|
MEDIA - FALSE NEWS |
Mystery of the secret PMO meeting
There was never any meeting. The media made it up.
|
|
|
BY OUR MEDIA EDITOR
29th September, 2005
 It has been with considerable
embarrassment that I often watched business editors dance with
glee when the Sensex goes through the roof and wear sack
clothes when it comes down. Business journos and editors can
often be seen strutting around as the index goes up and up, as
if the Sensex surge somehow vindicated their career choice.
Again, many of them feel lost when the Street party ends, as
if they have been collared out of a Page 3 party.
This week, many misinformed editors and journalists received a
rap - from none less than the Prime Minister of the country -
for getting carried away. It is nothing new - editors and
reporters do get carried away by the news around them - and
tend to gulp down much of the rubbish that their uninformed or
motivated sources thrust down their throats. Sometimes,
newspapers clutch at straws in the air, for fear that their
rivals may splash the story on their front pages the next day.
This mad rush often results in false stories and red faces.
In recent times, the rise and rise of Sensex had been
worrisome - there was no correction in sight, there were
rumours of black money in the market and talk of yet another scam
- but little to prove anything of consequence.
Starting early last week, several general and business dailies
started putting out reports which catered to this fear.
Business Standard, under a byline of its Mumbai markets
bureau, announced
(click here for the story) that the Prime Minister's
Office had "swung into action" to probe the rise in penny
stocks. It said that the PM had met senior officials of the
Securities and Exchange Board of India, the Central Bureau of
Investigation and the Intelligence Bureau. It also said that a
bunch of IB sleuths were camping in Mumbai, and that their
draft report was already with the PMO.
Without giving too many details, The Economic Times
reported in a lead story (click
here for the story) on September 22 that the Finance
Minister had directed joint secretary UK Sinha to rush to
Mumbai. Quoting unnamed "sources" ET reported that
Sinha had already reached Mumbai. The report also hinted at
government's managers and intelligence agencies probing the
role of brokers. It also preened that it was the first to
report on September 17 (more on it later..) that a probe to
find if cooperative bank money flowing to brokers was under
way.
According to the Delhi Economy Bureau of The Financial
Express,
(click here for the story) the Prime Minister's Office
held "a series of meetings" with officials from Sebi,
Intelligence Bureau and the Reserve Bank of India to get to
the bottom of the case. The IB, it said, had already submitted
a three-page report to the PM on the case. UK Sinha from the
Finance Ministry had already been rushed to Mumbai, an
anonymous, non-existent or mischievous official told FE.
And the paper reported it. The headline was "PMO cracks whip
to bring order". Later, when the PMO actually cracked the
whip, it was the journalists who squirmed, not imaginary
speculators and bogeymen scamsters.
The impact was almost immediate - the market panicked and in a
single day, the Sensex sank 266 points. This was also the day
when there were raids on some brokers."I told you so", grinned
the doomsayer journalists.
The grin vanished soon. Fact is, the imaginary meetings never
took place. The PM had no clue of the meetings supposedly
convened by him. UK Sinha had gone to Mumbai to attend a UTI
board meeting, not sniff for manipulators. Credibility went
kaput, overnight.
There was more to come. Speaking in Chandigarh, the
gentlemanly Prime Minister minced no words in blasting the
ill-informed editors and journalists. A pilot would lose his
job if he made a mistake, the PM said. "How many mistakes must
a journalist make, how many wrong stories, how many motivated
columns, before professional clamps are placed? How do the
financial media deal with market-moving stories that have no
basis in fact? Investors gain and lose, markets rise and fall,
but what happens to those reporters, analysts and editors who
move and make the markets?" the anguished Prime Minister
wondered.
There was more to come: the Prime Minister's media advisor
Sanjaya Baru (formerly Chief Editor, Financial Express)
shot off an angry letter to many media organisations for
publishing "speculative reports" and said that "newspapers
have been misused by motivated persons to move the markets."
Business Standard, in fact, tendered an apology the
next day, but by then, it was too late. The damage was done -
Rs 100,000 crore of investor wealth had vanished just the way
the imaginary meetings did.
Interestingly, The Indian Express, (which is currently
empowering India with an ad campaign), ran an editorial on
Monday, September 26, titled "News, Sen-sexed up".
(click here for the story) It said that the PM is
cautioning it (the media) to send virus-free messages. ["Govt
runs a virus scan on Sensex," the ET headline ran on
the day of errors]. "In the past week, business newspapers ran
reports of the Prime Minister's Office directing intelligence
officials to investigate Dalal Street's bull run," the
Express edit said. The Indian Express is the mother
publication of The Financial Express.
The Express edit postulated whether a bear cartel was
responsible for the false reports and if journalists allowed
themselves to be used by them. Express also attacked
the "itch to rush to print" reports without verification and
blamed others for lack of professionalism. The Express
edit also warned of "some bad apples" in the media over their
"propensity to manipulate the market."
The Express edit made us wonder. Which are the bad
apples? Why look at other apples when your own basket stinks?
It also said that an overwhelming majority of the business
media is strictly above board. We have just four business
newspapers in India - market leader Economic Times,
followed by BusinessLine, Financial Express and
Business Standard. Except BL, the rest three
churned out misleading reports. Is one out of three an
overwhelming majority, if we accept the argument that those
who put out wrong reports are bad apples, by virtue of their
propensity to manipulate market? Or is it the point that even
among those who put out false reports, there are the good guys
and the bad boys? How do readers distinguish between the
deliberate falsifiers and innocent mistake-makers?
On Tuesday, September 27, ET tried to do some damage
control with a story on its front page titled: "Blood
on Street: Did govt's soft landing plans crash the hard way?"
Essentially, the ET report tried to say that we are not
responsible; it is the government which triggered the crash
with the raids on brokers in a surcharged market scene. The
report itself has some truths and some half truths. The
earlier ET report had said that the PM rang up Chidambaram in
New York, following which UK Sinha was despatched to Mumbai to
take stock of the market situation with Sebi. The
damage-control report confirms the PM-FM chat, but does not
admit the ET error in reporting that Sinha came to
Mumbai on Mission Market. To be fair to ET, its
September 22 report did not talk about the "secret PMO
meeting". That part is correct. But the report DID say that
"Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has stepped into the act" and
that "the government is indeed investigating the roles played
by a large number of prominent NBFCs and broking firms."
There is a side-story here. There have been rumours from
September 16 about the intelligence agency angle. On September
17, ET carried a story about a meeting of officials
from RBI, Sebi, Enforcement Directorate, IB and RAW to discuss
the state of capital markets.
(Click here for the ET report).
This was one of the reports in the run-up to the imaginary-PMO-meeting.
The September 17 ET report said: "To ensure that the
authorities are not caught off-guard, a meeting of all the
concerned agencies (sic) was convened on Thursday to discuss
the movements in the market... The meeting was attended by the
Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Securities and Exchange Board of
India (Sebi), Intelligence Bureau (IB), the Enforcement
Directorate (ED), DRI and the income tax department among
others.
However, ET's damage control story
(read it here) denies it ever said anything like that.
"The (September 16) meeting, in fact, had been convened to
discuss the implementation of the recommendations of the Joint
Parliamentary Committee, which inquired into the ’00-01 bull
run and the subsequent scam. ET had made no reference
to any role to be played by the security agencies, whose
normal role is to a keep a watch on stuff such as naxalism and
jehadi terrorism," it says. The fact is, there was no mention
about any of this in the September 17 ET story. It had
plainly said that the meeting was held by the government "to
avoid being caught off-guard" vis-a-vis the market. JPC, Osama
and Naxalbari were nowhere in the picture then. They
were painted in later.
The ET damage control story blames the government for
trying to talk down the markets and says it is normal
government behaviour. It shifts blame to the government, and
ends by saying that "it is not clear the media is the only
institution which has to do the learning." Excellent.
Also, journalists seem to close ranks when accountability
issues are raised from outside the newsroom. Some editors told
DNA in a
September 27 report that media tackle such issues on
their own. HT editorial director Vir Sanghvi was quoted
as saying: "Journalists make fewer mistakes than the average
PMO man these days". It is a point Sanghvi made recently, in a
critique of the Manmohan PMO's media management in a half page
op-ed article. (Click here to read the article). In his
article, Sanghvi had dwelt at length on how the PMO became
media-friendly in the days of the Vajpayee PMO, but started
deteriorating with the arrival of the new dispensation.
We are not surprised. First, the media mavens let themselves
be carried away by rumours, half-truths and lies. Later, when
they find themselves in the wrong, they shift blame elsewhere
and find bad apples and peaches everywhere but in their
backyard. It is human to err, but it takes courage to
apologise. When you are not up to it, you wear yellow glasses.
BY OUR MEDIA EDITOR |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
