Ubiquitous and clamorous media are transforming foreign policy into a subdivision of public entertainment. The intense competition for ratings produces an obsession with the crisis of the moment, generally presented as a morality play between good and evil having a specific outcome and rarely in terms of the long-range challenge of history. As soon as the flurry of excitement has subsided, the media move on to new sensations. At their peak, the Gulf and Kosovo crises or the Camp David summit were covered twenty-four hours a day by print and television media. Since then, except during occasional flare-ups, they have received very little day-to-day attention, even though the underlying trends continue, some of them becoming more unmanageable the longer they remain unresolved.
- Henry Kissinger Does America Need a Foreign Policy?; Simon & Schuster, page 27.
THE situation in India is no different. It is far worse. The Indian media have, moreover, very few specialists to draw on. Television has simply run amok. It is unaccountable because there is no audit of the media in the media itself. Sevanthi Ninan in The Hindu is a solitary exception. The media set the agenda, one of the most upright figures in our public life remarked to the author in New Delhi a fortnight ago.
Stanley Baldwins unforgettable words at a byelection rally on March 18, 1931, are apt: What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility the prerogative of the harlots through the ages. The celebrated last sentence was supplied by his cousin Rudyard Kipling.
Shekhar Gupta, editor-in-chief of the Indian Express, himself a regular participant in TV debates, wrote recently (April 3, 2010) on the publics contempt for dumbed-down news, while defending TV journalism. His fears that criticism might give the politicians a handle to attack our freedoms are wide off the mark. His testimony is relevant: Yet, why is this muck sticking? Why is it that whichever audience you may have spoken to in recent times, ranging from an auditorium at the National Defence College packed with the brightest officers of our three forces of the rank of Brigadier or equivalent, to an audience of predominantly tribal intellectuals and bureaucrats in Shillong Club in the distant Northeast, the question you face are all about the same, on the media dumbing down mostly on news TV. At least three standing committees of the two Houses of Parliament have produced reports damning the news channels for sensationalism and inaccurate reporting and demanding laws to regulate them. Several High Court judgments have already reflected a similar view. Are they all motivated or wrong? (Emphasis added, throughout.)
The speeches delivered by National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon and Chinas Ambassador Zhang Yan in New Delhi on April 1 should prod furious thinking on the role of the media in the conduct of foreign policy. They were speaking at a seminar on India and China: Public Diplomacy, Building Understanding.
Menons remarks bear quotation in extenso. After a survey of relations between India and China in the past 60 years, he said: You might ask what this has to do with public diplomacy by India and China, the topic of your seminar. Everything is my answer, for two principal reasons. One is the shrill and over-excitable commentary on the relationship that has appeared in both countries in the last year or so. The emergence of nativist voices, and the loud expression of opinion as fact in the news media which purports to express public opinion could introduce volatility in perceptions. We have all witnessed this phenomenon in India-China relations in the last year or so. When the world is changing so rapidly, and when uncertainty in the international system is at unprecedented levels, neither India nor China can afford misperceptions or distortions of policy caused by a lack of understanding of each others compulsions and policy processes.
That is a task which the media, print and electronic, are loath to perform. TV, in particular, prefers sensationalism. Ambassador Zhang Yan spoke in the same vein. He pleaded politely for an end to the war of words. Both countries must properly handle public opinion. This was not a plea for news management but for better information on the situation on the border.
Navdeep Suri, Joint Secretary (Public Diplomacy) in the Ministry of External Affairs, dwelt on the Foreign Officers outreach programme to the countrys youth to inculcate the basics of foreign policy in the young generation, which was prone to nationalist chest thumping (The Hindu, April 2).
These remarks should be read in the context of the frenzy in the print media and hysteria in its electronic partner not long ago. All of September and October 2009, the media reported Chinese incursions across the frontiers. Chinese media did not lag behind in this game either. There were doubtless other genuine causes for disquiet, the stapled visas for Kashmiris being one of them. Article 9 of the Agreement on confidence-building measures (CBMs) in the military field along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), which India and China signed in New Delhi on November 29, 1996, provided in diplomatic language precisely for such situations, enjoining both sides to be discreet. In case a doubtful situation develops in the border region, or in case one of the sides has some questions or doubts regarding the manner in which the other side is observing this Agreement, either side has the right to seek a clarification from the other. It did not stop there but went on to add: The clarifications sought and replies to them shall be conveyed through diplomatic channels. This was not a statement of the obvious. It was a tacit injunction not to go public and deploy what Kennan called megaphone diplomacy in which the media is an ever ready partner. Only months later, in Copenhagen, India and China worked together. External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna received a warm welcome in Beijing on April 8.
It is not a new problem, though TV has aggravated it. Since 1700, British public opinion and the press played an important role in influencing foreign policy. The Opposition placed alternatives in Parliament and on public platforms. But the mainstream media batted on the same side as the government, urging, if anything a stronger line; seldom, conciliation.
In his classic The English Constitution (1867), Walter Bagehot noted: The newspapers only repeat the side their purchasers like: the favourable arguments are set out, elaborated, illustrated, the adverse arguments are maimed, misstated, confused. In newly independent countries, patriotic fervour holds the media in its grip. Dissent is equated with treason.
European diplomacy between the Congress of Vienna (1915) and the Congress of Versailles (1919) holds many a lesson for our times. So do debates in the British Parliament and press. One such debate is of striking relevance today. It is set out in full in pages 74-79 of Wickham Steeds classic The Press (a 1938 Penguin that deserves a reprint). He reproduced two editorials which Robert Lowe (later Lord Sherbrooke) wrote for The Times under John Thadeus Delanes editorship on February 6 and 7, 1852 (see box for the texts).
In December 1851, Louis Napoleon, President of the French Republic, carried out a coup detat which made him emperor. Lord Palmerston, Foreign Secretary, expressed his approval of the accomplished fact without consulting his colleagues or informing the Queen. The Times thundered against him, and Louis Napoleon was so annoyed by the language of The Times that British Ministers who thought it desirable to stand well with him had to try to stop its mouth. Palmerstons high-handed acceptance of the French coup detat brought about his dismissal.
Lord Derby, who succeeded Lord John Russel as Prime Minister, took the occasion (in a debate on the Address in reply to a Speech from the Throne) to lecture The Times for its outspoken language and to claim that as in these days the English Press aspires to share the influence of statesmen, so also must it share in the responsibilities of statesmen.
As an independent journalist, Delane felt that he could not let this doctrine pass unchallenged. He instructed Robert Lowe to refute it and to expound the principles that govern the freedom of the press and the duty of journalists in a free community. Lowe did this with insight and vigour. Taking up Lord Derbys proposition, Delane wrote in The Times of February 6, 1852: The purpose and duties of the two powers are constantly separate, generally independent, sometimes diametrically opposite. The dignity and the freedom of the Press are trammelled from the moment it accepts an ancillary position. To perform its duties with entire independence, and consequently with the utmost public advantage, the Press can enter into no close or binding alliances with the statement of the day, nor can it surrender its permanent interests to the convenience of the ephemeral power of any Government.
Having enunciated these principles in one leading article, The Times went on, the next day, to work them out and to apply them to the situation Louis Napoleon had created in France.
On February 7, 1852, it wrote: Government must treat other Governments with external respect, however black their origin or foul their deeds; but happily the Press is under no such trammels, and, while diplomatists are exchanging courtesies, can unmark the mean heart that beats beneath a star, or point out the bloodstains on the hand which grasps a sceptre. The duty of the journalist is the same as that of the historian to seek out truth, above all things, and to present to his readers not such things as statecraft would wish them to know but the truth as near as he can attain it.
There were those like Metternich who detested public opinion. He called Canning, who respected that force, a malevolent meteor hurled by divine providence upon Europe.
The issue of the role of the media is in essence part of the wider issue of democracy itself. In an exact sense the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis of journalism, Walter Lippman wrote in Liberty and the News (1920).
Sidney Blumenthals comments on Lippmans fears are even harsher. The standards of objective journalism Lippmann painstakingly advocated in the early twentieth century, and which were adopted as ideal goals by major news organisations in mid-century having long since been traduced, trampled, and trashed there has been a steady degeneration of the press over the past few decades, involving both the wilful self-destruction of hard-won credibility and the rationalisation of dull incomprehension as invulnerable self-importance.
When, in 2004, the Sinclair Broadcast Group waged a smear campaign against John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, the Groups president and chief executive, David Smith, said: The media is politics, the media elects politicians and then eats them for lunch (U.S.: Here isnt the news by Eric Klinenberg; Le Monde Diplomatique; October 2005).
On the Iraq war and the press, Blumenthal remarks, The behaviours of the press corps under Bush revealed a corruption more in line with Lippmanns analysis than Sinclairs, although Sinclairs stress on the primacy of vulgar economics had its play, too. Indeed, Bush administration officials, including Vice-President Dick Cheney, complained to the chief executive officers of major media corporations about reports and reporters, and the pressure fell down the claim of command like an anvil. For crass reasons, jingoism became a criterion for presentation of news.
Advocates of foreign ownership of Indias media should think again. The fourth estate is as much a player in the political process as the other three and you can no more allow foreigners to own or run it than you can allow them in the Cabinet, Parliament or in the courts.
However, while the press can seldom shape foreign policy, it can do a lot to obstruct and deter. British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd remarked: Like it or not, television images are what force foreign policymakers to give one of the current 25 crises in the world greater priority; in short, set the agenda and also determine the pace. Delane would have chuckled at this. The media now does assert partnership rights with the state. Those in its favour become embedded in a cosy relationship; some others vie for it. There is, to the credit of Indias democracy and its media, print and electronic, a small band of those who are committed to values and scorn official favours. But there are also those who wish to participate in the negotiations and even try to wreck them. Witness the Agra Summit tapes. The media have no right to know how negotiations are proceeding.
Eric Louws The Media and Political Process (Sage, 2005) lists the opportunities available to the media: Disrupt the agendas policymakers wish to pursue by raising issues that undermine policy planning; intimidate policymakers; trivialise some issues and hype up/exaggerate others (i.e., direct attention one way or another). The state reacts by employing PR men to influence the media and, indeed, by co-opting the pliable ones. Some of them play on both sides.
But the state also uses media as the whipping boy when its policies failed. Kissinger never ceases to blame the media for his debacle in Vietnam. The classic instance is Jawaharlal Nehrus use of the media on Kashmir and the boundary dispute for political mobilisation at home only thereafter to plead that he could make no concessions given the state of public opinion. Diplomatic exchanges are published in White Papers or Blue Books only after closure. The annals of diplomacy provide no precedent for his instant publication of notes and memoranda exchanged with China on the boundary dispute. That included a statement on May 16, 1959, by Ambassador Pan Tsuli, obviously drafted by Mao Zedong himself. Nehru misunderstood its significance and delivered a headmasterly reprimand, which he published in the very first White Paper to Chinas dismay. Had our genius on foreign affairs grasped its significance, Sino-Pak entente would not have been formed. Australias High Commissioner in India, Walter Crocker, posed questions few Indians care to ask: Why did Nehru publish the White Books [sic]? They were bound to unleash nationalist passion in India, probably to a degree which could deprive him of any leeway for negotiating. Pique? Nationalist passion in himself? Or calculations for instance to exert pressure on China as well as to anticipate criticism of his border policy in India? (Nehru; George Allen & Unwin, 1966; page 105.)
It was the same story on Kashmir and on India-Pakistan relations, generally. Nehru made a big fuss of not signing in 1951 the U.S.-sponsored peace treaty with Japan, an achievement for which his drummer boys in the media and retired diplomats praise him still. A decade later Khrushchev told him that the Soviet Union had made a mistake in not signing it.
In India the standard of learning in and writings on foreign affairs is none too high. What Louw wrote of others in the trade apply a fortiori to the ones here. Most journalists are ill-equipped to read foreign contexts and so can be easily led by both overseas spin-doctors and domestic foreign policy bureaucrats and experts. Domestic agendas take precedence over foreign agendas. Hence overseas contexts generally tend to be reported in ways that misread foreign events through domestic concerns; journalists generally do not wish to see their own countrys foreign policy fail. Especially in times of crisis, they are inclined to embrace their governments definition of events.
Talk shows on Indian TV resemble gladiatorial contests with binary, argumentative debates. Contrast them with say Dateline London on BBC, which Gavin Essler hosts every week. London-based correspondents discuss and debate with conspicuous civility and competence. Our divided polity makes the anchor an arbiter. Characteristically, all Bharatiya Janata Party spokesmen are loud, shrill and aggressive. So are a good many TV anchors. One of them shouted at Pakistans Foreign Minister Shah Muhammad Qureshi on 26/11. Qureshi being a well-bred gentleman did not shout back. Instead, he asked the anchor not to lose his cool.
William Pfaff, one of the most cerebral columnists, noted the deep schism in Americas polity and its effect on debates. This has not been particularly healthy for journalism or for government. It is partly responsible for the fact that policy now is made chiefly in terms of its reception by television and the press. Ideological confrontation and killer journalism both are essentially sterile, caricaturing reality. The only useful debates are those that start out with a clear agreement on what the argument is about, and in which the Opponents arguments and persons are paid respect (International Herald Tribune; January 20, 1994). Which is why Bill Clinton holds that there is a special role for the old-fashioned newspaper in daily life.
The specialist of old, the diplomatic correspondent of the calibre of Wickham Steed, Nicholas Carroll, Henry Brandon and James Reston, is an endangered species even in the print media. In TV, one can count the accomplished on the fingers of one hand leaving three of them unused.
Nothing exposes the superficiality of Indian media and politics on foreign policy more than their flawed outlook on negotiations. It is treated as an exercise in improper intimacy and any resulting compromise as illegitimate. It is a specialised subject (vide How Nations Negotiate by Fred Charles Ikle, 1964). The latest work, Bargaining with the Devil by Prof. Robert Mnookin of Harvard (Simon & Schuster; 320 pages, $27), is based on case studies and has a fund of wisdom.
The record shows that the Taliban was prepared to negotiate after 9/11 but Bush spurned the offers (page 273). The author lists six tests what were the interests and stakes? What were the alternatives to negotiation? Were there likely potential negotiated outcomes that would meet the interests of both sides? Was there a reasonable prospect that such an agreement would be carried out? What were the costs of choosing to negotiate? Finally, was the alternative use of military force legitimate and morally justifiable? Even at the height of the Cold War, Churchill was all for negotiating with Stalin. Charles de Gaulle scornfully rejected the advice to talk to Arab yes-men in Algeria (Beni Oui, Oui), saying: You talk to those who shoot at your soldiers. You do not talk to those who do not have blood on their hands; for they are irrelevant.
Such sophistication is absent in media comment. Abba Eban, whose skills in diplomacy were matched by his felicitous prose, noted that one reason for the success of the media lies in their capacity to fix the agenda of public preoccupation. The conduct of diplomacy is treated as a crusade, with inevitable disappointment in the result. The Almighty cannot be on both sides at the same time, after all. Compromise, ever inescapable, is dubbed a sell-out and the diplomat a traitor (Diplomacy for the Next Century; Yale University Press, page 88). No statesman should make himself a slave to the media. He should appeal to the good sense of the people as Adlai Stevenson did. Abba Eban tellingly remarked, A statesman who keeps his ear permanently glued to the ground will have neither elegance of posture nor flexibility of movement.
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