An Evolving Relationship Between Media And Diplomacy: Menon

The shift in the relationship between journalists and diplomats, and how politics and technology might be affecting it.

This was the question that Shivshankar Menon, former national security advisor and foreign secretary, explored on 66 Wednesday in his keynote address at the 25th Business Standard Seema Nazareth Award for Excellence in Journalism 2023.

The award is given each year to journalists of Business Standard under 30.

Peppered with anecdotes from his stint in China, where diplomats and journalists collaborated to get past the great Chinese information wall, Menon said, "In scarcity and adversity, we all worked together, and shared information." "I first became aware of the role of journalism in diplomacy in Beijing in the early 1970s during the last furious, or rather hectic, days of the Cultural Revolution," he recounted.

This trust between the practitioners of foreign policy and journalists remained strong, he said, when he returned to New Delhi after the Emergency. Confidences were respected, and there was an understanding that we were on the same Indian side, dealing with a complex, and sometimes hostile, world, Menon said.

In the 42 years of speaking to the press, he said, it was only twice that something said in confidence was attributed to him in public. "That is a remarkable record of trust and professionalism," he said, clarifying that this did not amount to collusion or to a media that didn't do its job of speaking truth to power or exposing inconvenient truths or reflecting objective reality. The media, he said, was ready to hold the government to account, especially in the days after the Emergency.

Besides, the government and politicians back then were less sensitive about criticism, Menon noted. "This sensitivity on the part of the government to journalistic opinion was also due to the fact that many politicians on both sides of the aisle had been journalists themselves -Atal Bihari Vajpayee, LK Advani, PV Narasimha Rao," he said.