The Hindu responds to criticism of biased coverage of Tibet developments

K. Narayanan, Readers’ Editor of The Hindu, after examining readers’ complaints, has made a professional assessment of the newspaper’s coverage of Tibet developments in his fortnightly column “Online and Off Line”, published today. He writes:

I compared the reporting of the events in other Indian newspapers (English) and also The Guardian and the New York Times with that in The Hindu from March 15 to 19 and could not but note the wide gap which led to the readers’ protests. (The angles given to the stories and their display are not to be questioned; that is editorial privilege). Overall, these points struck me as noteworthy:

1. Reliance on Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency. Its reports should have been balanced by inputs from other news agencies, but their use was scanty and selective. No doubt they too would have had their angles and biases but that would have been another side of the picture. Why was The Guardian, otherwise used extensively, ignored (except for an eyewitness account which was not very informative)?

2. The Hindu’s perceptive correspondent in Beijing, Pallavi Aiyar, made no contribution, except to report Prime Minister Wen’s press conference.

3. The statements of the Chinese Prime Minister and the Chinese envoy in Delhi were fully reported. The Dalai Lama’s were truncated versions. Many readers noted that his remark on “cultural genocide” was edited out.

4. The most surprising feature was the total absence of Tibet in the “Letters to the Editor column” — in which otherwise comments appear even as events are unfolding and continue for days. A few letters appeared after an article and an editorial were published and ceased abruptly.

The Readers’ Editor has also included in his column the response of the newspaper’s Editor-in-Chief N. Ram to the readers’ comments and to his observations on them. Here are excerpts from it:

We have an arrangement with Xinhua. We have also used western agencies and PTI. The violence reported and confirmed editorially was by Tibetan discontents, some hundreds of them. The Chinese authorities seemed unprepared at first but moved to stop the savagery in Lhasa and violence in some Tibetan areas. The riots were easily overcome. The violence in Lhasa, by every account, was by protestors, who included monks. No specific incident of violence by the police or paramilitary forces has been reported by any credible news source or eyewitnesses.

The comments in the column fail to look critically at the abundant editorialising in the guise of news. If the content in The Guardian, The New York Times, and Western news agencies is analysed, the problems of professional news reporting on the Tibet developments can be better appreciated. They were full of editorial judgments and loaded phrases and were often inaccurate (such as death toll). Their websites published wrong photographs or photographs with wrong captions. The Dalai Lama’s statements were edited because he is a separatist and tended to justify the savage and murderous riots in Lhasa. Not many letters were received other than what we published.

Nobody asked Pallavi Aiyar not to report in The Hindu on Tibet. She has been on leave during the relevant period.

The Readers’ Editor concludes the column with the following quotation from the editorial The Hindu wrote on August 27, 2003 (not August 23, 2003, as stated in the column):

The only answer to all this can be journalism of high quality, rooted in well-defined principles, clear-sighted, ethically and professionally sound, determined to put editorial values first, responsive to the needs of readers and the market within clearly worked out journalistic parameters .…

The Editor-in-Chief’s explanation that some observations of the Dalai Lama were suppressed because he is a separatist and tended to justify the Lhasa riots does not go well with his proclaimed determination to put editorial values first. He says nobody asked Pallavi Aiyar not to report on Tibet. He sidesteps some relevant questions: Did the newspaper ask the correspondent to report on Tibet? Would she have had access to sources other than the Communist Party-controlled Xinhua news agency if she were asked to report?

While The Hindu’s Tibet coverage fell short of its own illustrious traditions, let us salute the newspaper, the Editor-in-Chief and the Readers’ Editor for the transparent manner in which they deal with readers’ complaints on such matters.

Human Rights violations in Tibet

As a minority region, it’s Tibet’s lot to suffer under Han domination when there is a powerful and essentially non-democratic regime in China. When I visited China in 1988, I sought permission to visit Tibet or some other autonomous region, but Xinhua, which handles travel arrangements of visiting journalists, pleaded inability to do so.

Western news agency accounts of Tibet developments may not all be correct. But experience does not allow me to reject them in toto as suspect material. I was on a short assignment at IPS Third World news agency’s headquarters in Rome in 1980 when the Solidarity movement was raging in Poland. I was inclined to dismiss the Western agency reports which I read daily in the Rome edition of the International Herald Tribune. I decided to go to Poland for a week and report on developments for my agency (UNI) so that the Indian public may have a non-Western account. M. R. Sivaramakrishnan, who was Indian Ambassador in Warsaw at the time, helped me to get a visa quickly. On arrival in Warsaw I found that the Western agency accounts of commodity shortages and Solidarity’s popularity were substantially correct.

The Editor of the Polish Workers’ Party’s theoretical journal invited me to dinner. The meal consisted of one large boiled potato, nothing else. My host said his wife could find nothing more than some potatoes in the market that day. I still cherish the memory of that dinner. It was a satisfying meal, partly if not wholly because of the utter frankness of the host and the extreme graciousness of the hostess. The Minister for Trade Unions, whom I met, was also devastatingly frank. “If we were a bourgeois democracy, they (Solidarity) will be ruling, and we will be in the opposition, but we are not a bourgeois democracy,” he told me.

Lenin’s party, on seizing power, preserved the Czar’s empire under the label of ‘union of soviet, socialist republics’. The USSR Constitution said the country was a union of republics, each of which had the right to secede. This was the position for seven decades. When a republic decided in the 1980s to exercise the secession option, the Soviet government said there was no law in place to deal with the issues to be sorted out when a republic leaves the union. A law was then enacted and the process of disintegration of the USSR began.

Mao’s party, which established the People’s Republic, conceived it as the successor of not just Kuomintang China but of all previous empires. The British, taking advantage of the weakness of the empire, had dealt with Tibet as if it were an independent entity.

The Indian government, successor of the British colonial regime, conceded that Tibet is part of China. It did so in exchange for a vacuous Chinese declaration of faith in peaceful coexistence, without securing from China an assurance with regard to the border. As a result, vast tracts, including a whole Indian State, remain territories “which we claim as ours and they claim as theirs”. The contrast between the specious internationalism of these words of CPI (M) leader E.M.S. Namboodiripad and the nationalist (chauvinistic?) response of Chinese netizens to Western reports on Tibet cannot be missed. (See report “China's Missing Voice Rises Up from the Internet”, circulated by NAM, a respected alternative media institution, at http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=ab2892f06e32f01f066cabc48c8f2297

Politics apart, there is enough material in the public domain to conclude that massive human rights violations are taking place in Tibet.