Why we need a Pulitzer in India

The Pulitzer is about to become an American antique. In the meandering years of its history, the prize administered by the Columbia University has tried to keep pace with time. The Jallianwalla Bagh massacre never had an American reporter covering it, but the latest Pulitzer honours New York Times with two prizes, for coverage of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, described “as courageous and vivid journalism that engaged the public and held authorities accountable.”

The Pulitzer includes music, arts and poetry besides online journalism, constantly botoxing itself into new realities the founder, an enthusiastic exponent of yellow journalism, never envisaged in 1902.

In many ways, it’s most exciting twists and turns are best captured in Humphrey Bogart’s assessment of how Hollywood changed under his watch. “I came out here with one suit and everybody said I looked like a bum. Twenty years later Marlon Brando came out with only a sweatshirt and the town drooled over him. That shows how much Hollywood has progressed.”

In the 1950s when Brando’s star began to rise, Bogart starred in a film called Deadline USA . It was the story of a newspaper stuck in the swirling currents of change with Bogey playing the steadfast editor, Ed Hutcheson. That is the scenario that many Indian media organisations have had to face since the 1990s opening of the economy. Scale up, pander to the lowest common denominator and ramp up the sales.

The new ethos in cold and hot combat with the old world, idealistic idea of journalism as an educator and enabler of greater public good through honest reporting. As Ed Hutcheson tells a wanna-be-intern: “About this wanting to be a reporter, don’t ever change your mind. It may not be the oldest profession, but it’s the best.”

At another time, he reflects on his bigger problem. “It’s not enough anymore to give ’em just news. They want comics, contests, puzzles. They want to know how to bake a cake, win friends, and influence the future. Ergo, horoscopes, tips on the horses, interpretation of dreams so they can win on the numbers lottery. And, if they accidentally stumble on the first page... news!”

Incidentally, the fading era of Bogart into the Brando phase was also politically significant in the US. The post-World War II McCarthy era had begun and television had started to assert its influence, taking away some of the sheen from newspapers’ role as the conscience of the people.

That was also when news television last scored a solid victory for the people, when crusty reporter and anchorman Edward R Murrow helped bring down the evangelical anti-communist witch-hunter from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy.

George Clooney’s 2005 film, Good Night, and Good Luck, on Murrow’s struggle with advertisers and the CBS’ corporate bosses starts with a 1958 convention that honours Murrow’s heroic fight. In a decidedly prosaic, very non-television speech, Murrow underlines the malady of the media then.

“We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable, and complacent. We have a built in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information; our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses, and recognise that television... is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture, too late.”

Indian media’s more stodgy gatekeepers, usually introduced as senior or veteran journalists, too lament similarly to a very unsympathetic audience. The churn and ferment of the American media of the fifties, sixties and seventies, brilliantly depicted in the 1976 movie Network , is what Indian media has gulped in one quick, distasteful spasm like popping a bitter pill.

Despite the brouhaha about rising superpower, Indian newspapers have less and less foreign correspondents. Indian news television, similarly, have few regular foreign correspondents. With the television channels’ ISRO-like austerity, they are unable to report from ground the big breaking international stories.

India’s boiling cauldron of weird, bizarre and ghastly stories keep the camera time engaged. And our notoriously politics-obsessed newsline burns out studio shows in a cloudburst of mealy-mouthed halitosis signifying nothing.

So far, the story will sound easy to compare and contrast. Bring in two supremely important sociological aspects and things turn into a more complicated situation. Internet and India’s youth bulge. Add to that the complication that the internet bridges the divide between the literate and the non-or semi-literate just like the radio did once in post-Independence India.

And how was the radio revolution seen in Europe? Milan Kundera, one of the most penetrative analysts of Europe’s various social psychosis and neurosis, has this to say about it: ‘As early as 1930 Schoenberg wrote: “Radio is an enemy, a ruthless enemy marching irresistibly forward, and any resistance is hopeless”; it “force-feeds us music...” with the result that music becomes just noise, a noise among other noises… If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, “regardless whether we want to hear it,” it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, reorchestrated, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, a flood of everything jumbled together so that we don’t know who composed it (music become noise is anonymous), so that we can’t tell beginning from end (music become noise has no form): sewage-water music in which music is dying.”

An all-too-easy binary vision allows one to choose sides in these debates. For one, the standards are set by the past and the current practitioners always tend to be aggressively, even gauchely, defensive.

India’s vast geographical spread, with its very many time zones which are supremely disassociated from what is considered “modern” by the country’s English-speaking agenda setters, create unique troubles.

Oscar Wilde said a lot of smart things. He said America is the only country that moved from barbarism to decadence without civilisation in between. He also said that journalism is unreadable, while literature is unread.

The Wilde choice for post-colonial countries with an English-speaking elite is then finding a credible way to rate what constitutes genuine contribution to building an acceptably cohesive society.

But then it will have to negotiate the social media which has the muscle to spread truth and canard at whim.

And, for a country with 50 per cent of its population under the age of 25, mostly connected to the internet, a standard as set by the Pulitzer for American journalism would be the most immediate need.

The writer is a journalist and author of ‘Defragmenting India – Riding a Bullet Through the Gathering Storm’

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