From Vantara to forest reserves, photo ops trump journalism

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on March 13, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/03/13/from-vantara-to-forest-reserves-photo-ops-trump-journalism

Compared to the Trump Tsunami that has the US president literally flooding the media with new and almost always controversial statements every day, our leaders and their politics appear almost dull. 

Even as he announced drastic job cuts in his country and the stock market went into a deep dive, Donald Trump found the time to promote his close friend and confidante Elon Musk’s electric car, Tesla, on the lawns of the White House. The concept of conflict of interest clearly does not exist in the era of Trump that we have now entered. There may be a few parallels in India.

Meanwhile, in India, the stock markets have been volatile. And there are other raging controversies, such as on the language issue and delimitation. But our prime minister seemed unperturbed as he spent a day endorsing the efforts of Anant Ambani, son of Mukesh Ambani, in setting up an animal rescue facility and what some may call a private zoo – Vantara in Jamnagar. 

Modi posed, stroking a lion who was safely ensconced in a glass cage. He was also photographed feeding tiger cubs. And all this promotional material was amplified without a question by mainstream media. There were no queries about the facility, how many animals it had, from where these animals had been brought, at what price, and whether the environment in which they were caged was suitable for them.

One newspaper did raise some questions shortly after Modi’s visit to Vantara. The Telegraph ran a story quoting a report by the Wildlife Protection Forum of South Africa (WAPFSA) which raised some uncomfortable questions about Vantara. Strangely, that story has now been taken down. And the PDF of that report as well as the statement by WAPFSA has also disappeared from its website.

But before that happened, it was mentioned in reports in Down to Earth and in Scroll, amongst other independent portals. 

The PDF of the WAPFSA report, which this columnist accessed before it disappeared, pointed out that Vantara had purchased wild animals from South Africa, some of which were endangered.  

It stated: “According to published articles, between 2019 and present day, the Radhe Krishna Temple Elephant Welfare Trust and the GZRRC have amassed what is described as an extraordinary assemblage of wildlife, including multiple endangered species. GZRRC started, according to the exact terminology of a published article, with an opening ‘stock’ of 1873 animals and during one year 2022 – 2023 acquired a further 1946 animals.” 

GZRCC stands for Greens Zoological Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre, an affiliate of Vantara.

The Down to Earth story also mentions the animals in captivity at Vantara and quotes WAPFSA: “Most wildlife experts agree that placing animals in any captive environment is itself a form of mistreatment. A life in captivity in a zoo, no matter how advanced the zoo facilities may be, can never equal a life lived in natural surroundings. Captivity enforces conditions upon wild animals in which they are not adapted to thrive.” 

Earlier in the year, Deccan Herald carried a story reporting that activists in Assam were worried about the way 21 captive elephants had been transported from Arunachal Pradesh to Jamnagar for the Vantara facility.

But these are exceptions. No questions asked or raised, no effort to get the back story. That now is the dominant norm in most of mainstream media when it comes to anything endorsed by the prime minister or the government.

For instance, after Vantara, Modi visited the 58th tiger reserve in Madhya Pradesh. An obvious question that any self-respecting media organisation should have asked is: how are the other 57 doing?

Tiger sanctuaries were enthusiastically promoted in the 1970s when Indira Gandhi was the prime minister. Project Tiger was hardly ever questioned except by a few journalists and activists. Anil Agarwal, the pioneering environmental journalist who set up the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), wrote this in “The State of India’s Environment 1982: A Citizens’ Report” about Project Tiger: “Project Tiger is a spectacular landmark in our efforts at wildlife conservation. A serious flaw in this approach, however, is highlighted by the situation in the Periyar Tiger Reserve. Here, several tribal villages were shifted out of the core zone. Dispossessed of their habitat, the tribals soon lost the little land they were given as compensation, and became pauperised. At the same time, the authorities did not remove four cardamom estates in the heart of the core zone”.

Since then, the rights of forest dwellers have found support, and the Forest Rights Act was passed in 2006. The law is not perfect but at least it recognises that forests are not just for animals but also for the people who have always lived there. However, as with so many reasonably good laws in this country, it is observed in the breach. Unless people protest, no one pays heed to such rights, particularly when the people involved are at the bottom of the economic pyramid. 

And of course, only if people come out in substantial numbers on the streets does the media pay any heed to what they are saying.

Agarwal’s observations of the Periyar Tiger Reserve are echoed even today in other tiger reserves. Take this story by The Hindu’s Odisha correspondent Satyasundar Barik on tiger sanctuaries in the state. He points out that not only were the Adivasis forced to relocate but that out of four tiger sanctuaries in the state, one has no tigers and yet vast lands have been emptied out for it.

And this story in Down to Earth points out that even today, literally thousands of Adivasis are being evicted from lands they have occupied for generations by the process of creating inviolate spaces for tigers and other wildlife.  

“These evictions are affecting nearly 400,000 Adivasis, who are now fighting to defend their homes and heritage. Protests have erupted in major tiger reserves such as Nagarhole, Kaziranga, Udanti-Sitanadi, Rajaji, and Indravati. Demonstrators are calling for an immediate halt to what they describe as illegal actions by the government.”

You will not know any of this if you only follow mainstream media. Of course, there was a time when newspapers devoted space to environmental stories, even those that made the government or corporations uncomfortable. But that is in the past. In today’s media reality, the only environment that interests the mainstream is what happens in big cities. So, air quality, and sometimes water quality, will feature as environmental stories.

Meanwhile in the rest of the country, not only are thousands of Adivasis being displaced, but rivers are being poisoned, glaciers are melting, land degradation is evident, and the mad pace of infrastructure construction everywhere is turning cities, and even small towns into dust bowls.

Coverage of Ambani ‘pre-wedding’ tells you everything that’s wrong with the media today

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on March 6, 2024

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/03/06/coverage-of-ambani-pre-wedding-tells-you-everything-thats-wrong-with-the-media-today

Last week, I spoke to some students at a Mumbai college. They were in their second-year of a three-year degree course in media studies. I asked them how many of them wanted to be journalists. In a class of around 35, only one young woman raised her hand. 

Some others explained that in the first year, more of them had considered journalism as a career. But over time, they had concluded that there was no future in it.

If 19-year-olds in a Mumbai college think there is no future in journalism, what is the future of journalism in this country? 

The question came even more sharply into focus last week when a journalist with more than 20 years of experience, working with a national newspaper in Mumbai, literally died on the job. He was not in a conflict zone. He was in his office in central Mumbai.

His unexpected death led to considerable churning amongst journalists in Mumbai and elsewhere. It raised several questions that concern not just journalists but the media. It illustrated the insecurity and stress that journalists live with even when performing routine functions.

The death of this journalist also brought focus again on the state of the Indian media. 

Take, for instance, coverage of events leading up to the “pre-wedding” (not sure what that means) of Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant in Jamnagar, and the event itself.  

In the days before this “pre-wedding”, print media and television news carried glowing reports about Vantara, an elephant sanctuary set up by the Ambani scion. If you read the print reports, you will wonder whether they are reprints of a press release sent out by the Ambani communications team. There’s little variation. They are factual, yes, but there isn’t one critical question. From these reports, it is evident that the journalists went on a paid junket. 

Yet, of all the English newspapers I looked at, only one –  Indian Express – carried this disclaimer: “The correspondent was in Jamnagar at the invitation of Reliance Foundation.” And one newspaper, The Hindu, chose not to send a reporter even though it also received an invitation. 

Print coverage, however, was restrained compared to the cringe-worthy report by prominent India Today anchor Rahul Kanwal. Watch his report, especially from 20.45 minutes onwards where you see him exulting over the taste of the food prepared for the elephants! It’s entertaining, but it is not journalism.

All this animal talk was only a precursor to the actual event, that stretched over three days with the broadcast media giving a blow-by-blow account of the parade of national and international celebrities that hot-footed it to Jamnagar, a city in Gujarat with an Indian Air Force base that accommodates a limited number of domestic flights.

Most newspapers and channels failed to ask the obvious question: How will all these guests make their way to Jamnagar if there is no international airport? Jagriti Chandra of The Hindu filed this story. She found that, in no time, small Jamnagar airport was converted to an international airport for 10 days. All permissions were cleared. After all, what could be more important than the “pre-wedding” of the son of one of India’s richest men?Unfortunately, The Hindu buried the story on an inside page although it deserved to be on the front page.

Why bother to comment on the media’s predictable coverage of this over-the-top “pre-wedding”, you might ask? Because it forces us to acknowledge, yet again, that mainstream media in India has moved a very long way from what was once considered “journalism”.

I have placed the word within inverted commas for a reason. Because given the nature of politics in this country, the open nexus between politics and business, and the concentration of ownership of the media in the hands of big business, we must ask how long journalism of the kind that existed even a decade back will survive.

The media has been transformed over time to a product that must be sold. Once that is accepted, there is little room to discuss why this product is any different from any other: a bar of soap or a packet of chips. All need sales pitches. The more they sell, the more the business prospers.The more people read, listen or watch your “product”, the more advertising will come your way. 

But what about the producers of this product, the journalists? Where do they stand in all this? Where is the idea of what journalism was all about? Is it even relevant today in this new scenario?

There was a time, not too long ago, when journalists found secure employment. Under the Working Journalists’ Act, journalists’ salaries were fixed based on the circulation of newspapers and the designation of the journalist. They also got the kind of benefits people working in other formal sector companies received such as a provident fund, gratuity, bonus, medical allowance, etc. 

Most importantly, they could not be sacked arbitrarily. There was a process to be followed. And there were unions that could stand by journalists. Although salaries were low, journalists had what we would jokingly call STD (security till death). Now, this has literally become ISD (insecurity till death). 

Today, most journalists are on contract. They can be laid off without notice or explanation. During the Covid pandemic, many media houses laid off journalists and other staff. Some publications closed altogether. The unemployed then joined the growing number of independent or freelance journalists desperately looking for assignments for which they were paid a pittance, not enough if you had a family, or the inevitable debts that piled up. 

Many journalists stepped out of journalism altogether and joined public relations companies or non-profits. Even if their hearts were in journalism and they loved what they did, they simply had no choice. Those who hung on and continued to go from one insecure job to another became victims of stress-related diseases.

Adding to these other stress factors are the conditions at work. Everyone is under pressure. Newspapers must show sales to attract advertising. And it is only advertising that covers the costs of not just paper and printing, but also salaries of journalists. 

Increasingly advertising of the kind newspapers attracted, even the smaller ones, a decade ago, has shifted to broadcast, and now to digital. This means print media is scrambling, with only the largest in each language being able to sweep up most of the decreasing basket of advertising. And government advertising, from central and state governments, has grown exponentially, and with it another kind of pressure on print media.

The pressure to produce exclusives, to beat the competition, has increased manifold on journalists. In the past, print journalists did a story, sent it to the desk, and occasionally phoned in an update until closing time. Today, journalism is a 24-hour job. With digital, there is no closing time. Every page is open for news and updates. 

Additionally, to keep up with the competition, even legacy print media now has podcasts and videos. The same set of journalists who write often have to take on these additional tasks. Yet, even as the nature of their work has changed, their jobs are not secure. 

Those with some kind of financial backing have the choice of quitting and trying to find another job. But most journalists cannot give up a job in hand just because they have a demanding, or even abusive, boss. And the work is stressful –  they just have to buckle down and do it. 

Ultimately, all this affects the quality of journalism. Why would anyone break their heads to come up with an exclusive if they are not sure their paper will use it? And even if it is published, they might not be rewarded for it. You can get by doing the routine stuff, and that itself is a lot when the overall staff strength has been pruned. So, the majority would just tread water, continue with the minimum, stay under the radar, and collect their salaries at the end of the month. 

Despite this, a handful of journalists in mainstream media still manage to write compelling, well-researched stories. Their work stands out and must be recognised. But we also need to shine a torch into the conditions under which they work. The death of the Mumbai journalist has triggered a much-needed conversation on the newsroom.