Event reports
The seventh edition of the annual conference was inaugurated by Krishnan Srinivasan. He stressed that “the Indian media is now robust, vast, and reflects the diversity of the nation.” Nevertheless, he criticized that opinions too often were masquerading as news. He pointed out that commercial considerations were having too big an influence on the selection of panels and the opinions aired. Another problem would be that, in contrast to the Press Council of India, there was no body governing electronic media.
In their welcoming addresses, both Ravindra Kumar, editor of The Statesman, and Pankaj Madan, Programme Coordinator of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung India, emphasized on the long cooperation between the C. R. Irani Foundation and KAS. In his keynote address, Dr Lüders stressed current challenges to the German media and discussed their influence on the style and quality of coverage. He criticized that an increasing number of journalists would restrict themselves to dividing the world in “good and evil.” Furthermore, he expressed his worries that while high-quality journalism would require a certain distance between journalists and politicians, too many journalists were actively trying to be in proximity to political power-circles.
The first conference session discussed the severity of the media crisis and who was to be blamed for the loss of credibility. The journalist Kalyani Shankar criticized the „sensationalism” of media and a lack of fact-checking. Nevertheless, print media would continue to play an important in India. Sam Rajappa, veteran journalist and founding-director of the SPJS, raised the question whether prices of five Rupees and less were pushing newspapers into dependence on other sources of income and thereby may have led to a decrease in independence. Siddarth Bhatia, Founding Director of The Wire, pointed out that the title of the conference was a statement and a call for action at the same time. Even though the “good old times” never existed, coverage had been “less noisy” and journalists used to look less at the next headline and have shown more long-term commitment in the past.
The topic of the second session was whether the media required regulation from the outside or whether self-regulation was sufficient. Raj Kamal Jha, Editor-In-Chief of the Indian Express, pointed out that the Indian media was already regulated by a number of laws and expressed his view that the current problems were rather caused by bad and mediocre journalism and could be “solved in the newsroom.” In particular, he criticized the phenomenon of paid content which often is labelled only insufficiently. Mukund Padmanabhan, Editor of The Hindu Business Line, also expressed his doubts regarding a need for further regulations. He pointed out that The Hindu had installed an ombudsman particularly for questions of journalist ethics. Dr Lüders looked at the regulatory framework in Germany. He pointed out that there were no regulations in Germany and that the recent case of the online publication Netzpolitik.org had shown the strong standing of independent media. At the same time he observed an increasing trend of streamlining of the opinions expressed in most newspapers. Shah Hossain Imam, Associate Editor of the Daily Star from Bangladesh, compared press regulations in Indian and his native country and pointed out strong parallels. He expressed his views that “regulation within the system is more important than regulation by the government.”
The third session looked at media standards and asked the question who was setting these? Raj Kamal Jha pointed out the changes media coverage is going through. Instead of having to answer the five Ws and one H (who, what, where, when, why and how) newspapers today have to present background information. This is why his newspaper was rather looking for experts than good writers. Mukund Padmanabhan pointed out the phenomenon that a growing number of online formats were publishing printed magazines. Siddarth Batia explained the necessity of new business models for the media by the example of The Wire, which functions on a non-profit basis. The participants agreed that print media could only survive if it could provide high-quality journalism, which particularly referred to accurate fact-checking.
During a closing session law students from the Bengal National University of Judicial Sciences and journalism students from the SPJS discussed the outcomes of the conference and their views on the future of print media. It became evident that while the journalism students feared regulation as a challenge to press freedom, the law students on the panel rather saw moderate regulations as a chance to guarantee freedom of speech and press.
Following the conference, Dr Lüders visited the SPJS. For three days, he joined the students on a research trip in Kolkata, had an exchange on their career plans, and held a seminar that involved the students writing short articles on social and societal issues of Kolkata.