Suddenly, the telecom regulatory authority of India (TRAI) is in news. Big time. As if the idea of cutting roaming charges for cellular service and putting a 12-minute cap on advertisements on TV channels were not enough, the regulatory body’s chairman, Rajiv Khullar, now wants to play hawk-eye on the media industry in the “public interest”.

In an interview with The Hindu, published on June 19, Khullar said TRAI is “all set to recommend the creation of an ‘institutional buffer between corporate owners and newspaper management’ to the government”. According to Khullar, TRAI, which regulates the broadcasting industry, will also suggest ways to restrict cross-media ownership in line with practices in ‘most other established democracies’.

TRAI, Khullar told the paper (read the interview here), plans to create a buffer between corporate owners of media houses and the editorial management. The regulatory body is working on the principle that the two must be separated to protect any conflict of interest. While explaining that he has no problem with corporate entities investing in the media, Khullar pointed out, “The problem arises when the corporates want to abuse the media it controls to project a coloured point of view for vested interests. There is a conflict of interest here.”

Coincidentally, an opinion piece by Arindam Sengupta, executive editor of The Times of India, appeared in the paper the same day (read it here).

Sengupta not only countered most points made by Khullar, he also said the move is part of a “slew of measures” taken by the government in recent times – steps that “cumulatively pose as grave a threat to the country's free media as the infamous muzzling of the press during the Emergency.”

The latest moves, he contended, “coincided with the media exposing a series of scams and, given the dangerous combination of corruption, crony capitalism and misrule, going from being active to activist.

The contention here is not whether Sengupta is overtly harsh on TRAI, it is about the latter’s attempt to perhaps sneak its nose in where it might officially have a mandate at jurisdiction but is not exactly the domain area.

The most significant point raised by Khullar is the need to put up an “institutional buffer” between the owners/management and the editorial department of a media house to avoid a “conflict of interest”.

Now, if you cull out the moneybags and want to create a buffer between the management and editorial in the so-called fourth pillar of democracy, why not apply the same logic to even the first and second pillars of democracy as well? Why not create a similar buffer between industrialists and ministers in the cabinet? Why not a buffer between moneybags/industry owners and the ‘aam’ parliamentarian?

Why, for instance, should a Praful Patel be part of the cabinet in that case? Is it not a “conflict of interest”, in the super-sanctimonious sense of the word of course?

Or why, for that matter, and again only for the sake of example, make Navin Jindal or an Anil Ambani a member of parliament? They being owners of “corporate”, why is it par for the course to assume they would not “want to abuse” the power they enjoy as MPs “to project a coloured point of view for vested interests”? And, in this case, their own “vested interests”?

And why is it par for the course to those corporate owners and other moneybags running the fourth estate would invariably want to misuse the power in their hands?

And in there lies the second problem with Khullar’s assumptive theory of ‘conflict of interest’, the childish sanctity, inadvertent or otherwise, accorded to the media and thereby create problems of funding. While the government seems least interested in nourishing the first and second pillars of democracy – the executive and the legislature – by creating and empowering the lokpal system – it seems overtly concerned in its apparent bid to save democracy by ensuring that its fourth pillar – the media – does not gather rust and moss by getting too close to people who might corrupt it with their vested interests.

What is singularly striking is the fact that all political parties seem united in what Sengupta infers as throttling of the media. So much so that they are ready to open up every sector of the country to foreign investment – barring confusion and conflict raised by some parties in a few sectors deemed too ‘sacred’ to be touched by phoren money – but keep a cap on FDI in Indian media.

There is no reason to imagine Indian media would be swayed and washed away by foreign ones if they come to invest in the media sector here. If the scared-of-the-burra-sahib attitude isn’t funny enough, it’s churlish to imagine anyone thinking that foreign media can come with their ships and torpedo the little brown men fishing in their small boats in the creeks by the high sea – like the East India Company did once.

A corollary to this is the domestic fundraising by the media to keep the presses and the OB vans running. As Sengupta raised the pertinent point: while the few top guns can keep their ships afloat, at least on a medium to longish range of timeframe, it’s the relatively less-circulated, less-seen and low-investment newspapers and TV channels, and radio stations, that would stare at closure if, following Khullar’s idea, the screws are tightened too much on the moneybags and they beat a hasty retreat from the media houses.

What the government wants, as Sengupta rightly points out, is perhaps to keep all the power to choke the media so that the channels and the newspapers and magazines think twice before reporting on or analysing a development deemed anti-establishment by some. Only, the likes of TRAI and Khullar, and in a way the government, is using the word ‘check’ when they actually mean ‘choke’. Ergo the threat of stopping the government advertisements to organizations deemed wayward, as Sengupta points out.

No, Mr Khullar, we journalists are just about as much concerned about the freedom of our profession as you are. But we are also concerned about how and where the money would come to pay for doing stories that “ensure the independence of TV channels and the print media to articulate impartial, free and fair editorial policy”, as you put it.

And we are also concerned about our pay cheque at the end of each month, for it is neither sensible nor advisable to ask the government to foot the bill for that.