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Making a bridge of fire and shaming the devil
A.U.M. Fakhruddin
Great men think alike; in other words, great wits jump together. When it comes to speaking about journalism or views on the print media, this scribe finds a striking similarity between poet Rabindranath Tagore and some Western thinkers. In the words of eminent American columnist Walter Lippmann, there can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil, and remain detached from the great. He also said, "The theory of a free press is that the truth will emerge from reporting and free discussion, that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." But US president Nixon was bitter about the print medium; he said. "The press is the enemy." Today, in a Kafkaesque age of 'embedded' journalism not many are like that.
Like newsmen of diverse climes and cultures everywhere, this scribe too has immense regards for a sage statesman of the West. Of all the views of scholars and the wise on the press, the most outstanding tribute to the Fourth Estate and its paramount importance was offered by President Thomas Jefferson over two centuries ago, back in 1787. The cultivated savant affirmed: "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter [that is to say, newspapers without a government]."
Wild leap
While Tagore introspected on the print media's significance, poet Kazi Nazrul Islam practising editor and columnist in the letter and the spirit. Tagore wrote, "In the dawn of a new age/why waver, in subtle disputes/and miss your chance for starting/and employ your thoughts in a bottomless doubt?/ Like a desperate torrent fighting an obdurate mountain gorge/take a wild leap into your fate, dark and strange,/ win it for your own through a defiant courage/challenged by obstacles."
The preceding message of Rabindranath Tagore was given to The Statesman of Kolkata on 14 April 1937. (Its Bangla version was as follows: Notun juger protyushay kone probin buddhiman/Nityai shudhu shukhma bichar koray/Jaabar lagna cholar chinta nishehay koray daan/ Shangshaymoy tolhin gohbaray/Nirjhar jotha sangramay naamay durgam parbatay/Achenar maajhay jhaap diye por dushahosher pothay;/Bighnoi tor spardhita pran jagaye tuibay jay ray,/Joy koray tobay janiya toibi ajana adristeray.
Fiery editorials
Nazrul's role as a crusader, a courageous, uncompromising journalist was significant in that as Editor of the Langal the Dhumketu the Sevak and the Navayug he wrote fiery editorials and comments and called upon the people to rise against the alien British rulers who had subjugated the then India. As a man Nazrul was nobler than all his achievements, says Serajul Islam Choudhury, adding that he was generous, open-hearted and made friends without number. In the words of Buddhadev Bose, "To meet him has been to love him, for his was one of the most picturesque and attractive personalities in our recent history. He has been a living denial of everything that withers the heart. Where he was there was delight."
Nazrul was above all parochialism of creed, caste, clan or group. He burst on the literary scene of Calcutta like a comet - later on he brought out a political journal called Dhumketu, 'meaning a comet, with his first poem Vidrohi which was an instant, overwhelming success and its tremendous, forceful rhyme and rhythm were soon reverberated in every nook and corner of West and East Bengal. Many of the book by Nazrul, writes Shisir Kar in his well researched book, Nishiddha Nazrul, (Ananda under Sec. 153A I.P.C. to 1 year r.i. on Jan. 17, 1923.)
During this time in 1924, Police Commissioner of Calcutta, Sir Charles A Tegart, CIE, MVO, gave his report to the Chief Secretary, Government of Bengal, A. N. Moberley, suggesting proscription of Visher Vanshi. In the same manner Additional Secretary S. N. Roy advised on May 6, 1935 that Sanchita be proscribed. Again, Yuga Vani, Bhangar Gaan, and Chandrabindu were banned.
Fifth great power
Some time in the seventies Delhi-based newsman Aswini Sarin, hit the headlines when he bought a women from a clandestine market for Rs. 3000 or so and reported about it on the basis of first-hand experience. Further back, in the sixties Amitabh Chowdhury campaigned against P.S. Rao, ICS, who headed the Damodar Valley Corporation in the now-defunct Jugantar, Calcutta. In India similar crusades have been waged by the press at various times. There was campaign against the power that be in what is now Bangladesh during the Language Movement in 1952 by crusading dailies and periodicals such as the Azad, the Pakistan Observer, the Nao Belal, the Sainik and so on.
French Emperor Napoleon called newspapers "the fifth great power", Schopenhauer termed it the "second hand of world history", and Kipling-sometime on the now-defunct daily Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore-said: "King over all the children of Pride is the Press, the Press, the Press". The press records the immediate past, offers it through news items and write-ups in the present that will help compile history decades later. Thus every ideal journalist plays an important role in capturing the chronicle of current affairs "by virtue of intellectual weight and inner independence" that will constitute the body of annals in the days to come.
And how it happens can be seen at any news desk of a daily. There is a flood of news-news from North, East, West and South-hence the word NEWS-all of which can never be fitted into the paper. So sub-editors and the news editor choose the important and the interesting newsworthy ones. After that comes the question of display and presentation. Thus, it is an exacting job.
We notice the ironical remarks of a character in Utpal Dutt's stage-play Tiner Talwar. "O pretty housewives! Do you read newspapers and go through the stories about good and bad folks? The editor has caught red-handed the young wife look askance at a man. Now how can she escape from being reported about in the paper?" The Wall Street Journal too once said that a newspaper owed nothing to the public. But Samuel Johnson found a news-writer a man without virtue. This sweeping generalisation is unbecoming of a scholar of his stature. Newspapers may not often please certain quarters and hence they are under attack. But President Nixon was forced to resign partly because of the Washington Post's courageous newsmen, Bob
Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The Post was then headed by Catherine Graham.
WP and Watergate
Nineteen seventy-four; Public anger was rife at that time in the United States. The opulent Watergate on the Potomac river in downtown Washington became the target of a thousand anti-Nixon demonstrators who shouted "Pigs," "Fascists" and "Seig Hell" as they tried to storm the citadel of Republican, power in - 1974. Among those who had been knocked to the ground by police was Carl Bernstein, a young reporter of the Washington Post (WP). Bernstein and Bob Woodword, his colleague, unearthed the reason behind the burglary on June 17, 1972, at Watergate. Police had seized a walkie-talkie, 40 rolls of unexposed films, two 35 mm cameras, lock-picks, pen-sized tear-gas guns. and bugging devices that apparently were capable of picking up both telephone and room conversations. Out of the five arrested, four stated to be anti-communists, while the remaining one, W. McCord, Jr, confessed he was a CIA employee. The next days' WP front-paged the story which read, "There was no immediate explanation as to why the five suspects would want to bug the Democratic National Committee offices, or whether or not they were working for any other organ-nations."
Thus began the crusade despite secrecy and high-level pressure which was ignored by the WP executive editor Benjamin Bradley and publisher Katharine Graham. As Nixon appeared on the television at his desk with a bust of Abraham Lincoln, among other things, Mrs Graham said, "Oh, my God. This is too much.
The New York Times reported on the following day that White House press secretary Ronald Zieglcr had publicly apologised to the Washington Post and two of its reporters - Woodward " and Bernstein - for his earlier criticism of their reporting of the Watergate conspiracy. And finally US President Richard Nixon stepped down from presidency.
Newspaper Crusaders Eminent American writer and editor Silas Bent is of the opinion that as champions of reforms, as defenders of individuals, as protagonists their communities, they have exercised influences, quite as important as the transmission of information and the expression of opinion. More than once a newspaper, at the conclusion of a successful campaign, has preened itself or has paid tribute to a fellow; by and large our most articulate institution, sometimes almost as vainglorious as politics has been surprisingly reticent about one of its primary responsibilities.
Yet it has recognised crusading as a natural function and as a responsibility, and has discharged it for the most part admirably, some-times at severe sacrifice. That there has been default in certain areas none can deny, but the account balances heavily to the credit of the press and to the benefit of its public.
Contending zealously against evil
As he says, the history of American press since British colonial days is shot through with the struggle 'or unrestricted critical activity and the right to crusade. Every crusade implies, to be sure, the expression of pinion or of an attitude, it it involves more than that. It means also a willing-ness to fight if need be. It means, according to his dictionary, "to contend zealously against any evil, or on behalf of any reform."
"To contend zealously must mean surely to struggle with ardent devotion. The zeal which fires a crusading - editor may bring him to the boiling point of fanaticism, and has done it time and again. None who has under-taken a campaign in the certainty that it would entail loss of circulation and advertising, perhaps permanently, but was a fanatic, Just on the sunny side of lunacy. Sceptics who deny that campaigns are ever undertaken for other than sordid motives may disabuse their minds by examining the record".
Bent writes, "We may accept as a fair expression of its attitude the report adopted unanimously by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, at its 1938 session, declaring that the public lacked appreciation of "the true value and true functions of a free press."
What is this value, and what are the functions? He questions and continues, "Unfortunately all citizens do not think through the meaning of a free press [said the report]. Too many regard it merely as the profitable privilege of publishers, instead of the right of all the people and the chief . institution of representative government. A free press is that privilege of citizenship which makes governmental dictatorship impossible. When editors fight for the liberty to speak and write, they fight for the greatest of all human rights under government. He is not thoughtful who cannot see that democracy cannot exist except through the maintenance of a channel through which information can flow freely from the centre of government to all the people and through which praise and criticism can flow freely from the people to the centre."
Bent further says that there are millions, to the contrary, who echo (as our editors did, with an air of saying something not usually known) the Jeffersonian dicta that "our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost," or that "on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without beign lost," or that "no government ought to be without censors, and where the press is free, no one ever will be."
Keeping the flag of freedom aloft
Eminent American author Ernest Hemingway advises the aspirant writer thus: Write about what you know and write truly. Write about people you know that you love and hate, not about people you study about. This advice is applicable to newsmen as well. Reporters are writers of hard news', the bare facts of events, quoting sources or meeting important people often called newsmakers. As we are aware, the feature article has been called the news writer's masterpiece because a major news item by accentuating the human-interest element, and as such, it shares importance with the more newsworthy story or editorial comment. Articles of this genre play up the human-interest element. It centres around some emotion. In some respects, says Elmo Watson, the feature article is little more than the most human side of the news "played up" so as to "attract interest centre attention, and fascinate the emotional senses of the average reader. In order to do this, the feature usually centres around some single basic emotion or takes its point of departure from some item of current interest."
Epilogue: Let newsmen across the world keep the flag of press freedom aloft and continue fighting many an obdurate mountain gorge to build 'bridge of fire.'
The writer is Associate Editor of the Holiday.
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