Biting the hand that feeds

Last week I had written about the gradual dwindling of journalistic credibility in media today. The idea was to point out how concepts such as “paid news” in which newspapers and magazines in the print domain and television and online portals in the electronic and digital media domain present reports sponsored by vested interests in a quid pro quo type of arrangement has become commonplace. Barring a few genuinely upright exceptions, the trend has, arguably, infiltrated even some extremely well-respected organizations.  

Expectedly, I received a number of reactions from readers, friends and family which ranged from appreciation….mostly from old timers who associate journalism with unequivocal non-conformism….to exclamations of outright incredulity from those who, for the life of them, cannot comprehend how houses that run media can afford to rub those who provide the dough for sustenance, the wrong way. The gist of their argument: Isn’t it tantamount to biting the hand that feeds you? Or, is it not legitimate for them to expect from you their pound of flesh? After all, they argue that, there is nothing such as a free lunch. 

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Point taken. Which is why there is an ongoing debate about the issue….globally. Well-respected media houses around the world often publish pleas seeking support from readers and subscribers for donations and contributions in order to sustain themselves and the credibility of their journalism. “Crowd funding” as it is called is often resorted to by these media houses. 

However, there is also that rare breed of editors who dares to rub the providers of dough….the money that sustains them…. the wrong way, even if that means biting the hand that feeds them. And one such editor was my former boss Vinod Mehta who founded the newsmagazine Outlook, for which I worked as reporter for eleven years. In an uncanny coincidence, the date of my writing this week’s Desktop Doodles, to be published on 1 June, happens to have fallen on May 31, the day Mehta was born eight and a half decades ago. To be exact, he would have been 84 had he not died, prematurely of illness, in 2015, at age 74. A decade has passed but one has not forgotten the fearless, daring brand of journalism he not only practiced himself but always encouraged and supported. There is a tacit rule in media that one does not mention or name other media but then who imposed that Omerta anyway? I have always worked in the places where breaking that kind of a code of silence was an integral part of the freedom of journalism. 

So, yes, while there may not be something called a “free lunch”, whether you have the courage or gumption really to bite the hand that feeds you, especially in the event that that hand is up to no good (be it highhandedness, underhandedness or anything in between) is for you to decide. 

The writer is Editor, Features