What Outlook's cover story on Arnab Goswami didn't tell us

When the March 23 edition of Outlook hit newsstands last week, it sent a minor ripple through the dilated and flabby circuits of Indian media. Somehow the issue had managed to pack in a punch, clubbing together one of the most acerbic and pointed critiques ever written about star anchor and the face of Times Now Arnab Goswami with a bouquet of glowing tributes to the recently deceased Vinod Mehta, the former editor-in-chief and editorial director of one of the country's foremost and sharpest political weeklies.

Mehta was dubbed "il miglior editore", which is Italian for "the superior editor", by none other than the late newsman's former colleague and a gifted albeit "tainted" editor Tarun Tejpal. In the same edition, the cover story titled "Wrecking News: The Man Who Killed TV News" by Outlook's senior associate editor Anuradha Raman implied that Goswami, who had recently conducted a McCarthy-like quasi-inquisition of women lawyers and activists supporting a Greenpeace worker on his show Newshour, was, by inference, "il peggiore editore", Italian for "the inferior editor".

The study in contrast - more than the amalgamation of no-holds-barred on-the-face attacks on Goswami by fellow editors, journalists of left-liberal inclination, activists, feminist lawyers, commentators, think-tank workers - was essentially the coup d'état, as it were, that Outlook launched, perhaps intending the issue as both a great lament as well as a great manifesto of how journalism should not be done. Goswami's antics - his Newshour and Frankly Speaking have long been "dismissed" as TRP-hungry tabloidisation of opinion making and high table debates by the soberer television news channels, particularly NDTV - were considered unworthy of journalism and rubbished in no uncertain terms.

Sample this:

"Is this news? Is this an hour? Is this fair journalism? Is this information or is this entertainment? Is this visual cacophony the best Indian news television can offer in the name of reasoned debate? What is this doing to the civility of our public discourse? What is this murderous rage doing to my health - and, more importantly, to that of the nation's, of which Arnab proclaims himself as sole custodian each night, by wrapping every issue around the tricolour?"

The parallels with Billy O'Reilly, the all-American hero newscaster of Fox News, are hard to miss. Moreover, several commentators have already observed how Times Now has, in fact, modelled itself on Fox News, the US' one-stop bastion of everything ultra right, from warmongering neo-liberal capitalism to stark anti-immigrant racism, from espousing all-round surveillance of citizens to heavily rooting for the (white) American police state. However, while O'Reilly's alleged crimes include blowing up his involvement with a story (he had claimed on his show that he was in the Falklands reporting the Anglo-Argentine war - he wasn't), Goswami has been pronounced guilty of orchestrating McCarthy-style witch-hunt and public shaming of individuals with different views from his own on patriotism, nationalism, national security, Kashmir, the AFSPA and other highly volatile and debatable issues that are chart-toppers in newspeak.

Although, Goswami-style "lynching" of guests has been much frowned upon earlier, what really got fellow newspersons' goat was the "harangue-happy" anchor's latest antics that baffled even the most permissive and easy-going of the liberal lot. Goswami not only asked for a blanket ban on controversial BBC documentary on December 16 gang rape, India's Daughter, he also sought legal action against NDTV for the latter's intention to telecast the hour-long film during the 9pm prime time slot on March 8, Women's Day. In addition, Goswami dubbed Kavitha Krishnan and other women activists on his Newshour panel as "anti-nationals" for supporting the Greenpeace activist Priya Pillai's right to travel to London in order to depose before British Parliament and demonstrate how Essar, a British multinational, has been trampling the land rights of tribals in India. On both occasions, Goswami, forever wrapped in his cherished tricolour, said the actions would tarnish India's global image and prove detrimental to the sacred cause of national security.

Hence, Goswami's contrast from Mehta is not unlike O'Reilly's extreme difference from say Edward R Murrow, whose tireless questioning of Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy's claim that the US government had been infiltrated by the Soviet sympathisers and card-carrying communists during the height of Cold War helped put an official end to rounding up of political dissidents in the 1950s USA. So, while Mehta or Murrow, Prannoy Roy or Richard Dimbleby, occupy the left-of-centre of the media spectrum, Goswami and O'Reilly fall in the righter than the right category, well bypassing the conservative school of thought, having comfortably lodged themselves in the institute of barks and bigotry.

Yet, in a media ecosystem that is primarily conservative, isn't the singling out of Arnab Goswami a tad fallacious? Extrapolating Ramachandra Guha's recent contention that India's political right is without a robust ballast of a conservative intellectual tradition, and reading it in the context of Indian television media, it can be argued that ours is neither a liberal, nor a socialist world, since even the so-called liberal news outlets such as NDTV happen to be only socially liberal (for example: opposing caste system, honour killing, khap panchayats), but are not averse to adopting a rightist line in matters such as economics or national security (ambivalence, if not overt opposition, towards the MGNREGA, the AFSPA).

The overall conservative thrust of Indian broadcast media creates an atmosphere that is just ripe for a thriving culture of emotional paranoia: say on issues like religion, caste, women's safety and the crossover corpus of love jihad, inter-caste marriage, homosexuality. If Arnab Goswami becomes the first to Bollywoodise the existing conservatism of news media, turning Newshour into a gladiatorial battle between the hero news anchor and the assorted retinue of villains (the activist-Maoist, the Pakistani, the Kashmiri Muslim, the least articulate mouth on any issue that Goswami is opposed to, and this opposition is announced at the beginning of the debate), why should we imagine that picking on him is the solution to the current creative stalemate? And, if Goswami is spawning anchors who are furiously aping him in pitch and tone, diluting every complex story into a one-point agenda of tricoloured nationalism, then why should only he take the fall?

If the cultish craze for Goswami and the sky-scorching TRPs are anything to go by, then the present constitution of news media in India is the root of this banality. Goswami's prime time theatre of absurd is as much to be blamed for "wrecking news" as Shah Rukh Khan for "wrecking cinema", if Chennai Express and Happy New Year are the yardsticks. Yet, if Indian cinema is being eclipsed by Khan-trinity-dominated Bollywood and the Indian news media being compromised by Goswami's Newshour and Frankly Speaking, then the answer to this "wreckage" is more and varied newsmaking and not scapegoating the great polariser/s.

Obviously, this is not to say that Outlook's excellent analysis of Arnab Goswami isn't prescient or apt. It is more than so, being matchless in its bravery as well. Rarely, does a news company dare to take on the Goliath in Goswami. One may recall that Caravan magazine had carried a fascinating cover story on him, "Feel the Noise", in December 2012, which went on to become its first "media issue". Since then, Caravan has analysed the Reliance takeover of formerly Raghav Bahl-owned Network 18 as well as the profit and principles behind the phenomenon that's Shekhar Gupta. But given the fact that it was Goswami's untrammelled noise that pushed Caravan to turn the scanner on media and become self-reflexive is something that cannot be taken lightly.

If Tejpal describes Mehta as the finest editor of the transition period, then by that logic, Goswami can be dubbed the uncrowned king of post-liberalised, corporatised newsroom. Like Mehta, Goswami too does not delight in activities that other gifted and chillingly ambitious editors took to - politics, Bollywood, wheeling-dealing. In fact, Goswami's characteristically high decibel demeanour does not make him a "friendly editor", even though many an editor, including a formidable newsman of a prominent Hindi channel known for his proximity to the prime minister, has been hailed for his ability to "make friends" rather than make or break news. Thus, Goswami is both an obverse and logical climax of a self-aggrandising, corporatist media that offers news (and opinion) as sheer entertainment, a daily soap opera playing out at the highest and shrillest level.

A week later, Outlook has the slow death of Right To Information as its current cover story. Meanwhile, Goswami has frankly ranted against Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed for letting off "separatist" Masarat Alam. It seems that the intimations and intimidations of Arnab Goswami (including his comic sparring with the BJP ideologue Subramanian Swamy) is still very much the matrix, which a hyperventilating nation suffering from chronic anterograde amnesia gets its stunted nutrients from. But until we collaborate and mainstream the "progressive" alternatives, it's Happy News Year for all of us.

Frankly speaking, the TRPs are a calling.