About
half of the journalists who cover the White House in Washington DC are
from the American media. There is a belief that each one of them gets up
every morning with the conviction that the government was going to lie to them
before sundown. The American media is relatively independent and
objective because its members cultivate two important traits: a measure of
healthy scepticism and irreverence towards people in authority.
However
there is another aspect to American journalism. It is the planted question,
and its cousin, the grapefruit. As an aside, a planted question asked
in a parliamentary debate in Australia is called a Dorothy Dixer.
In
American media parlance, a grapefruit is a seemingly tough question (a
journalist asks during the course of an interview) but is in fact a scripted
favour to the politician being interviewed. It is like a slow ball bowled
in a cricket match which lands near the batsman’s feet. He can simply smash it
beyond the ropes.
The
planted question, the Dorothy Dixer or the grapefruit serves
the same purpose: promoting one’s party’s policies and programmes and
criticizing the opposition. Although George Bush, Hillary Clinton and Barack
Obama have been known to have used the ‘planted question’ technique in
their campaigns, there is a perception in the West that it is more
common in India. Bhagyashree Garekar of the Singapore Straits Times told
John Dickerson, it was a common practice in India. See the penultimate
paragraph of this article: HillaryClinton gets snared by a planted question
But
the devices are usually employed as a small component – usually one or two
questions in the question and answer session at the end of a speech or in
a parliamentary debate or one question in an impromptu interview with a
politician. Can you imagine a whole interview being stage-managed; or to put it
simply the whole interview being a grapefruit? But that was what exactly
Arnab Goswamy’s interview with Rahul Gandhi was! See its full text here: Rahul Gandhi'sfirst interview: Full text
Max
Atkinson, a UK based communications expert says that ‘news interviewers are paid to be neutral’. He goes on to say that ‘appearing
to take sides can get them into serious trouble’. It sounds
surprising, doesn’t it? But Atkinson is talking about the media in Britain, not
India. Atkinson suggests that the solution to compel evasive politicians answer difficult questions is to conduct
the interview in front of an audience. If only
Atkinson knew how the Barkha Dutts, Rajdeep Sardesais and Sagarika Ghoses
conduct their interviews in front of studio audiences!
One
expected Arnab Goswami who breathes fire, screams and shrieks, on his primetime show to
be persistent with his questions, to pin down Rahul to take positions
and at least seek to answer some pertinent questions. Instead Arnab
served Rahul the biggest grapefruit that one can imagine, by querying
about Narendra Modi and flogging the dead horse of Gujarat 2002. Atkinson would be surprised to know that Indian news
interviewers who would be neutral on the subject of Narendra Modi are a
rarity. Here is how Rahul’s view of the Sikh genocide of 1984 in
which his father had a hand compares with the communal riots of 2002:
In
1984, RahulG was 13. Yet, he knew that ‘the government was trying
to stop the riots’. In 2002, he was 31 but he heard that ‘the
government in Gujarat was actually abetting and pushing the riots further’.
Rahul Gandhi’s inability to frame his replies in grammatically
correct English, though he was presumably educated in England, is not a major
issue:
‘I
like difficult to tough issues. I like dealing with them.’
‘Yes,
we will be specific but if I would like to sort of explain things in a broader
fashion, I think that will okay with you.’
‘I
think probably the Sikhs are one of the industrious people in this country.’
What is surprising is his mendacity about the process of electing a prime minister, especially by
the Congress party. By the by, Rahul utters the word ‘process’
29 times in the interview; ‘issue’ 47 times, ‘RTI’ 71 times
and ‘system’ 74 times!
Rahul
of course doesn’t want to lose an opportunity to plug in his family history,
especially the poignant aspects of it (‘as a child, he saw his grandmother
jailed and later assassinated; and his father assassinated’). Then there is
the invocation of Arjuna (‘he only sees one thing, he does not see
anything else’)!
What
does one make of this sentence: ‘I am here basically for one thing, I see
tremendous energy in this country, I see more energy in this country than any
other country, I see billions of youngsters and I see this energy is trapped’?
Here
is a gem: because the judiciary and the press are not under the RTI, political
parties should not be brought under the RTI as that ‘changes the balance of
power’! He is however candid about one thing: in our parliamentary system
as it stands today ‘an MLA or an MP does not make laws. He merely presses
buttons.’
This
is how Rahul perceives how the economy works: ‘We
are working on prices, as I said we have spoken to our Chief Ministers and we
have reduced prices in states where we are in power.’
The
nation certainly wants to know what Rahul proposes to do to grapple with the
myriad problems the nation faces: spiraling inflation, unemployment, billowing current account deficit et al. The nation would want to know how he would deal
with hostile neighbours like Pakistan and China; how he would tackle terrorism
and what he intends doing to resolve a number of other problems that befuddle
the nation. Sadly the net take away from the interview was that it veered our national
political debate away from these questions and bringing Gujarat 2002 back to
the centre stage. And that was the grapefruit that Arnab gifted to
Rahul!
