The Press Council of India’s (PCI) statement against the attack on the Editor of Republic TV, Arnab Goswami, reminded me of a recent Twitter crowd-sourcing effort by Alan Rusbridger, Chair of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and former Editor of The Guardian. Mr. Rusbridger wanted readers to provide “examples of chaff”. He was referring to American politician Adlai Ewing Stevenson II’s assertion that “newspaper editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff.” An interesting sentence of the PCI’s statement read: “Violence is not the answer even against bad journalism.” It is important that not only the PCI but also the government and the courts notice the difference between editors who put out the chaff in the public domain and those who strive to deliver the wheat.

Mr. Goswami moved the Supreme Court seeking a stay on the FIRs filed against him for allegedly defaming Congress President Sonia Gandhi. He approached the apex court a day after at least 16 complaints were filed against him in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana, and Chhattisgarh. His plea was filed on April 23 evening, and the Supreme Court, on April 24, granted him a reprieve for three weeks. One yearns for the courts to display the same swiftness in hearing journalists who, against multiple odds, try to give their readers and the audience substantive news and credible analysis.

A case languishing in the court

Let us first see the fate of a case in the Supreme Court. A PIL sought permission for private FM and community radio stations to air news. In my column, “Liberating the radio?” (October 21, 2013), I pointed out that news is not permitted and politics is proscribed under clause 5 (vi) of the Policy Guidelines for setting up Community Radio Stations. Many community radio stations have had to confine themselves to broadcasting the developmental agenda of the NGO concerned or the donor agency. The irony is that while several of them have ‘community radio reporters’, these reporters are not expected to produce and broadcast any news. The only news that is permitted is All India Radio’s bulletin without any modification whatsoever. When the case came up for hearing before the first Bench of the apex court in 2013, comprising then Chief Justice of India (CJI) P. Sathasivam and Justice Ranjan Gogoi, the judges said, “You rightly mentioned that radio is accessible to everybody. There is no problem in case of TV channels. Only TV channels are allowed to broadcast news. Radio channels have access to every village, nook and corner. We will examine the issue. We will impose some conditions…. (before granting permission).” Justice Sathasivam went on to complete a full term as Governor of Kerala after retiring as CJI, and Justice Gogoi, who was elevated later as the CJI, is now a Member of Parliament. But there is no progress in this case.

Providing little relief

The Executive Editor of Kashmir Times, Anuradha Bhasin, moved the Supreme Court in August 2019 seeking directions to ensure that mediapersons and journalists from Jammu and Kashmir are able to freely practise their profession. “The information blackout set in motion is a direct and grave violation of the right of the people to know about the decisions that directly impact their lives and their future. The Internet and telecommunication shutdown also means that the media cannot report on the aforesaid developments, and the residents of Kashmir thus don’t get access to information that is otherwise publicly available to the rest of India,” she said.

Early this year, the court came up with some progressive observations but little in terms of relief. The declarations of the Bench of Justices N.V. Ramana, R. Subhash Reddy and B.R. Gavai, on the freedom of speech and expression and the freedom to practice any profession, and about the medium of the Internet, were commendable. However, the Bench did not accept the plea of the petitioners to quash government orders suspending and later shutting down Internet, mobile and fixed-line telecommunication services.

It is ethical to protect the rights of even those who provide the chaff. Journalism will suffer irreparable damage if legal relief is denied to those who provide us the wheat.

readerseditor@thehindu.co.in

COVID-19 has affected every sphere. At the Readers’ Editor Office, we had to stop readers from attending our editorial meetings and also cancel the Open House that we had planned to celebrate 50 years of this newspaper in Bengaluru. Apart from a perceptible decline in letters and calls, there is also pronounced anxiety everywhere. People are fervently hoping that this pandemic will end soon. This hour of crisis may also be used as an hour of reflection.

Physicist Freeman Dyson, who died early this year, was fond of reminding everyone about two different kinds of scientists: birds and frogs. Some scientists are birds who fly high to survey the broad vistas and establish unexpected links between different bits of the landscape. Others are frogs who prefer to be close to the ground, focussing on minute details. These two are not opposing trajectories; they are complementary paths.

If applied to journalism, Dyson’s classification may put most Editors in the bird category, but the Readers’ Editor in the frog category. An internal news ombudsman views and evaluates the world mainly through the pages of the newspaper. COVID-19 is hurting us on all fronts. From crippling our economy to immobilising us, the ramifications of the pandemic are beyond our comprehension. It may take a month or two to quantify the loss. In this hour of unknown hardship, the sports pages seem to be a metaphor for our times.

No sports events

There is a moratorium on sporting events. Some observers say that the 2020 Olympics to be held in Tokyo in July may be postponed. Sports writers usually compete with each other to grab the precious space for their reportage. When politics polarises people, it is sports that helps to break the silos, despite attempts by hyper-nationalists to inject jingoism in sports too.

I asked the Sports Editor, K.C. Vijaya Kumar, about how his team is managing when there is no sporting event to report. “Sports pages ideally thrive on kinetic energy through live reportage of matches supplemented with action-photographs. The other added elements are a sprinkling of analysis, a few features, and the odd pinch of nostalgia as and when a significant event’s anniversary comes to the fore. But largely the sports pages are of the here and now, of who won a match, of who scored the winning goal or the championship-winning forehand or the game-changing blistering hundred. But when sport ceases as it has in these grave times of the coronavirus pandemic, the sports pages are plunged into a vacuum,” he said.

With sports having hit the pause button globally, there is a dearth of live-action content. Understandably the sports pages had to be scaled down from three to two and the Sudoku grid was moved from the world page to the sports pages. “Even the feature-driven Weekend Sport page that appears on Saturdays, with its look-ahead perspective, well-curated by Senior Deputy Editor S. Ram Mahesh and embellished by Deputy National Design Editor S. Kannan, had to be suspended for now. Besides the periscope-gaze, reporters are also looking back with awe as anniversaries are culled out and written about, while the sports desk, headed by R. Narayanan, provides support through archival images and graphics,” said Mr. Vijaya Kumar.

Creating hope where there is despair

From George Orwell’s pithy article, “The sporting spirit” to Jorge Luis Borges biting one-liner — “Soccer is popular because stupidity is popular” — we have had criticisms of sport over the last century. What these thinkers did not bargain for was the possibility of suspension of sporting activity itself. In this bleak time, it is important to recall Nelson Mandela’s observation about sports. He said: “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire, it has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. Sport can create hope, where once there was only despair.”

Sports journalism informs us that bleak realities do not mean despair alone. They suggest possibilities and potentials, alternatives and optimism. The absence of sporting events has forced the sports team to remember and reflect on multiple aspects of sport — from aesthetics to skills — that make the world of games an integral part of our life. In a sense, it is a language of grief that generates space for empathy, social action and shared values, which in turn create space for hope and transformation.

readerseditor@thehindu.co.in