Neither an adversary nor an advocate

The op-ed by A.S. Pannerselvan was published in the Hindu on September 12, 2015. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

Earnest literary explorations have the power to provide answers to many questions in real life. Litterateurs have a way of articulating nuances, studied considerations, principled stands, and dilemmas and ambiguities in a language that does not reduce these qualities to a mere slogan or a statement of political correctness but as a way of life. I never thought that I would go back to a 30 -year-old interview with a writer to explain my own role as the Readers’ Editor of this newspaper.

In 1985, I spent five days in the temple town of Chidambaram talking to one of the finest short story writers in Tamil, Mowni, a couple of months before his death. He spoke about various aspects of life in general, and of the challenges confronting a writer in particular. One of the themes he explored was the idea of solitude and the infinite creative space it provides to an artist. He, however, felt that many of his readers saw his description of that state of being as loneliness and not solitude. It would be serendipity for a writer, he observed, when a reader instinctively reads the text as the writer had imagined.

Last week was a moment where I felt simultaneously vindicated and vilified. Many media scholars, editors and public intellectuals called and endorsed the idea behind the column, “Exercising editorial prerogatives” (Sept. 5, 2015). And some disagreed, posted comments or took to social media. The argument of those who disagreed with my column had a singular imaginary theme: my role as an independent ombudsman has been circumscribed by an editorial diktat.

One of the commenters on Twitter, Pranesh Prakash, who works on issues such as privacy and Internet governance, wrote: “The Reader’s Editor is supposed to be an independent ombudsman. Sadly, The Hindu’s RE does not fulfil that role.” His contention, explained in later tweets, was that the role of a Readers’ Editor was not that of a journalism professor and by not explicitly stating whether I agreed with the Editor’s decision or not, I had abandoned the ombudsman role. If my sentence in the column, “At a fundamental level, the act of rejection is an affirmative action to reduce destruction and impairment of democratic institutions”, is not explicit, I wonder what else would be.

At one level, it was flattering to know that the critics of this newspaper are concerned about the independence of the office of the Readers’ Editor. How I wish they exhibited the same enthusiasm in persuading other Indian media houses to have a similar mechanism that responds to readers’ queries. At another level, this incident is a reminder to explain how this office works, what its remit is, and how its autonomy is guaranteed and insulated from the pressures of a deadline-driven journalistic process.

While the confusion was between loneliness and solitude in the case of Mowni, it was between independence and shared values in my case. An independent news ombudsman, whose autonomy is guaranteed by the company that owns the newspaper, has a clear mandate. He is neither an adversary nor an advocate. He is not expected to endorse any charges without examining them using the yardsticks of best journalistic practices. He is expected to speak the truth, however inconvenient it may be, to both the complainant and the newspaper. In this process, the idea of shared values also plays a role in determining the validity of any news item that the newspaper chooses to publish, or as in this case, reject.

Idea of common good

What are these shared values? Who are the stakeholders in this cognitive universe of shared values? It is the idea of common good that brings an editor, a team of journalists, an ombudsman and the readers to the pages of a newspaper. The recognition that there are crucial differences between information, views and news, and the need to use the public interest barometer to filter out a set of articulations that may cause irreparable damage to our social and political fabric, are an essential part of these shared values. The fundamental expectation is whether a newspaper remains a responsible carrier of knowledge that has an enabling power, or becomes a peddler of rhetoric, absolving itself of its social obligation.

The Editor’s decision and my column, indeed, are part of the shared value system. It was a point of convergence in the thinking of the Editor and the assessment of the Readers’ Editor. The idea to share this with the readers flowed from my own obligation to foster media literacy. Carlos Maciá Barber, vice-chair of the journalism and media studies department at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, in his essay, “How news ombudsmen help create ethical and responsible news organisations”, for the anthology The Ethics of Journalism, brought out by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, has eight edicts for effective ombudsmanship. Fostering media literacy is one of them. He wrote: “Encouraging mutual understanding between the media and the general public is a primary task of the ombudsman, and an invaluable contribution is made when ombudsmen describe the work they carry out.”

The idea of a shared value system has civilisational bearings and to conflate it with the independence of a self-regulation mechanism may render us hopelessly cynical.