Deccan Herald » Bittu Sehgal » Detailed Story

GREEN TALK

THE MEDIA ENVIRONMENT

BITTU SAHGAL

I edit a magazine called Sanctuary. When we began publishing this wildlife and ecology journal in 1981, we would be routinely assailed by aggressive politicians and businessmen who would say: “Only after India becomes a developed country can we afford the luxury of protecting wildlife.” Meanwhile, they went about cold-bloodedly destroying habitat after natural habitat.

Narmada Andolan

Those were tough times. Doordarshan was the only channel available to the public and it was next to impossible to get anything said on air that did not blandly praise government. I was a part of the Narmada Bachao Andolan and we literally went for years without even a bald mention on the national channel about the environmental and human rights crimes committed by Sardar Sarovar Project.

Then, the press was not just free, but fiercely free. Press photographers and writers would travel at their own cost to expose the hypocrisy and lies that were doled out by officialdom. This forced the World Bank to withdraw funding from the Project.

It’s another story altogether that even after vanquishing the World Bank, the project continued to find patronage within the country thanks to a combination of politics and profit seeking, set in a media canvas where no newspaper in Gujarat was allowed to highlight the flaws of the ill-fated project.

The empire strikes back

The phenomenon of ‘Public Relations’ organisations was also imported into India and for each story we would get published about the dangers of this or that chemical, they would manage to get papers to write articles to plant just enough doubt to provide the fig leaves they needed to continue with business as usual. When you read about this product or that having this benefit or that, you cannot help but wonder how much money the manufacturer paid to the paper carrying the gooey supportive report.

The end result of all this has been that media houses have become richer, journalists are being paid more- but the readers are being treated to junk disguised as news.

Things were not all bad

In the ‘80s and ‘90s, story after story emerged in the press about how the tiger had to be saved, how rivers had to be kept free from pollution and how health and the environment were two sides of one coin. Such reports helped to establish a very simple premise: “Protecting wildlife is good. Destroying wildlife is bad”.

Had this not been the case, had the free press in India not thrown its lot behind the environmental movement, I believe India would have become a nation soiled, in much the way that Russia was.

Tehelka

I was diving with dolphins in the Andaman Sea when the Tehelka tehelka broke. The Congress Party asked for the Prime Minister's resignation. The BJP bayed for Tehelka blood. Some media people themselves questioned Aniruddha Bahal and Mathew Samuel’s ethics (sour grapes?). Others accused them of demoralising the armed forces.

Speaking for myself, I would love to have had Tehelka around when deals were being struck to push the Bandra Worli Link Road project (budget larger than the wildlife budget of the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF)).

The scheme had been rejected by several MoEF Expert Committees because an internal document clearly revealed it would cause traffic jams, not solve them. One fine day, we discovered that the project had been cleared, after first installing a more pliable Committee. We strongly suspect that palms were greased, but in the absence of a Tehelka-type sting, we had no proof.

We know there is a revolving door between wildlife, narcotics and arms traders. And that corrupt government servants profit from all these trades. This is why ordinary people should never sit idly by while the powers that be slander the likes of Tehelka.

The credibility factor

But there is another side to environmental journalism that is often forgotten in the haste to write the story- credibility. A journalist's life is hectic and the Editor’s more often than not are not particularly supportive of journalists who tow the environmentalists’ line. And all too often stories fall prey to the pressure of “headline journalism”.

Nothing explains this better than the manner in which the leopard attacks in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park were covered by some sections of the press.

In the first week of March 2002, two leopards were trapped, their bloodied photographs splashed across newspapers in Mumbai. An eye for an eye seems to have been the underlying justification. But does such reportage do anything for society, other than provide titillation? And what exactly are the underlying causes for leopards straying out of the protective confines of the forest?

The media glosses over such issues at the peril of the public and at a cost of its own credibility. The story that should have been written was one that explained the very rationale for the existence of the national park at Borivli and its carnivores.

In an age when every large corporate has dreams of owning a newspaper or a television channel, it may well seem naïve to speak about the need for impartiality and ethics in the media. The balancing factor is the public.

While viewers and readers do tend to be taken for granted, the fact is that they have the power to shut down the most powerful newspaper, by the simple expedient of not buying it.

For a while everyone is going to susceptible to the hypnotic appeal of sex and violence. But everything is cyclical. Already, Mumbai is seeing a campaign by Direct News and Analysis that seems to be keen on cornering an unoccupied niche in the media business- the thinking person’s paper.

The other city papers have already taken note and I predict that in the days ahead values will return to Indian journalism. This can only be good news for us all, and for our river, coasts, wetlands and forests.