'Inaccurate and sometimes outright malicious and false reporting has caused an immense amount of suffering to individuals.' – AP File Photo

DAS Reich was a weekly newspaper founded by Joseph Goebbels. Would it have made sense for Jews, gypsies, communists or other Germans troubled by the newspaper’s worldview to shoot off a letter to the editor pointing out the fallacy of the Nazi propaganda?

It eventually required a Normandy landing to change the discourse.

In the Murdochian era the question is just as relevant, not least because of the shrinking space for informed debates and probity in the media. There will always be excellent exceptions but those are getting few and far between. Three instances come to mind where fairly respected media outfits veered sharply to the right in the last few days and in doing so transgressed certain limits of responsible demeanour.

A sister publication of the reputed Financial Times has decided to declare Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi its Asian personality of the year. In seeking to project the author of a horrific carnage of Muslims as its man of the moment, the newspaper has chosen to share a glimpse of its ideological preference. Indian rights activists have written protest letters to the Pearson Group, which owns the Financial Times and FDI, the sister publication which has proposed the award for Mr Modi.

On the one hand, in a world as complicated as this, perhaps we should welcome an act as transparent as this one, in which both Mr Modi and those who choose to honour him stand exposed. On the other, allowing media houses that sell themselves as ‘balanced’ to get away with something as brazen as this is suicidal.

In the classic Murdochian nightmare, facts are increasingly bartered to push a rightwing worldview. The Judith Miller affair was one such instance. It took the editors of The New York Times a leisurely few years before they published a grudging apology in an obscure corner of the newspaper after callously misleading the world into a war against Iraq. On Sept 7, 2002, Ms Miller and another colleague reported the interception of metal tubes bound for Iraq.

Her front-page story quoted unnamed 'American officials' and 'American intelligence experts' who said the tubes were intended to be used to enrich nuclear material, and cited unnamed 'Bush administration officials' who claimed that in recent months, Iraq had 'stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb'.

Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld (remember them?) pointed to Ms Miller’s story as a partial basis for going to war. Subsequent analyses by various agencies all concluded that there was no way the tubes could have been used for uranium-enrichment centrifuges. But it was not until May 26, 2004 that the New York Times editors acknowledged their error. And what a mealy-mouthed apology it was. But it was too late. Tens of thousands had been killed. A country had been invaded and occupied.

Post the Mumbai attacks, a large section of the Indian media, in particular certain TV news channels, were involved in some serious warmongering that could have led to consequences far graver than even the invasion of Iraq.

On this occasion, the media’s drumbeat for war was mitigated by a reasonably — or let’s say comparatively more — mature response from the government. Not so in 2001 after the Dec 13 parliament attack, when both the media and the Indian government went hell for leather, putting out a series of statements and speculation, all of which proved to be false. But this almost led to a nuclear conflagration. Most of which was exposed in the trial of the accused that followed. (Much of this is documented in the book titled 13 Dec, A Reader: The Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament.)

Inaccurate and sometimes outright malicious and false reporting has caused an immense amount of suffering to individuals. Iftikhar Gilani’s seven-month long unexplained incarceration in Delhi’s Tihar jail comes close to similar callousness by his fellow journalists. They abused their sacred liberty to revile and wilfully misquote the Kashmiri journalist. It was ironical that Mr Gilani, who as a well-known journalist should have had access to the widest range of sympathetic media, had to write a book to present his side of the heartrending story.

But what can you do if even books and their authors are tendentiously misquoted? The Economist reviewed Arundhati Roy’s new book Listening to Grasshoppers — a collection of essays about the increasingly vacuous democratic institutions in India. In a hitherto unpublished letter to the editor of the reputed magazine, Ms Roy says that almost every single fact in the review was wrong.

'Beyond India, her grasp of her subject-matter gets looser. If Ms Roy believes, as she writes, that a good portion of Africa’s ‘contemporary horrors’ are caused by America’s ‘new colonial interests’, she would do well to pay a visit to the continent,' said the reviewer.

The reference was to a paragraph in the book that read: 'The battle to control Africa’s mineral wealth rages on — scratch the surface of contemporary horrors in Africa, in Rwanda, the Congo, Nigeria, pick your country and chances are that you will be able to trace the story back to the old colonial interests of Europe and the new colonial interests of the United States.'

As for the recommendation that she pay a visit to Africa, Ms Roy responded: 'It’s a grand idea, but how does one visit an entire continent? I have visited parts of it. Plenty of times. But the reviewer should know that it is possible to know things about places even if you haven’t been to them, like historians know things about history without travelling back in time.'

Another example of dangerously smug reporting came in the Newsweek. ‘Why Obama Should Learn to Love the Bomb’, its headline declaimed. 'A growing and compelling body of research suggests that nuclear weapons may not, in fact, make the world more dangerous, as Obama and most people assume,' the writer argued in the influential journal. 'The bomb may actually make us safer. In this era of rogue states and transnational terrorists, that idea sounds so obviously wrongheaded that few politicians or policymakers are willing to entertain it. But that’s a mistake.'

All that anti-nuclear activists could do was to write to each other in horror at another Judith Miller-like saga unfolding, one potentially more devastating than the invasion of Iraq. Goebbels would not be such a misfit in our world of free media.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com