KOCHI: A post in X (formerly Twitter) shows Prime Minister Narendra Modi chatting with PTI’s editor-in-chief Vijay Joshi over a worn-out teleprinter. The machine was kept encased in glass to mimic a coveted relic. This was in December 2023.
Some 20 years ago, the machine would have been proudly placed in the agency’s sprawling newsroom where it would spew news stories sent by the reporters and stringers that the agency employed across India
Once a mainstay of newsrooms, teleprinter’s place is now taken up by the television screen mounted high on walls flashing feverish poll-time visuals. The hurry in the TV frames and the sound of the teleprinter are both addictive and irritable. The similarity between newsroom scenes before and after the year 2000 stops there.
“Technology has totally overhauled the system. Till about the mid-90s, we used to carry Fax cards and Teleprinter cards during our election coverage. To get the news to the office, we would have to find a post office, and queue up to send out the news,” says Rajeev P I, whose career spans illustrious years with The Indian Express, India Today, The Times of India, The Hindu and Mathrubhumi.
“The most difficult work was to get pictures across. We used to team up with the staff of route buses and tip them to get the photos to the newspaper office,” Rajeev recalls.
Those were also the days of thorough homework often leading the correspondents to make “kingmaker” observations, says Jagadish Babu, whose career as a political correspondent with Kerala Kaumudi has fetched him interesting anecdotes.
He remembers his article on A Vijayaraghavan’s growth from a child labourer to a promising CPIM candidate from Palakkad during the 1989 Lok Sabha elections. “I felt his story compelling. When he won against the ‘invincible’ V S Vijayaraghavan, there were references to my article being an influencing factor,” he says.
“It was not just reporting, even politics was different. When filmmaker Lenin Rajendran took on K R Narayanan, a three-time winner from Ottappalam, it was not a battle of mudslinging. They might have campaigned against each other in the mornings but in the evenings, they would sit down to share jokes and niceties.”
The lack of facilities prompted more legwork and better networking, which helped even politicians. “I got a whiff of how an inter-party sabotage was being planned to bring down V S Achuthanandan who was fighting for Assembly from Malampuzha. I informed the leader. He later acknowledged that the warning helped to reverse his possible defeat,” Jagadish says. “Those days, political leaders used to call us. Nowadays, I see journalists run behind leaders.”
At the newsdesk, too, election time meant research, data handling, and long hours of work. Researching the candidates or constituencies was an intense process, says Prema Manmadan, who was a senior hand on the desk at Indian Express over two “momentous” decades.
“Those days, libraries were the search engines in place of Google. Other than that, it was our reading and homework that helped. Editors assigned to election pages would be those with an acumen for the beat,” she says.
Prema began her career in the late 70s when pagemaking still had to be done the traditional way by page setters on beds using stones. On election days, the process would involve astute crosschecking and proofing, she says, remembering some of her veteran colleagues, now no more.
The cardinal rule
When it comes to poll coverage, even in the current digital age, it is still the TV that rules the roost. But the mother of all TV election coverage has exclusively been Doordarshan, which was opened in Thiruvananthapuram in the 1980s.
K Kunhikrishnan, DD Thiruvananthapuram’s first director, stresses the gatekeeping role that media played those days, filtering out any aberrations to journalism’s cardinal rule of objectivity.
“The first election we covered was in 1987. We had a strong election code as well as a broadcast code that did not allow any kind of bias to enter our news network. A committee was set up to ensure this.”
He remembers an instance when the committee had struck down a reference that V S Achuthanandan had included in his address about an unproved corruption deal by his rival. “Achuthanandan was furious and stormed into my room. We stood our ground. Later, he agreed to make the required amends to his speech,” recalls Kunhikrishnan.
Nowadays, the bias is blatant in coverages, he adds. “You watch a debate and the political tilt is obvious.”
The pioneer also recollects managing the broadcast of the 1989 general elections, which saw V P Singh topple Rajiv Gandhi and become the PM.
“The coverage was very well-planned. We recruited about 50 people specially trained to cover the elections,” he says.
The 1989 elections were also aided by hot-switching centres across the country. “There was non-stop election coverage spanning 60 hours. During election results, all other programmes would remain cancelled. The end product was world-class,” Kunhikrishnan says.
Armed with the grand success of the 1989 polls, the DD team took to the coverage of the 1991 Assembly polls in Kerala. The LDF had won the 1987 elections and E K Nayanar, who was sworn in, made the first policy announcement on DD. The practice was followed by Karunakaran in 1991 when UDF struck back.
“What we did in 1987 was with minimal facilities. The 1991 coverage had the backing of better connectivity. We had relay centres in Kozhikode and Kochi, decreasing our dependence on Post and Telegraph department’s microwave links for feeding videos.”
Compiling data
Data collation was the biggest challenge when there was no digital support. Most newspapers had an election desk with people assigned to take the calls of reporters deployed at the counting centres and press offices. “It was all manual. They would take down whatever came, make a report, and pass it on,” says Prema.
This work was more intense for news agencies, as agency reports were used for cross-checking. “We had to be fast. No one would get leave or off days on election counting days. We would have hotline facilities in election control rooms from where our reporters would give us news, which would be taken down by three or four people who would prepare huge spreadsheets to enter data. Based on this, reports would be made and sent as flashes and news stories,” says Ravindran Nayar, who was the regional manager of UNI.
Getting accurate data also meant tuning into the All India Radio (AIR) news bulletins. “There would be updates in between news readings. Something like the breaking news or flashes of today,” says D Pradeep Kumar, former assistant director of AIR. The grassroots-level reach of the medium warranted that AIR be a stickler for accuracy, he adds.
Ensuring the press coverage remained free and fair meant working twice as hard under conditions twice as tough, say the veterans. Yet, work was fun and the experiences fulfilling enough to be keepsakes of an era bygone.