Pedagogy for Press Freedom

Freedom of the press has not been in such dire straits since India’s independence, except for the brief stark eclipse of the Emergency of 1975. A combination of factors has converged to set in motion a motivated and accelerating dismantling of the fourth estate from the outside on the one hand, and its gradual deconstruction from within, on the other. 

Since best practice in the news media is best set by its practitioners, and since in the changed media ecology, now the practitioners include the owners who have skin in the game and the consumers who are themselves producing (social) media while consuming it (hence the moniker, ‘prosumer’), a transformative pedagogical intervention in the circumstance demands: (a) recognition and appreciation of the sea change that has taken place in the media and is proceeding apace at a frenetic pace even as we take stock, and (b) based on such a concrete analysis, arriving at concrete measures to galvanise a social movement, no less, to harness the freewheeling forces unleashed and running amuck in the domain so as to redeem order from dystopia.

Here’s what this means:

(a) (i) The shift from the post industrial revolution era to that of the information and communication technology revolution since the mid 20th century – a revolution raging in our midst here and now – has at its core been a paradigm shift from the analogue to the digital, the implications of which are hitting us with full force, yet continue to go largely unrecognised.

(ii) The transition from analogue to digital is manifestly – but not only, nor most importantly – one of technology. It is at once also a drastic cognitive reordering and an upending of sensibility. This is the human and social dimension, as against the technological, of digital ‘disruption’. 

The shift has meant privileging breadth over height and depth, the coming into vogue of what is called ‘flatism’. It is one from linearity to non-linearity, where simultaneity and impressionism take over from sequence and logic – standing the Cartesian perspective “I think, therefore I am” on its head and replacing it with the poet Rimbaut’s insouciant “It thinks me” counter. The shift is into a pixelated world of sense perception where bits and bytes dominate, where speed and the accelerating rate of technological obsolescence are the given. 

(iii) The ripples of social media lapping against the news media landscape in the last few years of the 20th century turn into gigantic currents that virtually engulfed it in the first decade of the 21st, heralding a digitally-mediated public sphere where media representation by, of and for the people has rapidly become the lived reality – or lived illusion to the sceptics – of democratic representation. What is represented has become the real, so to speak. This is media lived, as never before, going beyond the McLuhan maxim: “the medium is the message”. 

(iv) This vibrant living, breathing, engaged digital media public sphere, which evokes playwright Arthur Miller’s quintessential description of a good newspaper as “a nation talking to itself”, was already functionally making the formal mainstream media marginal to the informal social media. Moreover, the discrete forms of the  mainstream media – Print, Television, Radio, Online – converged into a digital integrated multimedia graspable in the palm of one’s hand – via the smartphone – to be at once read, seen, heard and immersively felt.  

(v) True, in the process, it became a riot of the good, the bad, the indifferent; misinformation, disinformation and a whole lot of fakes. True, this media terrain is a minefield of filter bubbles and echo chambers where groups congregate and interact to confirm, reinforce and virally propagate their biases and intolerance. True, the digital capitalists, the tech billionaire Leviathans who straddle this global realm harvest identities and monetise them with algorithms programmed not only to meet consumer demand but also to shape and direct consumer appetite towards particular kinds of demand. 

There is nothing subtle or subliminal about this marketing pitch. And true too, that the intolerant, rightist Indian State can pounce on any, or all, of the infirmities of this digital social media to censor and snuff out critical voices of individuals or independent media which also operate, against heavy odds, in this newfound space of free expression.

All of this raises the urgent need to build a concerted social awareness of the  symptoms of the malaise of contemporary media – an awareness that leads to action that is not tantamount to throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but builds guardrails and filters that protect and nourish the critical adversarial right and role of professional and citizen journalists. One akin to the kind of concerted mass mission needed to build an urgent agenda of public action to mitigate the hazardous consequences of human-perpetrated climate change.  

(b) (i) J-schools and professional mass-com institutions which pay as much attention to the reflective ‘why’ of journalism as to the hands-on ‘how to’ of it, and have additionally a research bent of mind, would be well-placed to become crucibles of brainstorming to develop toolkits and curricular frameworks for application in both academic and extra academic, social, contexts. A good starting point would be to reflect with T.S. Eliot, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” and to update it to our current context by continuing to ask, “Where is the information we have lost in misinformation and disinformation?”. Then we can proceed from there to identify what we seek to protect as valuable and enabling for the public and what to filter out of public discourse. 

(ii)This is, of course, easier said than done, because there cannot be a set of prescriptions and proscriptions which would take the form of a code of censorship. An indicative desirable approach would be to share the recognition of, spread awareness and mobilise discussion on the nature of the changed media that has become an organic part of our lives and daily socialisation. 

Clearly understanding different aspects of the problem and their magnitude will itself be enlightening and help lead to a search, in a mission mode, for answers, solutions, mitigants, demanded by each. At the same time, strong resistance to omnibus heavy-handed regulatory measures continually resorted to by the government, in the name of cleansing the social media but aimed really at wiping out this digital bastion of critical defiance against the excesses committed by the State, must accompany this exercise. It would in short be an active campaign of self-regulation by “we, the media” alongside firm opposition to any attempt by the state to curtail media freedom.

(iii)  Such a dual approach will add credibility to the mission, particularly because it will be a democratic departure from the long habit of the formal mainstream media to collectively behave as if they are a club thick as thieves. Egregious professional and ethical lapses, laying itself supine before the State and becoming complicit in excesses by the Executive by overlooking or justifying them (well recognised now in India as the stock in trade of what is known as the ‘godi media’) and similar unseemly acts by one media outlet are not called out by another because of a false sense of professional solidarity. When the media, which is expected to seek and convey the truth of a given situation to its consumers, looks the other way as its ilk pedals untruth, or itself becomes non-transparent and less than truthful, there is a fiduciary betrayal involved. As the poet Yevtushenko put it, when, knowingly, “truth is replaced by silence, that silence is a lie”. In the process, such media, moreover, forfeits its right to claim to represent the truthful state of a situation to its constituency. The media needs to be pressured, by an awareness campaign, into developing a pang of conscience in this regard. 

(iv) Media pedagogy is really a larger social cause. It should not – and from our experience, cannot – wait until a new generation has come of age to practice and/or consume media. The anatomy, technology, nature, role, effect and implications of the new media in a democracy need to be imparted to the youth even at the high school level, particularly because even as they step into the Gen Z threshold, they are already digital natives; the mobile/smartphone almost a prosthetic extension of their arms. Such an early orientation will make for a more discerning attitude to the media. 

Media today is too imbricated in social mores for its education to be left only to academia, J-schools or mass-com institutes. In that wider sense, what is required is a more sweeping pedagogical intervention at scale: sweeping, too, in terms of being transformative, a la Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.         

Sashi Kumar is a veteran journalist and the founder of the Asian College of Journalism. 

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