Journalism never fails to excite controversy-for the simple reason that everyone encounters it in some form. In recent times, changes in the journalistic field have been so breathtaking that old rules no longer seem to apply and new ones are either being codified or implemented without any code or sanction.

After print came television, which vastly influenced the former. No sooner were journalists and their paymasters coping with the immediacy and the dramatic nature of the new medium than they were surprised by the advent of the Internet, which was still in the process of evolving as a news medium.

JOURNALISM: TRUTH OR DARE? By Ian Hargreaves Oxford University Press Price: $19.95 Pages: 294

In India, television and technology have combined to change the character of the mainstream print media. There is some confusion and much exploration in the broadsheets' attempt to become tabloids in trying to match television and newsmagazines and court readers by "dumbing down" their coverage. With one honourable exception, staff foreign correspondents have been largely withdrawn and world coverage for the better part consists of celebrity news or the exploits of the Indian diaspora when the broadsheets are not beating their own drums or those of their spin-off ventures.

In the Internet arena in India, the most dramatic advent-and near demise-has been of the Tehelka website which broke the story of corruption in high places. Most newspapers and magazines have been compelled to make their publications available on the web to reach a wider audience.

In this timely volume, Journalism: Truth or Dare?, Ian Hargreaves, former editor of The Independent, London, among his other assignments, has taken time to give a bird's eye view of journalism in the West as it has sought to cope with technology and interlopers. There are no longer the great, cigar-chomping, autocratic newspaper owners lending their weight to politicians and causes while firing editors at their whim and fancy. The media owner today is more likely to be a corporation or several companies zealously promoting their shareholders' dividends.

The United States remains the progenitor of most of the worthier and unsavoury aspects of the profession. For one thing, digital technology has altered the manner news is consumed. The US newsroom budgets have been cut and corporate mergers are the norm. The result is the trivialisation of news by television networks and the public's diminishing engagement with news.

The problem of the Big Brother assumes special importance during war. As I discovered in the 1960s in Vietnam, American journalists find it difficult to separate their brand of patriotism from professional duties. Witness the partisan coverage of the US television channels in the post-9/11 phase and, more recently, in the Iraq war which initiated the evil of the "embedded" journalist. (Fox News made no claim to impartiality in covering the war but even a CNN anchor called the American soldiers fighting in Iraq liberators.) Tellingly, the average soundbite on American television news has fallen from 42 seconds to 8 seconds, and American newspapers devote 2 per cent space to foreign news as against 20 per cent two decades ago. There are, of course, worthy exceptions.

One finds a bright spot in broadcasting in Europe. The BBC is state-funded as are, indeed, many radio and TV stations in the continent, which operate under written guidelines. The quality of their programmes suggests that they are not snowed under by purely commercial considerations. The accent on celebrities and triviality is sure to retain readers; American newspaper readers have fallen from 81 per cent in 1964 to 55 per cent in 2000. And newspapers everywhere are struggling to maintain circulation and their share of marketing revenue against electronic competition.

For journalists, the increasing sophistication of the hidden and the not-so-hidden persuaders makes their reporting tasks that much more difficult. Spin doctors like those employed by Britain's Tony Blair, the author suggests, lead to the erosion of trust, damaging politics, business, public relations and journalism.

The one lesson that comes through in this readable book is that, whatever the technology, the excellence of a publication or a television, or radio station or a news website depends on the integrity, honesty and professionalism of the journalist.