PressEthic

A few months ago, JAM (a "youth magazine" in India) ran a story tearing apart the credibility of the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM), a business school (with multiple campuses) that competes with the IIMs (Indian Institutes of Management, the most well-respected b-schools in the country). The article challenged advertisements put out by IIPM, which relied heavily on supposedly official rankings (the Outlook-c fore rankings 2003) to place it near the top of the pile of b-schools. By doing some apparently thorough investigation, the writers for JAM discredited IIPM based on the rankings, their description of the campuses, their fee structure and faculty.

In early August, a blogger named Gaurav Sabnis, having read this article about IIPM, added his two cents worth -- rather scathingly and without JAM's journalistic tone. But then again, it was his personal blog and, as a self-publisher, nobody should be able to police your content or language, right? Well, in Sabnis's case, it turned out that the assumption didn't hold.

A war of words exploded across the Indian blogosphere. Sabnis and Rashmi Bansal (JAM's editor) were blasted from one end by IIPM supporters (some who stooped to name calling and other profanities) and from the other end, they received support. But it didn't end there. IIPM was, perhaps naturally, outraged. They served both Sabnis and Bansal with legal notices (Sabnis reproduces his here).

But, for Sabnis, the drama intensified. IIPM allegedly called the higher ups at IBM (where Sabnis worked) and complained about his blog! And then they went a step further. They threatened IBM saying that if Sabnis didn't remove his posts about the institute, the IIPM Students Union would burn their Thinkpads outside the IBM office in Delhi (apparently, IIPM buys a whole lot of IBM laptops every year...the Indian Express newspaper reports that it's as many as 2,000). While insisting that his bosses never pressured him to do anything, Sabnis decided to resign from IBM on October 10th, feeling that he had put the company in an uncomfortable position and that, at the same time, he wasn't willing to just pull the posts:

Firstly, my intention to stand by my posts, since I believe in freedom of speech. I have written nothing that can be thought of as libel. IIPM is an organisation in free India which makes some claims in its advertisements. What I did was exercise my right as a citizen, by responding to the information contained in the ad. I stand by it.

The second thing dear to me is IBM's well-being.

There are many questions that spring to mind about all of this, the most obvious, to me, was: why didn't IIPM just publish a rejoinder, pointing out factual inaccuracies (if indeed there were any) instead of resorting to bullying and threatening? That in itself is extremely suspicious -- and leads one to assume that what was printed about them was, in fact, irrefutable. The legal notices claim that the reputation of the institute was tarnished, but not once does anyone at IIPM try to convince us (the audience) that anything said was unfair. Sabnis says, in one of his blogs, that if they had sent a simple email proving him wrong, he would have apologized and eaten his words immediately.

And I guess the bigger issue is that of freedom of expression. Can bloggers say absolutely anything on their personal blogs? Is that ethical? And if not, what are the consequences?

And finally, I read a take on the controversy that was critical of Sabnis's use of language in his IIPM-related blog. The writer says:

If blogs are to be taken seriously as an alternative medium, they should measure up to the standards of accountability and reliability of the mainstream media that the bloggers so deplore.

I see his point. And I think that if blogs are trying to be an alternative source of news, they should definitely live up to the standards imposed on mainstream media -- though, there's so much abuse of these so-called standards by the mainstream media, I wonder if it's even worth mentioning!