MEDIA MATTERS
Ambiguous role
SEVANTI NINAN
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The contribution of media houses to the fortunes of political parties is yet to be comprehensively studied.
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Photo: K. Ananthan
In the Spotlight: Media exposure is no guarantee of success in elections.
DO politicians need the media? The answer from Tamil Nadu is yes, at least they think they do, and if the captive media house that was around falls out of favour for some reason another one has to be found, as quickly as possible.
The answer from U.P. is no, at least not to win an election. There was a captive media house for the Samajwadi Party, Sahara, there was a lot of advertising deployed, both print and television, and none of it gave this party the definitive edge. Then there was the so-called national media, including Doordarshan, obediently trailing Rahul Gandhi but they achieved no miracles for him. The decisive edge went to the party which did not even have a visible media cell, let alone advertisements in the newspapers or on television. And which, according to subsequent post mortems, even shunned the local cable TV discussions which the other candidates welcomed as a platform.
Hark back to the national elections of 2004 and it is a similar story. The BJP has always had a phalanx of journalists and media owners on its side, and in the build up to that election it had a television campaign spread over four months. In media build up it had the edge. But the advantage went to a party that did not have this edge. Rajiv Gandhi in 1989 started deploying Doordarshan in May for a November election. It did not help his party. Those who were able to form a government had had no access to the only TV channel of that period.
Useful tool
But elections apart, a captive TV channel can be useful in sustaining exposure for someone when he is out of power, or in building up a newcomer to politics as in the case of Dayanidhi Maran. Sun TV has done both successfully. When Jayalalitha arrested Karunanidhi it just took one satellite TV channel to make the arrest an issue, nationwide, and the image of that late night arrest remains burned into one’s memory.
Sun TV has in the past functioned as a year-round propaganda organ. But the point to note is that there have been periods when the DMK has gone out of power, despite its exertions on the party’s behalf.
Surely what all this points to is a receptivity factor which comes into play when a citizen encounters either political media, or political messages on media. When you are voting on the basis of your own perceived needs from a government, a media message that runs contrary to your own experience is unlikely to make a dent. (Such as the Amitabh Bachchan advertisement on julm in U.P.) However, if you are dissatisfied with a candidate or party and open to exploring alternatives, a les
ser known candidate might be able to swing the receptivity in her favour by using media intelligently. Even in the U.S., the Mecca of media effects research, there are no firm conclusions on how campaigns impact voters.
What India’s experience is pointing to is this: simply the presence of a media onslaught (much of it mindless) does not guarantee an advantage in political terms. And when the media is effectively established by the campaigner as an outsider in many senses of the word, its influence is likely to be even more peripheral.
Previous strategies
For what was seen in U.P. this time around there was a precedent in the early Laloo Prasad victories in the 1990s, where Bihar’s largely upper caste media was repeated dubbed by him as an institution not to be trusted, when he addressed his voters. And where the Bahujan Samaj Party is concerned, the message from the early years of Kanshi Ram was that the media will not take up the Dalit’s cause, and must be bypassed. He is often quoted as having said, “Dalits, don’t trust the upper caste media. To strengthen your movement, you must yourself become the media” ( www.ambedkar.org).
Mayawati often vocalised her problems with the media in her State, and contrary to Mulayam Singh’s wooing of them in his earlier tenures, she has even attempted on occasion to oust them from government housing in Lucknow for non-payment of rent. Certainly the media was not depended upon to carry her message during this past election.
So where does that leave the question on political uses of media? In India there are a sprinkling of media houses around the country which are wholly or partly owned by political entities or families. These are to be found in Orissa, Kerala, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. They play their role, but what sort of role it is, and what it achieves is yet to be comprehensively studied. The drama over Sun TV in Tamil Nadu and the anointing of a new channel for the DMK should not lead to an overestimation of media’s role in politics.
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