There can be no freedom of the press without the freedom of the journalist, and the truth is that there is not a single mainstream news organisation across India today, be it newspapers or television channels or even in the digital space, where the journalist is truly free.

There is no news organisation where journalists cannot be and are not being fired at will. This includes the organisations that are today being cited as paragons of fearless challenge to the "establishment", the upholders of the lofty democratic spirit in the face of sweeping dictatorial headwinds, the moral beacons championing equity.

The reality is that even the most liberal and intellectual editors, bearded and clean-shaven alike, with hearts bleeding for farmers, Muslims, Dalits, adivasis and generally the poor and the disadvantaged, have done nothing to institutionalise dissent at their own news organisations whereby they would have no individual veto power over what goes into print or is broadcast/streamed but would follow a principled system of decision-making that required them to argue their perspective to a subordinate and convince her logically rather than work through my-way-or-highway diktats.

(Of course, the liberals are too suave to be that blatant. But the I'm-the-boss paradigm is uniform for the self-styled "principled" news outfits and the snakes-ghosts-bigoted sensationalists.)

India's news organisations today are essentially top-down pyramids where the proprietor-owners always control the journalists' works with the unspoken threat (sometimes quite vocal, actually) of termination of employment for dissenters and free thinkers. That has made journalists today start behaving like corporate employees, who cannot afford to have minds of their own and defy the editorial bosses by arguing their way through.

In newsrooms across India, stories are today decided, allowed, dropped, changed and slotted by the bosses, while the journalists are merely informed of the day's news menu and agenda.

In crass places such as so many of the Hindi newspapers and television channels, this order of thought hierarchy is openly acknowledged and followed without shyness. In uppity and intellectual newsrooms, everyone pretends they are different when they are not.

Let us not forget that these paragons and beacons do not think twice before dropping an interview with a former finance minister merely because they think his criticism of the establishment went too far. (Is self-censorship part of freedom of the press?)

Thirty years ago it would have been extremely difficult if not impossible to drop such an interview without inviting all-round criticism. Similarly, in the bygone era, had a top editor been found, through leaked audio tapes of phone conversations, promising corporate lobbyists that she would curry favours from politicians for their clients, the workers' unions would have been the first to protest and demand action against such an editor.

Today, there are no unions, of course, and only deafening radio silence from what are known as employees.

It began with The Times of India group hiring journalists on contract. Photo: Reuters

It wasn't always so. Although utopia never existed, India's news world was far freer back in the 1980s when I joined the profession. And it wasn't because the proprietors or editors were nicer people. It was because India's newspaper journalists were protected from wrongful termination of employment by the terms of the Working Journalists Act under which they were hired and which allowed such termination only by following due legal process, including an inquiry.

A dismissed journalist could challenge the termination of service under the Industrial Disputes Act. Many did and several won, even against powerful organisations such as The Times of India and The Indian Express.

The Working Journalists Act was (and is, for it is still on the statute) so remarkable that it recognised journalists (as also non-journalists working with a newspaper) as a very special category of employees unlike in any other business.

It mandated rules for work hours, leave, promotions, and even the procedure for fixing of wages. The wages themselves were to be fixed by an independent "board" constituted by the government with representation from both the proprietor-owners and employee unions. Newspaper managements were obligated to share their balance sheets with such a board to determine their capacity to pay the new wages.

This freedom of the journalist created a much brighter era of independent journalism than anyone can imagine today. Extremely poorly paid journalists nonetheless took immense pride in their work. Junior or senior, reporters would be on top of their beats, often working on leads their chief reporters or bureau chiefs, leave alone the top editors, wouldn't even know of.

On the rare occasion an editor called a reporter into his room and tried to push a story, the reporter would be defensive about that assignment to disapproving looks from fellow reporters, and would be in a hurry to do it quickly and put it behind him.

Ministers, politicians and bureaucrats couldn't browbeat reporters as often as they do now. Today, editors hand out assignments at open news meetings to journalists who have no qualms in doing what they are told to do.

The freedom of the journalist in that era also created a powerful sense of right and wrong that extended not just to esoteric writings about other folks but spawned tremendous awareness about workers' rights within the news industry.

Unions across news organisations as well as the industry flourished and went from strength to strength, opposing, on occasion, wrongdoings by mighty proprietors.

All of that started going out the window as the 1980s neared their end, beginning with The Times of India group, as it began hiring journalists on contract asking them to step out of the protections of the Working Journalists Act. Quickly, everyone followed suit.

Journalists of all shades, including, alas, this writer, greedily took up the option of the contract when a point in time came that the option was no longer available and the news organisations were only hiring on contract, with the proviso to fire at will without the encumbrance of explaining and justifying the sacking in a legal framework.

Today, freedom of the press means only freedom for the proprietors. Journalists are caged, their hands and feet bound.

(This post first appeared on the writer's Facebook page.)

Also read: Why Narendra Modi hates the English news media and what it means for India's democracy