MEDIA MATTERS
A double act
SEVANTI NINAN
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The media in India has to be conscience-keeper and cheerleader at the same time.
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PHOTO: AP
Excessive coverage: Sanjay Dutt’s case set off a frenzy among the channels.
The Economic Times on Sunday has two lead stories side by side, both three column. One tells you that over 40 per cent of all Indians, 60 years after independence, do not even have bank accounts. “Nearly half of Indians financiall
y excluded.” In rural India, the coverage is even less. The other story is about companies tying up with big designer names to add additional value to their products: Armani, BMW, Ferrari, Lamborghini Brian Eno.
The same Sunday the Pioneer advertises three special features on its masthead. A special report on the Bihar floods, a story on “Chak de India” released that weekend, and a 60-year review of Hindi film music. One thing i
s clear from the outpouring of 60th year assessments: for all the criticism it constantly attracts, the media in India routinely performs a double act that is possibly unrivalled anywhere else in the world. It has to be conscience-keeper and cheerleader at the same time. It is expected to simultaneously track the disasters and deprivations that visit a sizeable majority, cater to the aspirations of a middle segment, and retain the interest of a miniscule privileged minority.
Challenges of reporting
All of this while being advertisement-driven, because none of the three categories above is inclined to pay what it costs to produce a wide-ranging media product. You could argue that governments in this country also have to cater to all three constituencies but at least they get our taxes.
Media in other countries report on relatively more homogenous populations, and most certainly smaller and less dispersed ones. Over here reporters, pollsters and editors putting together 60th anniversary packages travel to Kashmir, the North East, Naxal territory in the South, and pockets of Dalit deprivation in the heartland, along with tracking the mood of our metropolises, and transforming smaller cities. When a country is several countries in one, at different levels of development, reporting it routinely poses a challenge. Retaining its interest is an even greater challenge, so you look for commonalities to dwell on. After the feeding frenzy over Sanjay Dutt, which merited far more coverage than this year’s floods, a letter writer grumbled that the watchdog was only watching Bollywood.
In other established democracies, the media covers a population that can take the basics for granted. Food, water supply, and basic education if not healthcare; so you can focus beyond those, raising the bar in terms of subjects and issues. Here you begin with something as fundamental as access to life — given foeticide and starvation deaths, even that is a problem. As is basic human rights. Where do we find the reporters for all these things? Increasingly in the immediate neighbourhood.
Changing news
But they don’t always report them. A photographer in Jaipur once explained why atrocities in the hinterland made far bigger news for English newspapers in the metropolitan cities than they did for the local and regional press. For the stringer who is reporting from a district, he said, starvation deaths or a Dalit child being tied up by a teacher as punishment was simply not news. It happened every day. But now that news channels are a growth industry that is changing. The rural string is learning that he can sell these stories as breaking news provided they are bizarre enough.
So there is one part of the newspaper or channel that tracks this, and another part that caters to the Indian who is a technology or car buff, and wants reviews of the latest in these segments. In between, especially at anniversary time, the media takes it upon itself to worry about the quality of democracy and despatches pollsters to ask questions to a hundred people each in 22 cities or some such. You have to admire the optimism which even aspires to gauge the mood of some 1.2 billion people living in disparate circumstances. And the infectious energy.
Finances
How do you finance a newsroom that can handle this range of expectations? By doing tie-ups for the high end, which kills two birds with one stone. The brand reporting gets you the advertising; the Bollywood reporting at movie release time gets you free footage, viewership and advertising. As for the low end of the aspiration spectrum, increasingly news organisations handling the conscience-keeper duties with occasional forays into the hinterland at anniversary time and disaster time. They save their budgets for special occasions, and restrict their reporters to daily city coverage. Increasingly, they use data to report on inequality.
So why are there no agriculture or labour correspondents even for newspapers in Hindi, Telugu, Bengali or Malayalam, which have new district editions being launched all the time? Because farmers and the working class are yet to join the upwardly mobile readership whom the advertiser targets. But thanks to the double act that the media in India feels constrained to perform in a country of extremes, at least they remain an occasional constituency.
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