By Tom Plate
Professor at University of California, Los Angeles
Director of Asia Pacific Media Network
LOS ANGELES _ On arrival one night in India, I telephoned downstairs to the hotel’s Concierge Desk to ask for newspapers to be delivered in the morning. The voice at the other end paused, noticeably, not wanting to insult the guest or suggest he’d lost his mind. “Sir,” he said, “there are many Indian papers, in English and in Hindi.” I explained that the English-language ones would work best for me, miserable non-bilingual that I am. “But,” he continued, “there are so many!” I told him to send up every English paper he had.
The gentle Concierge at the lovely Sheraton Maurya Hotel in New Delhi probably put me down as just another crazy, pampered American tourist. The truth is, I am in fact crazy _ but just for newspapers. Always have been, and always will be. And so the wealth of interesting newspapers in India is delightfully staggering, despite the country’s struggle with poverty, the caste system, communal tensions, Pakistan and well _ it’s a long list.
My hotel served the best Indian black tea in the world while I waded happily though lively newspapers such as The Times of India, Hindustan Times, Hindu, The Indian Express, Economic Times and The Asian Age. The Times of India sports the largest broadsheet (quality) newspaper circulation in the English language. This figure attests not only to the paper’s quality but to the greedy thirst of educated and literate Indians for intelligent journalism.
The quality of media institutions within a society of anticipating citizens is essential to get a handle around difficult economic and social issues. Citizens need to develop a consensus on such problems (global warming, economic development and health care) if solutions are to be found.
India is hardly the only place in Asia where you often find intelligent newspaper cultures. Hong Kong is great for a newspaper junkie; Americans like to rag about tiny Singapore’s closed political system but its lead English-language newspaper offers better coverage of key countries such as Indonesia and China than America’s own best newspapers. In Australia, bumptious dailies in Sydney and Melbourne constantly remind you that being Down Under is not the same as being six-feet under. Even Pakistan (as of this writing) offers strong dailies; highly literate Japan is notable for newspapers, from Japanese-language Mainichi (with a circulation near four million) to the English-language Japan Times, a midget circulation-wise but gently influential.
My emphasis on newspapers is rooted in the core belief that political civilization may depend in some circumstances on their flowering. Whether arrayed clinically on a digital computer screen, or splashed across newsprint that inevitably seeps onto your hands as you pour through it, the newspaper, at its best is a carrier of complexity. Any idiot news-medium can handle the Paris Hilton story, but only a truly good newspaper can hope to offer you any wisdom at all on the daunting complexities such as international currency imbalances, the Russian resurgence and China’s weird stock market _ not to mention the entire sprawling complexity of the Islamic world.
These kinds of pivotal issues are multi-dimensional. Leaders and citizens who would courageously plunge into them with sincerity know that. Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, speaking recently to New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Bob Herbert, rightly railed with contempt against the idiotic notion that important and complex matters can be seriously addressed in sound-bite sentences. The very idea is juvenile and ludicrous.
Alas, even with the astonishing rise of the Internet, the dominant media of mass-communication probably remains the television. The ideal of television _ asserted the late, great French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, not unfairly _ is to “interest everybody without touching on anything important.” But with the continuing surge of the Internet, serious newspapers that offer educated story selection, sophisticated analysis and more than the 3-second sound bite become more available to all. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t flash down my computer bookmarks and instantly check out newspapers across Asia and Europe.
This brings us, very logically, to an important American newspaper whose brand name is synonymous with quality control: The Wall Street Journal. Before too long, it will probably find itself, like many papers, to have more reach as an online product than as a paper one; also before too long, it will probably be owned by media baron Rupert Murdoch. Will he ravage it for profits or save its excellence for posterity. In ten years will it still be The Wall Street Journal _ more or less as we know it today?
My guess would be no. However, by that time, it will matter less as long as enough quality online newspapers like The Times of India and others from all over the world are still up and posted and keeping journalistic standards high. Newspapers alone can’t solve problems, but without very good ones, some problems may prove insoluble.