Immense power of the social and digital media platforms is persistently resorted to for precipitating the perception of guilt or innocence of the accused even before trial is over.

The society starts believing that the outcome of judicial proceedings ought to be nothing but conviction of the accused with extreme penalty for the accused.” The judge also noted ruefully: “Attacks of judges for their judgments lead to a dangerous scenario where the judges have to think what the media thinks, rather than what the law actually says… Social and digital media is primarily resorted to expressing personalised opinions more against the judges, rather than a constructive critical appraisal of their judgments. This is what is harming the judicial institution and lowering its dignity.” As a remedy, Justice Pardiwala suggested nationwide regulation of digital and social media, which may be extremely difficult, and counterproductive in the long run. Significantly, Justice Pardiwala had made some scathing observations against Nupur Sharma that had not gone down well with some hard Hindutva proponents. The only way to reform social media may be to appeal to the good conscience of social media platforms; asking them to make participants stick to the journalistic ethics of being fair, truthful and accountable, without deliberately harming anyone.

The Government can help by being a neutral umpire and act against all those who violate the law, not only against one set of people. Another pressing concern could be to tackle the issue of press freedom; our rank of 150 (out of 180 countries) in the World Press Freedom Index calls for serious introspection by all stakeholders. The Report has flagged the difficult conditions under which journalists operate in India; Government could obviously do better than routinely arrest journalists for their reporting. Referring to the recent arrest of an Indian journalist, a spokesperson for UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said that journalists should not be jailed for “what they write, what they tweet and what they say.” The media could also introspect on the ‘economic context’, highlighted by the Press Freedom Report. Specifically the Report has described Indian media as a “colossus with a feet of clay”, pointing out that “media outlets largely depend on advertising contracts with local and regional governments” and “at the national level, the Central Government has seen that it can exploit this to impose its own narrative, and is now spending more than Rs 130 billion (Euro 5 billion) a year on ads in the print and online media alone.”

In a best case scenario, a vibrant digital media, unencumbered by the huge establishment costs incurred by print media, can balance any misreporting by other media but given the current realities this situation does not seem likely to materialise, in the near future. To retain its relevance Indian media has to focus fairly on substantive issues, otherwise it will meet the fate of the US media, so succinctly summed-up by the US author and public intellectual, Gore Vidal: “The American press exists for one purpose only, and that is to convince Americans that they are living in the greatest and most envied country in the history of the world. The Press tells the American people how awful every other country is and how wonderful the United States is and how evil communism is and how happy they should be to have freedom to buy seven different sorts of detergent.”