The pressmen and pressmachines

- By H.Y. Sharada Prasad
Not all editors read their own newspapers. Their day is rather full of appointments such as an off-the-record palaver with a minister or party leader or an interview with a visiting fireman for a television channel or a sundowner with a business magnate. It is with difficulty that they find time to run through the leading article their editorial writer might have prepared. Their main concern as editors is not to let their competitors walk away with too many beats or exclusives. With so many preoccupations, they are too busy to notice mistakes that might have crept into their paper unless their attention has been drawn to them.

There are some editorial fuss-pots, however, who have a low tolerance level as far as mistakes are concerned. They do not make a distinction between minor typographical errors or not-so-minor mistakes of fact. They view them all as a personal affront to their competence and even to their character. I recall two such editors with some nostalgia from my newspaper days more than 50 years ago in good old Bombay. Claude Scott and J.D. Ewing were editors, one following the other, of the National Standard, whose name was later changed to the Indian Express.

Temperamentally Scott and Ewing were far apart, but they had one thing in common. When they came to the office at 9.30 they brought with them "the marked paper" which showed they had gone through every single line of the morning’s product including the market and sport pages, and marked out every mistake of spelling, syntax and usage. Before lunch-time, this marked paper would be circulated in the editorial department with the editor’s comments. I was told this was the prevalent practice in London’s Fleet Street.

The marked paper taught our reporters to be more circumspect in reporting court cases and political allegations and it taught the sub-editors to avoid stuffiness in headlines and intros. Both gentlemen did this with such humour that the offenders did not feel humiliated. They were both champions of plain prose and disapproved of pedantry not only in the news pages but also in the editorial comments. "Do you expect your reader to carry a dictionary around with him?" they would ask. Another point which they impressed on us was the need to avoid the use of slang. A bicycle was not to be referred to as a bike or a microphone as the mike. Children should not be called kids, as that would amount to insinuating that their parents were goats.

A basic rule in sub-editing is that levity or cleverness must be avoided when reporting serious events. A standard example given in text-books of journalism is that if there is a building collapse involving many deaths, you should not say "Sons of Toil Buried/ Under Tons of Soil."

One other rule commended to journalists is that when they have written a headline, they must, at the stage of revision or proof-reading, look at it as how it might appear to a mischievous or perverse reader. This piece of advice came back to me when I saw the following heading given to an editorial in a leading national newspaper recently: "Making Water/ A Basic Right"
If the awkward ambiguity of this heading does not strike you at once, try to read the heading aloud, the first time giving a longer pause after the first word, and the second time giving the longer pause after the second word. The first will mean conferring the status of a fundamental right on accessibility to water. A second, and a wicked, meaning arises when "making water" is treated as a unit. In everyday conversational English, "to make water" is to urinate, and that would create the impression that this respected newspaper believes that the citizen has the basic right to piss anywhere and everywhere!

Responsible newspapermen have always believed that journalism implies a two-way communication between editor and reader. Freedom of the press involves not merely the rights of the men and women who run the media, but of the readers or listeners or viewers as well.
Recently the Hindu introduced an innovation. It has appointed a Readers’ Editor whose function is to correct errors that might have caused confusion in the readers’ minds and issue clarifications in the interests of fair reporting. Every day a column is published on the page facing the editorial page (op-ed page as it is called) under the heading "Corrections and Clarifications." In it the newspaper candidly acknowledges its mistakes pointed out by readers and discovered on its own. The column published in the Hindu on April 11 included seven items. One of them said that a reader had pointed out that the paper had erred in describing the SSBN Typhoon-class nuclear submarine as US-built, whereas it was built by Russians. Another item corrected a mistake committed by the Press Trust of India which had identified Mr M.C. Bhandari as the United Arab Emirates ambassador, whereas he was India’s ambassador to UAE.

The column has so far not published letters from readers challenging the opinions of the paper. It is presumably thought that that is the province of "The Letters to the Editor" column.
With a practised proof-reader’s eye I spotted a rather hilarious typo in the Bangalore edition of the Hindu of April 11. A report on page 5 quoted the new advocate-general of Karnataka, Mr Uday Holla, as saying that he knew Mr F.S. Nariman, the Supreme Court advocate, and Mr B.N. Narasimha Murthy, the former advocate-general of the state, and "both were men of impeachable character and integrity," and an example for the younger generation. I waited for five days to see whether the paper had apologised to the two legal luminaries, and whether any alert reader had pulled up the paper. But no.

If you hear people complaining that there are more mistakes these days even in the leading newspapers, don’t brush it aside as the incorrigible gripe of grumbletonians. The fact is that as technology progresses the scope for mistakes also grows. Computers have taken over the pressroom. The concept of a senior looking at the "copy" produced by juniors has become obsolete. Editorial departments are run horizontally and not vertically. There is a touching faith in the infallibility of the "spell-check" provided by the machine. When memory, grammar and experience — three things that old professionals loved to claim — are at a discount, don’t be surprised that the avoidable becomes inevitable.

H.Y. Sharada Prasad was adviser to Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi