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One might argue that the headline is misleading; that India has always had a fourth estate, a free press - so where is the relevance of the word arrival?
It is the rash of investigative stories across all media in all languages that prompts us to suggest that we are witness to a freer fourth estate than we have seen hitherto. A fourth estate that believes that it is clearly more responsible to the Third Estate of the country rather than to the First and Second estates.
It is not as if the news media suddenly had a change of heart: the new news media we see has virtually had the role thrust upon them by the realities of the market place and the realities of commerce.
The news in the public domain is news that every journalist has access to. This can never be an area for a differentiator, as deadlines force writers to file stories as soon as possible, leaving little room for comment and analysis. There is no alternative for competing newspapers and competing news channels to investigative journalism, as has been made evident during the last one year. The more public and more successful the target of the story in question, the greater the attention and brand building for the publication or channel that carries it.
The change, therefore, is not just for the readers of the newspapers or viewers of the channel; the change is most significant for those in power. Unused as they are to an aggressive media that is not cowed down by threats, they are reacting in ways that we, as a society, are finding difficult to digest: by resorting to threats and violence.
Katharine Graham, former publisher of the Washington Post when the Watergate scandal broke, called the story "A Turning Point for a Nation and a Newspaper". The Watergate expose, at that time, went way beyond that which America was used to seeing - and the reaction of the establishment was so as well. A few paragraphs from the book "Personal History" by Graham will give readers a sense of how difficult this story was in the making, and how unprepared the Nixon administration was for it's revelations:
Two weeks later, a seminal Bernstein and Woodward article appeared on Page 1 of The Post. They had dug up information that there was a secret fund at CRP that was controlled by five people, one of whom was then-Attorney General John Mitchell, and which was to be used to gather intelligence on the Democrats. Thus the story reached a new level.
In an effort to check it out, Bernstein called Mitchell directly, reaching him at a hotel in New York, where Mitchell answered the phone himself. When Carl told him about the story, Mitchell exploded with an exclamation of "JEEEEEEESUS," so violent that Carl felt it was "some sort of primal scream" and thought Mitchell might die on the telephone. After he'd read him the first two paragraphs, Mitchell interrupted, still screaming, "All that crap, you're putting it in the paper? It's all been denied. Katie Graham's gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that's published. Good Christ! That's the most sickening thing I ever heard."
Bernstein was stunned and called Ben Bradlee at home to read him Mitchell's quotes. Ben told Carl to use it all except the specific reference to my "tit." The quote was changed to read that I was "gonna get caught in a big fat wringer." Ben decided he didn't have to forewarn me. (Later he told me, "That was too good to check with you, Katharine." I would have agreed with Ben's decision.) As it was, I was shocked to read what I did in the paper, but even more so to hear what Mitchell had actually said, so personal and offensive were the threat and the message. It was quite a temper tantrum on Mitchell's part -- and especially strange of him to call me Katie, which no one has ever called me. Bob Woodward later observed that the interesting thing for him was that Mitchell's remark was an example of the misperception on the part of the Nixon people that I was calling all the shots. In any case, the remark lived on in the annals of Watergate and was one of the principal public links of me with the affair. Pressure Points
In October, the tempo of the whole story picked up. The Post printed an article that described the original break-in as part of a massive, nationwide campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted in behalf of the president's reelection efforts and directed by White House and reelection committee officials.
That day Ziegler began his morning briefing at the White House charging that "stories are being run that are based on hearsay, innuendo, guilt by association. . . . [I]t goes without saying that this administration does not condone sabotage or espionage or surveillance of individuals." That same afternoon, Clark McGregor, Nixon's campaign chairman, said that The Post's "credibility has today sunk lower than that of George McGovern," the Democrat running against Nixon.
During these months, the pressures on The Post to cease and desist were intense and uncomfortable. I was feeling beleaguered. Many of my friends were puzzled about our reporting. Joe Alsop was pressing me all the time. And I had a distressing chance meeting with Henry Kissinger just before the election. "What's the matter? Don't you think we're going to be reelected?" Henry asked me. Readers, too, were writing to me, accusing The Post of ulterior motives, bad journalism, lack of patriotism.
Nixon's campaign to undermine public confidence in The Post was intensifying. The investigation of such a tangled web of crime, money, and mischief was made much harder given the unveiled threats and harassment by a president and his administration. Bearing the full brunt of presidential wrath is always disturbing. Sometimes I wondered if we could survive four more years of this kind of strain.
I particularly loathed reports that personalized the whole dispute, implying that some sort of personal vendetta had poisoned the relationship between The Post and the administration. I had already begun to hear a chorus of rumors concerning my own feelings about Nixon, a chorus that warmed up with some help from Sen. Bob Dole, who made a charge, picked up and carried all over the airwaves, saying I had told a friend that I hated Nixon. Dole made the leap to saying that that was the reason The Post was writing all the negative Watergate stories.
The politicians in power in India will be as uncomfortable about revelations of corruption, impropriety or involvement in crime as Rickard Nixon and his cohorts were, and the news media has recently demonstrated that they will not succumb to intimidation and legal action. But they are discovering that it is becoming increasingly difficult to go after what the industry calls "document stories", the Right to Information Act notwithstanding.
The issue is no different in America - hear it from Bob Woodward, one half of the team that brought down Nixon:
"The big worry that we should have about the country is not terrorism or hurricanes or Karl Rove or George Bush or whoever, the real thing that will bring us down as a country is secret government," Woodward said in an interview with First Amendment Center Founder John Seigenthaler.
"There is a lot of discussion about our business - are we too intrusive? You know what, we are not intrusive enough," Woodward said. He also criticized what he called "this period of red-state, blue-state journalism," in which he said the press tends to go beyond reporting straight facts and into "judging and predicting" in