Many years ago, when I took up a job in a Gujarati newspaper, my neighbour in Surat Kadir Pirzada, the city’s former mayor, recounted a story.

He had gone, along with another Congressman, to the owners of an important Ahmedabad newspaper, to request coverage of a Sonia Gandhi rally. The proprietors were polite, but said that there could be no photograph in their paper till ₹ 25 lakh was paid. And so two bags of cash were arranged and the next day delivered, just before the rally.

This week comes news that four Maharashtra candidates, including Mumbai Congressman Milind Deora and Sanjay Nirupam, and a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) man paid newspapers to have their campaigns covered. The papers named by the District Media Watch and Monitoring Committee were Pudhari, Navakar, Sakal and Mumbai Samachar.

The last named, a Gujarati daily owned by an eccentric Parsi family, is the oldest newspaper of India. Sakal is owned by Union minister Sharad Pawar’s family and run by his nephew Abhijit. It is accused of taking money from the BJP candidate, which happily demonstrates the maxim that business is business. A report in Mint quoted Deora as accepting the fine imposed but only because, according to him, he wanted to avoid an extended legal battle. The newspapers all rejected any guilt and are unlikely to have reported on the findings.

This is a serious problem as those who work in vernacular journalism know. Corruption in the media is widespread in India. Very few newspapers have even a written code of ethics and corruption has become normalized. Journalists, even moral and upstanding ones, have to ignore certain aspects of their trade because they have become unavoidable.

Most regional (non-English) newspapers have their editors as proprietors, which makes such conduct easy and frictionless. Certain parts of pages, full pages, and sometimes whole sections, are set aside for which the candidate sends his material, which is published as news. Sometimes the paper despatches its journalists and photographers to interview the candidate and lob soft questions. Where newspapers are dominant, as in that story I recounted about Ahmedabad, they can demand money even for regular coverage. Larger newspapers usually have a “PR manager" in their regional office, who fixes such things, keeps in touch with politicians and ensures the newspaper group gets favourable treatment from politicians, including free or subsidized land and licenses and that sort of thing.

Of course, paid news is not just a regional phenomenon. Many English newspapers and channels also do this.

The difference is that in English media, the party paying for publicity is usually corporate rather than a politician. Another difference is that the corporate transactions continue through the year, while the language papers make money mainly during elections. If a study were to be organized, I would not be surprised if it were found that for many smaller regional newspapers, such devices were critical in keeping them profitable.

About 20 years ago, I was editing The Asian Age in Mumbai. We needed a press and I went to meet the Cama family that owned Mumbai Samachar to ask if they would print us. The paper is located in a huge building in South Mumbai, worth hundreds of crores. Mr Cama, a man of 75 or so, sat in an office without air-conditioning. He wore thick-framed glasses whose bridge was broken and held together at the nose by a piece of string. He heard me out, told me he would like to help me, and that it would also be good money for him, but he couldn’t. I asked why not. He had no excess capacity, he said. I had done my homework and pointed out that he had two high-capacity Newsline 45 machines of which he used only one. “What if the other one breaks down?" he demanded to know, “won’t I need it then?"

I wondered what sort of business keeps 100% capacity in contingency as I walked away. I am disappointed that the paper’s great name (it is legend among Mumbai Gujaratis) has been laid low by this week’s story.

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