This is the transcript of my speech at Keraleeyam 2023, shared at a panel discussion on media in India held in Trivandrum on November 6, 2023.

I want to start with the premise that one of the key roles of the media in a democracy or any other situation is to speak truth to power.

I wish to focus mainly on the mainstream media and its failure to crack even a joke to power. Forget truth, which is the biggest casualty in many parts of the world, especially in India since the rise of Modi to what looks mostly like the apotheosis of his political career.

It is not space science or topology but absolute common sense that journalism changes dramatically and vacates its rightful role under any authoritarian rule. We saw it happen in India during Emergency — some of us have not seen it but have read and heard about the excesses of Emergency. Now we are being ruled by an authoritarian regime that demonstrates fascist tendencies, especially when it comes to muzzling the media and going after anyone whom it sees as inconvenient, be it a writer, a university professor, or a public intellectual. The more inconvenient a journalist, an academic professor or a public intellectual becomes, the worse their plight. They are immediately sidelined in their organisation — if it is an organisation that has decided to sell its soul to the powers that be.

They can land in jail or be harassed or demonised by social media trolls and IT cell heads if they are associated with an organisation that defies the government. The organisation itself attracts the wrath of very powerful people who have also apparently destroyed institutions and meticulously misuse agencies that literally parrot the government line however whimsical that turns out to be. What follows is legal and digital repression and in some cases witch hunts of the scale we have only heard of used to happen in medieval times.

This is not a phenomenon associated with democracy: it is in a monarchy that we see anyone who questions the king or the emperor being hurled with abuses such as traitor, anti-national and the sort. I am not getting into expletives reserved for those who don’t toe the official line by mercenary cyber forces affiliated with the government in power at the Centre. The outcome is a legitimised and weaponised toxic mix of Islamophobia, Dalit phobia and Left phobia.

If you are in pursuit of journalism that we learnt in journalism schools you are immediately discredited and your organisation that shares your values is instantly stigmatised. Let me now come to tangible changes unfolding right in front of our eyes since the crowning of Modi.

Prior to 2014, there used to be this joke that the political bureaus of a few top newspapers in the country were being run by a certain lawyer politician. That was partly joke. Part true. But things were much better because editors back then had a spine. With Modi consolidating his power especially after he was re-elected in 2019, this idea of a super bureau chief, an extra-constitutional authority, that presides over the running of news organisations – in print and on TV – has unfortunately become a naked reality. As a result, there has been a phenomenal overhaul of how newsrooms function.

The first casualty is editors at the top echelons of a news organization who typically used to enjoy a certain political autonomy by virtue of keeping a cautious distance from politicians as regards daily news flow was concerned. But no longer. What happens now? Editors literally act like public affairs personnel for the government which dictates to them what is the story of the day.

The second tragedy is the death of the reporter as a job function and an institution. With editors working as public relations officers for the government, the reporter stands virtually canceled or obliterated. This is a big departure from how journalism used to be practised before in India except during the dark days and nights of the Emergency. I am not talking about independent media outlets like The Wire or Caravan where the reporter performs what he or she is meant to do: gathering news.

For the new editor of the invariably government-affiliated and monitored mainstream media in new India, news isn’t what his or her reporters bring to the table, but the news of the day the grandees in the new Lutyens Delhi, of the Central Vista make, want him to carry in exchange for what he thinks as the Holy Grail of journalism: access to the ministers.

Let me explain. The news story that is relished the most in the new media of new India is interviews with the ministers in the Union government. You may laugh, but believe me, that is a new idea, a new metaphor, or a metonym for a scoop. Often these interviews are not one-on-one interactions but written responses to questions that are meant to please the masters, not to probe them. The quid pro quo is proof of a certain stability in the newsroom. And these interviews are hardly hard talk, but a nibble of sorts on the ear. But such capitulation of journalistic values is good news for our esteemed media groups, for they are allowed to function without income-tax raids or ED summons or other such inconveniences.

Now let’s see what this access to the Union ministers actually means. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

‘Scraping acquaintances with the great and the good’ is an expression that the late Christopher Hitchens had once used for the great Briton Benjamin Disraeli who was a highly networked writer and public figure of his time. There was another man who instead of scraping acquaintances with the great and the good decided to pore over the archives of the British Museum library, an out-and-out liberal who had no contacts whatsoever with the high and mighty.

Of course, Hitchens later went back on his values and became an apologist for the American empire and its allies. But it is worth remembering what he said of that inveterate rebel in question and his prophecies in his journalistic work for which he had fallen back on statistics.

Karl Marx was the Diego Maradona of journalism without the hand of god. Several notches above the others with so-called connections. You can also ask this about Julian Assange. Did he have connections with the President of the US or top officials inside the FBI?

I wish to quote Hitchens here: “When journalists today are feeling good about themselves, and sitting through the banquets at which they give each other prizes and awards, they sometimes like to flatter one another by describing their hasty dispatches as “the first draft of history”. Next time you hear that tone of self-regard, you might want to pick up Dispatches for the New York Tribune and read the only reporter of whom it was ever actually true.”

Talking about the mediascape in the country, it is unfair not to dwell on how fake news laws are being consistently used to punish journalists. A lot of studies have gone into it, notably by GIGA whose extensive study of six countries including India is due to come out in February. Such studies and their conclusions alone go beyond mere firefighting and build narratives to check the gross excesses and criminally repressive actions of our central government in order to criminalise journalism, especially in the hinterland where journalism is far more dangerous because of their lack of proximity with cities where acts of brutality tend to get amplified more. Offering journalists in rural areas a helping hand must emerge as one of the new slogans in journalism and among the journalist community which will have to fight its battles from the front lines against the legal and digital repression of news gatherers.

Finally, I want to bring to your attention the negatives and positives of AI with the segment marking a record growth over the past decade. We are now in the era of generative AI and we are also talking about the prospects of artificial general intelligence.

When I started in journalism in the late 1990s I was told that if you don’t know how to type with all your fingers you cannot be in the business of journalism. Then I was told if you don’t know shorthand you cannot be in journalism for long. Technology has obliterated those needs. Like a sword beheading such tasks.

In a similar fashion, technology is helping us focus more on creativity and less on white collar manual functions like typing with all fingers and shorthand and checking spelling and grammar. It allows us to focus more on more relevant aspects of journalism — to synthesise information and make sense of it than being mere bearers of the message.

As John Pilger says, “It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it.”

Again, there are grave challenges. I was thinking that Noam Chomsky had lost his marbles a few months ago when he said ChatGPT is mostly about high-tech plagiarism. But as I read and try to understand more about it, I get a feeling that he could be right. AI-generated content is a simulation of existing content and involves copyright infringement of both text and image. We weren’t interested in seeing that flip side in the euphoria generated by ChatGPT from the OpenAI stable.

Now there is a new concept emerging among writers and artists and researchers — multimodal infringement. Let me explain it with an example. You have a generative AI software for translation called DeepL. The moment you translate your work using that app, whatever you have translated as well as the original content becomes public and loses copyright because you have used the app.

We cannot align the clarity of purpose of these technology giants and their avarice with our confusion and generosity. Chomsky is right that generative AI is high-tech plagiarism in that it is a simulation of the content generated by rigour and endless hours of hard work. And among other work they also encroach into the intellectual turf of journalism. We need to be aware, and cautious and we need to resist it through conscious action.

In a country where IP laws are lax, Indians are going to bear the brunt of it and lose out work to smart men who will walk away with your products and make more money out of it. Be warned, this has happened before. Viagra was made using public money, and so was the computer and the internet.

So-called smart private enterprises like Pfizer and con men like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates walked away with the fruits of taxpayers’ money and lied to us that private sector research and development made the world a better place. No. Public investment in scientific institutions and defence and space units made cutting-edge technology and products and private enterprises made what they are hardwired to make: profit from other people’s money, people who aren’t even shareholders.

I am stressing on this aspect — technology — because in journalism we have no practice of assessing how technologies affect the world and journalism itself. We have technology correspondents who merely report what the corporations tell them. Stories about modern-day slavery in the Congo to make electric vehicles and smart phones and tablets are rare and often easily forgotten. In this age when technology is growing faster than ever before and often funded by the public sector and banks where common people park their money, journalism cannot allow itself to be lazy the way it used to be. The speed with which technology grows will be faster than ever before.

We also have to watch out for how technology is going to be misused in the short, mid and long term. One example of short-term misuse is going to be how AI will be used in the coming elections in India as well as in the US and the UK. The rest of the world is writing about it, but we aren’t because we are too afraid even to crack a joke to power as mainstream media outlets.

I wish to conclude by quoting an unlikely man, a smart actor, Denzel Washington who had a knack for surprising us with the way he watched the world. Not long ago he said, “We live in a world where if we don’t read the newspapers we are disinformed and if we read we are misinformed.” It is time we work towards creating media platforms that will help people cut through the dense fog of propaganda.

Thank you.