When you open a newspaper, or switch on the television, and there’s nothing but good news, it’s time to start worrying about what they’re not telling you. Nobody likes bad news, but the world is full of it. Don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise: they want your vote or your money, or for you to look the other way.
Whenever this question comes up, I am reminded of an incident in Tamil Nadu when I was covering the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami for The Independent. I had just emerged from a press conference given by the chief secretary of the state when I saw a small group of demonstrators outside, and sent my translator over to find out what they were protesting about. Just then the chief secretary herself came out, saw my translator and started berating him angrily in Tamil.
In those days I was still fairly new to India, and more used to reporting in places like the Middle East and Pakistan—places where a translator who attracts the ire of a senior government official is in peril of his life. So I did what foreign correspondents are taught to do: I put myself physically between him and the chief secretary, and demanded that she address her complaints to me. She was staring at me in astonishment, at what must have seemed rather uncouth behaviour on my part, when I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to hear the translator say: “Don’t worry sir. India is a democracy. I can say whatever I like.” He was looking the chief secretary right in the eye. He was an ordinary man. There was a severe shortage of translators with the world’s media camped in Tamil Nadu, and in desperation I had hunted down a driver who spoke good English. He drove an old white Ambassador for a living and wore an uncomfortable uniform that made him sweat in the sun. But in that moment, he encapsulated everything that is great about India. The Chief Secretary towered over him, but he had silenced her.
The protesters, it turned out, were Dalit tsunami survivors claiming they had been denied access to relief supplies by survivors from other castes. To the chief secretary, it was a bad news story that detracted from the state’s otherwise excellent response to the disaster. Naturally, she wanted to project Tamil Nadu in the best possible light. As far as I was concerned, if relief wasn’t getting through to some survivors, for whatever reason, that was a story that needed to be told. But for me the real good news story that day was that in India, a driver could stand up to a chief secretary and insist on his right to know the truth.
That is what “bad news” is all about: your right to know. To know what your government is doing in your name, and what it is failing to do; how it is spending your taxes, what big business is doing behind closed doors; how much is being stolen through corruption or lost through incompetence, and who is at fault. I am not suggesting for a moment that journalists should ignore good news, or focus solely on the bad. To tell the whole story, you have to tell both. But bad news is often important. What would an Indian press that only ever reported good news really look like? A press that was silent about the tsunami, didn’t report it at all? Perhaps there should be an exemption for natural disasters. What about a press that was silent about the Bhopal disaster then? A press that was silent about the assassination of Indira Gandhi? Silent about the mass revenge killings of Sikhs that followed? Would the US be a better country if its press had decided not to pursue the Watergate scandal merely in order to spare its people the bad news that their president was involved in a cover-up?
You could say it’s a bad time for a British journalist to be defending the role of the press, in the light of the News of the World phone hacking scandal in my own county. Well, true. But a lot of people forget it was another newspaper, The Guardian, which uncovered that story through years of relentless investigative journalism, without which it would never have come to light.
Usually, bad news stories are often not so spectacular. Another memory: the region of Mewat, just south of Delhi. Its villages lie just off the gleaming new towers and malls of Gurgaon, but I encountered another world there. In rural Haryana, the practice of selectively aborting female foetuses has become so widespread that the men buy in “wives” from poorer parts of India, like Orissa or Jharkhand. They buy the women like a commodity from their parents, then bring them to another state where they don’t speak the language or know anyone. They call them “wives” but there is no formal marriage, they are property. Sometimes several brothers share a woman. One “wife” tried to run away when her “husband” ordered her to sleep with his brother. He cut her head off with a scythe.
Illustration by Sorit
It’s not front page news, but it is a quiet tragedy taking place a stone’s throw from Delhi. Which story to report then? The shining new India of the Gurgaon malls on the horizon, or the desperate story inside the old walls of Mewat behind me? It was a dilemma that came up constantly during my time as a correspondent based in Delhi. Which India to report? The India of Tata and Reliance, the economic powerhouses that were buying up companies in my native Britain by the day—or the India of potholed, crumbling roads where the infrastructure was in such disrepair that the major cities flooded every monsoon season and the roads were in perennial gridlock?
The only answer to it, of course, was—both. Both sides were true, both were India. If I were to tell my readers only the good news of India shining news of India shining, I would have misled them. Of course, some of this makes uncomfortable reading, especially stories like Mewat. Naturally, Indians have a patriotic desire to show the best of their country, especially to an outsider like me, and I can see how they might be uncomfortable with a foreigner digging away at some of these stories.
But we’re not talking about foreign correspondents, we’re talking about the Indian press, and I think what a patriotic Indian should be rightly proud of is that this country has a free press and free speech—and to have a truly free press you have to report the bad as well as the good. Ah, you might say, but we’re not proposing censorship, we’re talking about journalists being more selective in what they report. But the most pernicious form of censorship is self-censorship. If you want to see newspapers and TV that only report good news, you have to go somewhere like the Middle East. Syria, say, or Libya. And yet, all too often, you find the regimes in these countries don’t need to practise that much censorship, because the journalists already censor themselves: they know the red lines that are not to be crossed.
Even in Pakistan, which has a relatively vibrant press, the journalists know there are places they cannot go—and just in case they didn’t, they have been served a timely reminder with the recent “mysterious” killings of journalists who didn’t play by the rules. Nothing like that is going to happen in India, of course, but when the press starts censoring itself it starts censoring the citizens’ right to know, and at that point those in a position of power will be able to wield it just a little more freely. A politician gets a backhander from a foreign company to get some villagers moved off some land. He uses a little force. They’re only villagers. But next time he might act against a small private Indian business, a landowner. If no one reports it, who’s to stop him?
There are safeguards against that sort of thing in a democracy. But quis custodiet ipsos custodes—who will guard the guards? The safest society is one in which the citizen is armed with knowledge. A lot of people are under the impression that journalists prefer bad news. In fact, good news is much easier. A journalist is constantly bombarded with good news stories: press releases arrive in their hundreds, there are phone calls from government officials, the PR departments of big firms, ngos and charities, all eager to tell you about the good things they are doing. There are people whose entire job is to sell you good news.
Bad news is much harder. No one wants to help you. Generally there is someone who actively wants to stop you, often someone powerful. You have to hunt it down, work it out of people in hours of painstaking interviews, or track it down through reams of documents. It makes you enemies. In a lot of countries, it can get you killed. So why do it? Because it matters. Good news makes us feel satisfied with things as they are; bad news makes us demand change. So the next time you read a bad news story, don’t feel downhearted, be proud you are part of a country that has a free press and is prepared to be honest about itself, failings and all. Bad news makes the world a better place.
(Justin Huggler was a former correspondent for The Independent. He’s working on a novel set in Delhi.)
