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•AASTHA MANOCHA: When you returned to the New York Times, it was going through a credibility crisis. How did you go about correcting the situation?

It was a funny occasion in my life because a lot of people who were not particularly distressed to see me leave, welcomed me back like some kind of reborn saint. My theme when I returned was that we are just going back to work and we are going to do things the way we know was the right way to do them and stop talking about ourselves. I thought my task was to get the New York Times to forget about the New York Times for a little while. It was 2003 and America was already in Iraq. I was also trying to push authority down, because one of the features of the previous regime was that there were a lot of edicts out there and people were afraid to do things without making sure that the guys on top were going to approve it in advance. So I was trying to get people to calm down and do their work in the way they are supposed to.

•AASTHA MANOCHA: What do you have to say about the difference in philosophy between you and your successor, Howell Raines?

I wasn’t there when he was there. I’ve not exchanged a word with him since all this happened. So I don’t really know what happened then. He wrote about what he thought the differences in our philosophy were, and I refer you to that. I think that if we had actually talked, there would have been a fair amount that we would have agreed on and he would have been surprised. I have been very careful not to say a word about him since all this happened and that’s my plan for the rest of my life.

•COOMI KAPOOR: What is the guiding philosophy of the New York Times which makes it such a standard of excellence in journalism?

Basically, the New York Times covered everything — the whole world, culture, business and finance, sports, everything. And did it in a responsible way with its own reporting and a high standard of journalist excellence. It was a general interest newspaper with a vengeance. Now the New York Times and all other papers are getting smaller because of the finances in the newspaper business and it can’t promise quite as much. It’s shaken in its conviction that people wanted it to weigh the news and say this is what we should be talking about in our country. For myself, it’s still what I want because I don’t have time to spend my whole day at a computer, I don’t want to spend my whole day looking at websites in order to figure out what really matters today. I welcome the gatekeeper who tells me what matters. Today, reporting staffs are getting smaller. Major news organisations that maintain large foreign staffs have gotten smaller. Television networks used to be all over the place — they are in only a few places now. The number of American news organisations that still cover the world the way they covered it in 50 years earlier is two or three. And in the US, it’s also about the number of reporters the national news organisations maintain around the country. It’s just down, down, down.

Meanwhile, the reporters’ days are getting much longer because they are supposed to multi-task and write for the Internet and make a video and do a TV interview and then write their story and revise their story for the late edition. So there’s less time for reporting.

•COOMI KAPOOR: Has television taken over the role of a newspaper’s reporting team?

No, no, television is sort of over. It’s between the Internet and newspapers now. Only newspapers still maintain large reporting organisations but even the New York Times had to announce cuts of over a 100 journalistic positions. They have a staff of over a 1,000 journalists and a large a foreign staff. A website tends to have half a dozen reporters, a couple of websites have a dozen or so reporters, but there’s not one that has a 100 reporters or even 50. So, the new media draws on the content of the old media and if the old media fade away, the new media will not have the robustness to maintain that kind of reporting.

•SANDEEP SINGH: Don’t you think newspapers have failed to engage with people? And why can’t the old and the new media tie up?

I was talking about the amount of reporting going on in the world. And the new media does very little reporting. They don’t break stories. Of all the things that journalism does, I place the highest value on getting the information out, breaking stories, opening new subjects, and so I am concerned about where the reporting is going to come from as newspaper reporting diminishes.

•RIJU DAVE MEHTA: How do you account for the tremendous public interest, worldwide, in the US presidential elections?

It’s been a remarkable American presidential campaign There’s dramatically more public engagement in this year’s presidential campaign than there’s been in American politics for decades. A lot of that has to do with the particularly interesting elements in the campaign: the first woman or the first non-white might be president. But a lot of it has to do with the Internet and the traffic that goes on in the Internet. And people’s swift reactions to everything that happens.

•MINI KAPOOR: Your opinion of Barack Obama?

He is phenomenal. He is a wonderful speaker and he seems to be a man of really good judgment, talking about the need for a new kind of politics, a new kind of engagement in the public. He is the most exciting new personality we’ve seen in my adult life because he’s happened so suddenly.

•RIJU DAVE MEHTA: What do you think about the blurring of lines between news and features?

Well, I don’t know what you mean by features. If you mean features on what Britney Spears was doing yesterday and where Paris Hilton is this week, I don’t regard that as news and, there’s too much of it around.

•RIJU DAVE MEHTA: How does media shape public opinion?

In the new environment, the most important ways newspapers shape opinion is by what they choose to cover and the subjects they go into deeply. People have a lot of sources for opinion these days. I don’t know how to weigh that. Opinion is very nebulous and hard to pin down because a lot of it has to do with whether you heard the news as it happened, or just the recap of it or whether you heard about it on some discussion programme. Were you affected by the incident itself or were you affected by a later comment on it? I am no philosopher of media. My whole life has been involved with getting the story out. I’ve never worried too much about the effects of the story. I don’t think it’s our job to worry about the effects of the story. Our job is to give people information so they have the opportunity of making reasonable judgments.

•SHALINI LANGER: How do you decide the balance between what the people may want to read and what you think the people should be reading? A lot of people want to read about Carla Sarkozy.

I was an editor during the whole dismal Monica Lewinsky thing and we didn’t want to be covering that but obviously, we had no choice. I think you start off by doing what you think matters and then you address the question of what you have to do about Carla Sarkozy on the basis of how new it is. When she was new, you had to something. Now they’ve been married for a while, maybe you don’t have to do much anymore.

•COOMI KAPOOR: So you don’t believe that what the reader wants is what you should give?

I’ve always mistrusted that phrase “the reader wants”, because how do we know exactly what the reader wants? I think you should give the reader a fresh and original paper that’s very well-written and covers all sorts of things —.social trends, fashion, the works but I think you are at your best when you give the reader something the reader wants that the reader didn’t know he or she wanted it till you gave it to her. Nobody is going to abandon you because you went three days in a row without mentioning Sarkozy’s wife.

•PREETI JHA: What advice would you give young reporters?

Don’t get beaten. Figure out what really matters on the beat. Think independently about what’s in front of you. The trouble with editors is that they are influenced in what they demand from reporters by what they read. You have the opportunity to give them something they’ve never read before and another name for that is news.

•KUNAL PRADHAN: After 9/11, a couple of news agencies, especially Reuters, received a lot of flak because they never used and still don’t use the word terrorist. Their philosophy is that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Where do you stood stand on the issue?

I think there is such a thing as terrorism. I have no problem calling Mohammed Atta a terrorist. If you fly an airplane into a building and kill 3,000 people, you qualify. So I am not against the use of the word. But I think it should really be limited to acts of terrorism and organisations that have a consistent pattern of terrorism. I would not mind saying that Hamas has regularly supported and committed terrorist acts. But I think it would be a mistake to call Hamas just a terrorist organisation because it’s many other things — for instance, a political movement that represents a large proportion of people in Gaza at least

•CLAIR MCDOUGALL: Do you think US newspapers cover India well?

I think there are some very good correspondents working in India but my guess is it’s harder to get an India story into an American newspaper today than it was when I was here in the sixties, primarily because there is less space.

•RAJ KAMAL JHA: Is there a story you would like to be done from Delhi that you saw as you travelled through the city?

I have never heard the term ‘encounter cop’ before. In Indian journalism, everybody knows that means a shootout in which some miscreants or witnesses had to disappear. I find that fascinating.

•MANDAKINI GAHLOT: Tell us something about your time as a reporter in India?

I overlapped here with my predecessor, a very distinguished American reporter named Tony Lucas for about half a year. On my first day here, he was off somewhere, and there was a demonstration against cow slaughter in front of Parliament. There were a lot of people on the road. The police told them to disburse. When they didn’t, the police went through the whole British manual on how you deal with a crowd that refuses to disburse and then fired shots in the air and into the crowd from a distance of 30-50 yards. There was havoc — 13 people were killed. Nothing like that had happened since Independence. That was my first story out of India, 36 hours after I arrived here, and it was on top of Page 1 in New York.

A second anecdote: Mrs Gandhi had imposed President’s Rule in West Bengal. I went to interview the governor of West Bengal the afternoon there were demonstrations and cars were being burned outside the building in Kolkata. Later, I heard this story of the French film director Louise Malle who was filming a documentary sequence there: a ministry of information official led Malle up to a police inspector who was in charge of the lathi charge that was to occur outside the building and said to the inspector, “This is Louis Malle, the famous French director, and he requests permission to film your lathi charge.” According to the story, the inspector, a film buff, replied, “I would be honoured to have you film my lathi charge.” I always thought it a good story but I never believed it.

Four or five years later, I went to Kolkata for an article. Early morning, I flew from Delhi to Kolkata. I sat next to a gentleman in the airplane and being loquacious, I told him the Malle story. I ended by saying, “Of course, it must be apocryphal.” He said, “Oh no, I know that inspector. In fact, I am having dinner at his house tonight. Would you like to come?” And I went to the inspector’s house that night, and he confirmed the story and showed me his collection of films. So, I’ve always had a soft spot for Kolkata.

•SAUBHIK CHAKRABARTI: The New York Times took a public position against Murdoch buying the Wall Street Journal. The Indian Express had not opposed it. What is your personal view?

Murdoch is a very smart man but aside from the NYT’s Literary Supplement which I think he probably has forgotten he owns (a little pimple in the whole body of Murdoch’s enterprises), I can’t think of any publication he’s made better. He’s made a lot of publications more profitable but a number of his papers also lose money. The Times in London loses money, the New York Post loses huge amounts of money. It doesn’t bother him because he likes the prestige of owning those papers.

I think his plan for the WSJ is unfortunate and in some ways good. He’s going to change the paper and he sees it as a competitor to NYT. In that sense, I welcome it. But if he moves WSJ more towards becoming a general interest paper, it will obviously be less of a financial paper and less of a concentration of talent, knowledge and experience in that area. So, it’s a bold move and since there was no ownership prepared to defend the WSJ, it became an inevitability. But there is a certain tendency in Murdoch: he is a clever newspaperman and he’s a brilliant entrepreneur but he does tend to cheapen what he owns.

(The transcript was prepared by Irena Akbar.)

editor@expressindia.com

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