Transcript

Is Investigative Journalism Dead? | Sucheta Dalal | TEDxJaiHindCollege

1992 the security scam that's what you heard in the intro and my subject is is investigative journalism dead isn't it an irony you know just look at the title The reason why I put that up on the slide is to say that 23 years later when you call a journalist who's written about something way back in 1992 you're really looking in the rearview mirror you're not looking forward so short ansers is investigative journalism dead yes it is the way it ought to be it is dead does it mean that it's the story is over then you know I can let you go and have lunch in the next 15 minutes instead of talking about it but it's not so simple so I'm going to talk about the last 23 years and when I talk I'm not talking about individual Brilliance lots of wonderful work that a lot of investigative journalists have continued doing some have put their lives on the line I'm not talking about those exceptions I'm talking about whether the system provides for an opportunity for investigative journalism to play a role in the media so that the media again plays a role in being the fourth pillar of democracy so we're looking at a larger picture so don't tell me that X did wonderful work or why did wonderful work there going to be many people who do that to understand the background I think you should look at the next slide which which is a movie called The brokering News okay this is a 1H hour documentary which I think for the first time in 2012 explore you know expose the sleazy underbelly of the media to the rest of the world those of us inside we know exactly how it works we know what the forces are that dictate what is fit to be published but people outside didn't know it so it was a shock to most people that talking about Entertainment News whe you know entertainment news is fair game these days it's you can anything as long as somebody's paying a price for it business news again no surprises everybody knows that there is a whole PR missionary that is going to orchestrate that what goes into the news and who's going to influence it okay so business news is no surprise political news was a bit of a surprise to most people especially the extent to which election coverage is manipulated and now of course it's no surprise to you but it was was in 2012 what is happening in sports sports is again dominated by two forces politicians as well as business and we this is a picture of the media today it is media is owned by either politicians or by corporate houses and what are spvs they special purpose Vehicles what do they why do they own media because they want it as a special purpose vehicle to push their agenda and in it is working most systematically need to go back to the Daria tapes 2010 was another big expose for people outside the media who don't understand what happens about the extent to which money par rules what gets published and printed okay so n Rya was a brilliant woman her PR firm vishnui had the two biggest corporate accounts in India the tatas and Reliance and the income tax department decided to start taping her conversations and those conversations are out there in the public domain thanks to Outlook Magazine and open so those of you go back four years or Google it's there for you to see and what it demonstrated is the phenomenal power muscle power that this woman yielded right from deciding who gets to be a minister what portfolios do they get how to influence acoss the board for a whole bunch of our clients and finally what of the information gets printed what is the spin what is the angle and how many editors were on her speed dial and how much she could influence them so I think today when we talk about all of you people who are outside the media you had a lot more knowledge about what is really going on inside and nobody asks questions about why don't we have enough and more investigative journalism does this mean investigation jism died not really I mean you ask me I things happening over the last 20 years lots of twists and turns and let me take you through a couple of them we thought what we thought was investigative journalism also slowly turned out not to be so investigative after all okay so let me come to the first factor that influences or actually kills investigative journalism is a paid news we know very well today that it is not about PR spinning it is about actually paying for everything that appears as news Americans always good at very coining new words they call it native advertising which really means that a news story that you read in the paper or you know a panel discussion that you see or you know something that's breaking news is probably just completely paid for by somebody including asking the questions on the debate deciding who are the panelists or along with a headline just printing it and it appears like a news story and people still don't know that this happens earlier when it started I think it started about 20 years ago it started very innocuously with CEOs of companies beginning to write columns and I remember those days media was quite thrilled instead of chasing CEOs here they were writing entire articles so you had their point of view after a while it was a PR agency which began to negotiate this as part of the deliverables for an ad campaign so I give you an ad campaign and my CEO is going to place an article it's called place going to place an article in your magazine you say no to that article and and you know there is no advertising campaign so incidentally I'm sure every one of you have seen today the papers are full of expert opinions from people on the inside so there's no more room for people like me to cultivate a certain beat develop expertise and have an independent view course media owners argue that journalists themselves began to get so embedded in corporate houses they said mix no difference either way now that's for you to decide but I don't think it's a healthy Trend the next thing that happened is what I call suari journalism I'm sure all of you have heard what what is a supari it's not the canate leave the you know Beetle nut that you eat it is an underworld term which means that you pay Contract Killers and this is exactly what was began to happen in the media and it passed off as investigative journalism so somebody was paying you know the piper and he called the tune so you would go after someone expose a corporate house an IND indidual a politician damage their reputation go on for days together and it was paid by somebody so when a contract was signed you had any amount of damage happened it could be sting operations we've always wondered how is it that some people's which required a year of hard work going and staying somewhere is fully funded it is because somebody is behind there funding it the next is what I call the toigo tomit journalism this is a bunch of of journalists who are so embedded with their media owners and now remember a lot of media owners are either corporate houses or politicians so the media owner will decide who has to be attacked so the minute he says Tommy go Tommy is barking shouting you know it's breaking news day and reputations are damaged there discussions going on day after day after day it can go on for weeks together one fine day just suddenly stops so it's like Tommy Sit end of story so you wonder what happened I mean what happened to that big expose did it go to court was there an fi filed nothing because somebody is calling the shots and for a long time even people like me who are in the field used to think that this is investigative journalism so I'm telling you what is not investigative journalism all this is not but it looks very much like investigative journalism and for a long time people believed it was right so now you go to the next what works I think when I say Cent turns one of the most wonderful things that has happened in the last 20 years is the work done by RTI activists there is the good and the bad over there but overall it allowed individuals really committed individuals to go out there you know investigate Hammer questions file appeals there are people who have filed 200 appeals there are Railway activists I know who have got information from inside the railways and used it to file public interest litigation but it has enriched the media because a lot of work which which was done from outside by people who had developed domain knowledge out of passion these people who were giving their entire work out to journalists to be published and I think it is wonderful this is what has sustained or created an illusion of great investigative journalism over the last 20 years and a lot of these people have put their lives on the line I mean you hear every other day about RTI activists being harassed and killed now the problem over here is that this is not investigative journalism as you know we would want it to be it has to be supported by the system it can't be about individuals who put their lives on the line because that is not what investigative journalism is about it is about activism that gets published in the media occasionally and gets called investigative journalism I know RTI activists who spend as much time chasing information as they do cultivating the media because ultimately they think once it appears in Main stream media that is when there's going to be action doesn't always happen I have activists who come to me saying we have tried all the major channels and newspapers nobody would publish it because the same forces that ensure that investigative journalism does not work they also ensure that certain activists and their work is kept away from the mainstream so where do we go next right if this doesn't work what is the solution and I would say I mean I I would say that there is a very romantic notion about you know any kind of investigative work which requires a serious grind getting facts sifting to them doing all this hard work because nobody is out there yet there's a romantic notion that put it out on social media so what if media doesn't carry it have a Blog and you can go about becoming a great investigative journalism on journalist on your own it does not work like that because the minute you are alone you're defenseless and you're out there open to all kinds of forces the same deadly big money corporate forces are out there working at you the simplest way to shut up a blogger is a defamation notice this morning I've come from the high court because somebody has slapped a 100 CR suit on on me and it's not the first okay in fact 100 cror has become the bare minimum for a legal notice these days and I know the boldest people who have been bloggers they just have to get 100 CR notice and the first thing they do is bring down their articles because most people know that everybody talks I may have 100 tweets supporting what I do but the minute you hear that there is a notice all the supporters vanish it is not easy so unless you have systemic support it's not going to work you know the tragedy is that it shouldn't have been like this like I said while the world has shrunk and technology has shrunk the beauty is that you could have actually had International investigative journalism happening and I must take a minute to talk about my experience you know 1992 was a great experience in the amount of writing that we did but even more exciting for me was something called DH Dal and dsq software this is a guy who was involved in the 2000 Ken parik scam his uh stocks were part of K10 manipulated like hell went up and once the investigation started he dumped everything sold his best most lucrative contracts ran away to the US went to New Jersey with a new name new house a brand new red Ferrari and started a new life with millions of hundreds of million dollars that he had collected from here and rooted through tax Havens none of this is news it's stuff that I wrote bit by bit and through each step of this journey I had somebody discovering my writing on Google so first it was somebody from Dubai who gave me information then it was someone from Singapore then it was someone from Europe who gave me incredible information on the contracts that he was selling off finally I get discovered by somebody called Christopher Byron huge journalist in the US who works for the New York Post who one day at around midnight I get this email saying do you know this guy denesh Dalia and I said I mean do I know I've written so much about him so I said why and he says I've been investigating this big company in the US which is being bought over by an Indian antecedent not known and I've come across the name Dalia so I Googled and I saw your articles then we began an amazing collaboration across the world so he used to investigate stuff and give it to me here I was checking stuff in India and sending it back to him he wrote any number of stories finally denesh dalmia had to created another scam in the US came running back to India and was arrested over here and he spent the next 5 years in jail now this is a possibility okay but it's not going to happen unless you have systemic support investigative journalism needs backing needs money I think one of the answers again people have is crowdfunding but I keep telling people crowdfunding needs mature crowds because if you're going to be on Twitter saying I'll send you 2,000 Rupees as long as you investigate X or Y because I have a grous against him you're no different from the large corporate houses that are dictating what happens to the media if you're mature enough to say that you will leave the decisions to an editor you will let them take forward what is going to work only then is crowdfunding going to work so where are we today I live with a lot of hope that the internet and crowdfunding is going to mature as more and more people realize that the news that has reigned to you for a two rupe newspaper is not what you want is probably misleading you is incorrect that is the time you're going to begin to understand that you will have to pay ultimately that's the bottom line you will have have to pay to get the correct news and that is when crowd funding can work and investigative journalism can be reborn probably in a different Avatar thank you very much