Newspapers. Neutral?

'See, we are not against CPM, but we are pro-Mamata', quipped my friend, now an editor of a Bengali daily in the metropolis of Kolkata. I was not startled.

In West Bengal, after the demise of a 35-year Left rule last May, the social computations obviously got recast. Mamata Banerjee, now the Chief Minister, single-handedly took hold of the rein of a fiercely political state after a landslide victory in the Assembly election. She reduced Communist Party of India, Marxist (CPM) to almost a non entity. No wonder my editor friend would sound a neutral, being 'not against' the defeated but proudly to be 'pro' new ruler. Did I have a cool afternoon with him in his cabin; I wondered when I was in the middle of the honking street.

When the protagonist is journalism I develop a problem. The profession, to me a truthfully right vocation, these days often twirls into an untruthful realm. Coming down from my friend's cosy office, with an ambience of smart young people, my problems started trickling in my stomach. I started feeling uncomfortable.

Never ever I considered a newspaper can be neutral or it should be so. Even so my friend's voice sounded to me strange since he told me with all caution and almost in a whispering tone. I was a bit scratched though but not injured.

Every reader is instilled with an impression that a newspaper should be neutral, and this hype is created by the Newspapers themselves. Can they really be neutral? Has it ever been anywhere in the world? I have heard none yet. New York Times and Washington Post, The Daily Telegraph and the Times (of London) — are they neutral? Then why should my friend's daily should try to be neutral? And if he is not, why should I get scratched?

All of us know media is known as The Fourth Estate, meaning it's a body that stays apart from the government and large interest groups of any nature. But the fact remains, media keeps itself alive only on Advertisement, and on no other means. How can they vouch for neutrality then? It's just drum beating, nothing else. We know that an individual reporter's personal agenda, how truthful it would be, will work nowhere, since he too is in the live loop of survival.

Thus I could find my friend no wrong. And I had no reasons to be injured not even for a scratch.

Even so I was sad, taken aback at the good reasoned policy of a Newspaper. Possibly my friend was furthering his 'Balancing' tactic which I didn't hold up. 'Balance' is not synonymous to fair, and not an easy way either to avoid reality reporting. The 'Balance', I consider, is the most treacherous act since it shirks the responsibility to inform readers. A newspaper has to inform, and inform what it believes in. So I expected my friend's daily to be either 'anti-CPM' or 'pro- Mamta', and not both, in which objectivity gets the beating resulting slow growth or no growth in paper's readership scale.

Objective reporting is considered to be the face of neutrality, since objectivity ensures an appropriate standard which is fairness and accuracy. And many believe these days true objectivity is never possible in a media since now-a-days, in most cases media is a 'purposeful business', a front line business proposition. Readers or no readers.