Trump's ‘You have a friendly press’ compliment to Modi is menacing

The saddest lines are often the most ironical. President of the United States, Donald J Trump, quipping to Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the White House that the latter has a “friendly press”, is really one of those jarring, ringing with irony and dressed as a compliment lines that are a mirror to what the press is doing, or not doing well enough.

Trump’s relationship with the American media has been the subject of obsessive social media conversations, with several inches of column space dedicated to the issue daily in various newspapers and websites all over the world. He’s a 3 am tweeter, who screams FAKE NEWS at the slightest instance. He recently tweeted an unintelligible line “Despite all the negative press covfefe” and left it hanging there for a whole night before it was deleted. Many in the media wondered if the man who can’t even tweet well, should be in charge of nuclear codes. But then, those apprehensions were published everywhere.

Trump’s tryst with possible Russian collusion in the November 2016 elections, his firing of former FBI director James Comey who was looking into those very allegations and leading an investigation into the same, his executive order banning citizens from Muslim majority countries (those in fact the US has been bombing and those who don’t buy arms from the US directly), his assault against Obamacare, or the affordable healthcare act, his parochial protectionism for the United States after it has reaped the benefits of globalisation to the hilt and should now compensate by accepting the job shifts, his rampant Islamophobia and anti-refugee stance while selling arms and ammunitions with gay abandon to the world’s most dreaded terrorism sponsors in the Middle East – all these have been constantly documented and contested by the American establishment media.

Senior journalist Rajdeep Sardesai praises the American press profusely when he says that the US media has found its mojo, rediscovered its spine and is putting up a gallant fight against the forces of conservatism bogging the country down. He, however, is less effusive about the state of Indian media, despite the assault on free press from both the governments.

At a recent cultural function, Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan asked the press to “avoid unpleasant truth” in national interest. Earlier this month, the CBI wrote to the editorial board of the New York Times condemning their editorial titled “India’s Battered Press” or the raids against NDTV promoters.

BJP members of Parliament have called the media “presstitutes” in an affront to both freedom of journalistic expression and voluntary sex work as a profession. We are having to deal with the advice that the press should behave like “Narad muni”, the panegyricist of the Hindu heaven, whose only job is to sing customised praises of every god in the pantheon.

The parallels in the manner both the Indian and American media are hounded for doing their job are too strong, but the impression that large sections of Indian media, particularly the TV media, have been effectively managed, is no longer a secret. It was evident in the editorials put out by the British magazine The Economist, which said that “India’s raucous democracy is becoming subdued”, and the assault on the still adversarial press is going on unabated.

That the Indian media is bitterly divided, busy with factious infighting and more worried about TRP ratings and hits and numbers instead of coming together and resisting the governmental onslaught as it causes one economic mayhem after another, while allowing its loosely dispersed political affiliates to facilitate ideologically driven sectarian tensions, is a sad reality of our times.

Last week, one of the English news channels that never stops claiming that it hits the TRP jackpot every week, was exposed by Altnews and other fact-checking websites, broadcasting a patently fake news, that too a seven-year-old internet hoax, with the hashtag #CaliphateConvertsHindus.

This is unacceptable, but it’s also a telling commentary on the splintered state of the Indian media. In 2017, India has slipped to rank 136 in the World Press Freedom index, three below from last year, and this, despite our claims to a free and fair press representing a boisterous democracy.

While the American media is doing a great job complementing each other, supporting and propping each other up, and coming together as a press fraternity, our “solidarity meets” are becoming echo chambers where we preach to the converted. Where’s the greater solidarity across the board? Why are large sections of the Indian media falling in line and crawling once again, at a time when it ought to be at its most fearless and interrogatory?

When Donald Trump, whose pathological hatred and narcissistic co-dependence on the American media, compliments Narendra Modi on the latter having a “friendly press”, it’s a moment of shame for the entire journalistic fraternity. We need to double up our efforts at questioning the regime, fact-check everything and expose all its rubbish claims in order to gain international credibility once again.