A Footnote of Regret for a Full Front Page of Fiction is Not Enough

On Saturday, September 12, The Hindu dedicated its front page to a convicted rapist's defence. The advertisement, "What is Dera Sacha Sauda? (Facts vs Fiction)," ran beneath the paper's own masthead and did exactly the opposite of what the newspaper would do in its news pages. The advertisement posed its own question about whether Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh had been the target of a conspiracy, and answered, "Yes, absolutely." It asked whether his repeated paroles amounted to VIP treatment. "No, not at all," was the reply. Dainik Bhaskar ran the identical advertisement in Hindi the same day. Both papers tucked a small disclaimer at the bottom disowning any editorial hand in what was splashed above it.

The outrage against The Hindu was overwhelming, even as the memory of the same ad in Dainik Bhaskar quietly slipped into the shadows. That’s telling: The Hindu has earned a certain reputation and credibility for its fairly independent editorial position, ethics and authentic reportage. Readers hold it to high standards. They have no such expectations of several other newspapers, and this betrays an overall lack of faith in the news industry.

By Sunday morning, The Hindu had published a front-page apology calling the advertisement "deeply offensive" and apologising to its readers without qualification. To its credit, the apology ran on the front page of every edition, not only the ones that had carried the original advertisement. Two days later, the paper went further, announcing it would not bill Dera Sacha Sauda for the advertisement at all, a gesture it called "essentially symbolic," meant to signal that it did not want to profit from an ad it had already called offensive.

Seems like a tidy ending to the story: mistake made, responsibility owned, and amends made. At least, that’s what some, including credible journalists, believe. Others are busy hunting for premeditated motives in Hindu’s editorial team, and that’s also problematic.

No Routine Error

Newspapers, however credible, are prone to making errors all the time. Grueling deadlines, constantly pouring information, sudden shifts in news patterns, and daily stresses of collating and processing accurate information make it pressingly difficult to maintain perfection. There is always a case of a misleading headline, a misspelt word that alters the meaning, a photograph mixed up, or even unverified information.

When that happens, professional editors are quick to issue a correction, an apology, and even an explanation for the error. But the Dera Sacha Sauda ad was no regular error. It was an unabashed eulogisation of a rape convict. 

Ram Rahim was convicted of raping two women disciples by a special CBI court in 2017 and continues to serve the 20-year sentence. He was separately convicted in 2019 of murdering the journalist who first published his accusers' allegations but this conviction was overturned earlier this year by the Punjab and Haryana High Court overturned this March, and is now under challenge by the journalist's son before the Supreme Court. He is also being prosecuted over allegations that he orchestrated the forced castration of hundreds of followers. When the 2017 rape verdict came down, his followers went on a violent rampage, killing 36 people and burning the vehicles of dozens of journalists who had covered the trial. None of this made it into "Facts vs Fiction."

Instead, the ad offered a parallel narrative from the organisation with impressive-sounding figures, that nobody had counted:  7.5 crore people "freed from addiction," 35.4 crore trees planted, 33.85 lakh units of blood donated.

Ram Rahim has been released on parole or furlough 17 times since 2020, spending roughly 435 of those days outside prison, a fact The Hindu's own reporters had documented months earlier. The advertisement didn't dispute that record. It simply asked readers to imagine a non-existing ‘reality’.

Who is responsible?

In all fairness to the Hindu editors, the editorial and advertising departments do not run as one desk. Though the advertisement department is often given broad guidelines about what can or cannot cross the sales desk, it would be preposterous to assume that an editor personally vets every advertisement coming in and was in the loop – willingly sacrificing editorial credibility for profits. It's also fair to note that clients are usually billed only after an advertisement runs, so there's no clear evidence that anyone at The Hindu saw this coming.

XX-Size versus Size Extra Small

While it is important to note that The Hindu was quick with an apology, something that Dainik Bhaskar has yet to do, the apology and the non-billing announcement are not proportionate to the blunder. A full-page ad one day and a few sentences in a 6-8-centimeter box the next day don’t quite square up. That this single-column apology was positioned in the centre deck, low enough for a rapid reader to easily miss, further tilts the balance.

Even more glaringly, nothing in that apology addresses the specific claims (made in the ad) it never actually rebuts. Not a word about Dera Sacha Sauda’s so-called conspiracy theory, the VIP-treatment denial, or its self-proclaimed achievements. Equally, it did not address the question of why it happened and who signed off on Page 1 for a discredited client.

An apology that doesn't name and correct a single claim, or pin the blame, isn't a correction. It's a camouflage that hides a case of lack of accountability and transparency. The basic essence of independent journalism is to speak for the powerless and hold the powerful to account. A newspaper that constantly raises questions of accountability and transparency to the powerful cannot be seen as evading those same questions.

That The Hindu later decided not to send a bill doesn’t make it any holier, even though it may give it a clear conscience. It just ends up as an unpaid favour to the Dera. The advertisement did its work the moment it was printed – it presented a rape convict and murder accused as an innocent victim.

A more suitable and dignified response expected of an organization like Hindu would have been a front-page editorial that spelt out the newspaper’s stand on Ram Rahim and Dera Sacha Sauda and offered an explicit explanation for the mistake. The front page the next day should have additionally splashed an investigation nailing the lie of the advertisement.

The Larger Underlying Failure

There’s also a need to look at the broader underlying failure rather than turning it into a one-newspaper scandal. And that is: advertising revenue pulling a serious newspaper toward claims a paper's own reporters would never let go unchallenged. This failure is all-pervasive in the newspaper industry. It shows up wherever the advertiser is powerful enough to buy the space.

Few years ago, the Indian Express carried an Uttar Pradesh government advertorial listing the state's infrastructure achievements, illustrated in part with a photograph of a Kolkata flyover the state government hadn't actually built. Similarly, the paper corrected the image and called the error regrettable, but the underlying claim of achievement went untouched. Communally biased ads have also made it to the pages of newspapers and have been shrugged off without a whimper.

Advertisements are claims that are often unverified. Government advertising – one on which much of the newspaper industry relies - routinely misrepresents facts and often makes claims that are in sharp contradiction of the publishing newspaper’s own investigative reporting. No disclaimer can resolve that contradiction. When the business and editorial interests do not align, the newspapers end up offering two versions of the same issue and the readers are left to draw their own conclusions.

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: Newspapers are heavily reliant on advertisements. Newsprint economics have been brutal for years, and advertisements help recover the costs. So, how do credible newspapers committed to independent journalism keep up? Refusing advertisements exacts a price that can be incremental.

Had Hindu refused to entertain the Dera Sacha Sauda ad on principle, the tainted organisation would have simply walked to another office – well illustrated by the fact that Dainik Bhaskar took the same money and has paid no visible price for it. A newsroom's conscience isn't much of a defence against misleading ads if the rest of the market doesn't share it. And there’s more: refuse an ad and a whole line-up of advertisements from intermediary agencies or government sometimes gets impacted. That’s how the industry works. The newspaper may have the courage to refuse an advertisement but not enough resources to sustain the institution.

Moment of Reflection

The present controversy instead could be turned into a moment of reflection. The advertisement-driven revenue model virtually puts up valuable columns of a newspaper for sale. That’s very different from journalism that exists alongside this space. The newspaper invests its columns to gain profits so that journalism can continue. A misleading ad can undo all that hard work. Can the industry think of better revenue-oriented investments it can make for reaping profits without being burdened by the compelling need to circulate lies, falsehoods and half-truths on behalf of their advertising clients?

Until the search for viable alternative revenue models, the newspapers need to reflect on how advertising content can get some basic minimal oversight from the editorial team, rather than letting the advertising and editorial teams work in silos. When a full page is dedicated to a convict’s defence, and a mini-sized ambiguous apology is tendered to atone for that sin, the more important thing to do is not to keep the scandal alive through criticism. It is to reflect on a flawed newspaper governance model and what can be done about it.