Corrected: Environmental journalism in India and false balance

Featured image credit: mamnaimie/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

I’ve developed a lousy habit of publishing posts before they’re ready to go, and not being careful enough about how I’m wording things. It happened recently with the review of Matthew Cobb’s book and then last evening with the post about false balance in environmental journalism. I don’t think my blog is small enough any more for me to be able to set the record straight quietly (evinced by the reader who pointed out some glaring mistakes). So this is fixing the false balance post. Apologies, I’ll be more careful next time.

In the same vein, any advice/tips on how to figure when an opinion is ready to go (and you’ve not forgotten something) would be much appreciated. What I usually do is take a break for 30 minutes after I’ve finished writing something, then return to it and read it out loud.

It’s no secret that the incumbent NDA government ruling in India has screwed over the country’s environmental protection machinery to such an extent that there remain few meaningful safeguards against corporate expansionism – especially of the rapacious kind. Everything – from land acquisition, tribal protection and coastal regulation to pollution control and assessment – has been systematically weakened. As a result, the government’s actions have become suspect by default.

For journalists in India, this has come with an obvious tilt in the balance of stories. Government actions and corporate interests have become increasingly indefensible. What redemption they may have been able to afford started to dissipate when both factions started to openly rub shoulders with each other, feeding off each others’ strengths: the government’s ability to change policy and modify legislation and the companies’ ability to… well, fund. Prime example: the rise of Gautam Adani.

In Indian journalism, therefore, representing all three sides in an article – the government, corporate interests and the environment – (and taking a minimalist PoV for argument’s sake) is no longer the required thing to do. Representation is magnified for environmental interests while government and corporate lines are printed as a matter of courtesy, if at all. This has become okay, and it is.

Do I have a problem with this? No. That’s why doing things like asking corporate interests what they have to say is called a false balance.

Is activist journalism equivalent to adversarial journalism simply by assuming its subject is to right a wrong? Recently, I edited an article for The Wire about how, despite the presence of dozens of regulatory bodies, nobody is sure who is responsible for conserving and bettering the status of India’s wetlands. The article was penned by an activist and was in the manner of an oped; all claims and accusations were backed up, it wasn’t a rant. I think it speaks more to the zeitgeist of Indian environmental journalism and not the zeitgeist of journalism in general that opeds like that one have become news reports de jure. In other words: if only in Indian environmental journalism, there is no Other Side anymore for sure.

This advent of a ‘false balance’ recently happened in the case of climate change, where a scientific consensus was involved. That global warming is anthropogenic came to be treated as fact after scientific studies to assess its origins repeatedly reached that conclusion. Therefore, journalistic reports that quote climate-change skeptics are presenting a false balance of the truth. A decision to not quote the government or corporate interests in the case presented above, however, is more fluid, influenced not by the truth-value of a single parameter but by the interests of journalism itself.

Where this takes us isn’t entirely difficult to predict: the notion of balance itself has had a problematic history, and needs to be deprioritised. Its necessity is invoked by the perception of many that journalism is, or has to be, objective. It may have been associated with objectivity at its birth but journalism today definitely has mostly no need to be. And when it doesn’t need to be happens only through the advent of false balances.