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Magazine
MEDIA MATTERS
Looking back
SEVANTI NINAN
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2007 saw some interesting developments in the discourse of political communication.
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Photo: PTI
Thinking big: Mayawati.
After the voting in Gujarat, one caught Arnab Goswami on “Times Now” coining something he called “the touch and feel factor of development” as a factor in voter decision making. We’ll have to wait to see if that enters t
he lexicon of reporting in elections to come, but overall, State elections in this country are becoming interesting studies in political communication. 2007 has been quite fascinating in this respect. There have been two much-covered elections, and three prominent instances this year of State governments’ attempting to take on the media.
The year which ended with much newsprint and airtime being expended on Narendra Modi’s demagoguery began in January with Amitabh Bachchan’s advertising campaign in Uttar Pradesh for the Samajwadi Party. In retrospect we know that voters in that State did not buy his selling line, “U.P. mein julm kam hai” (There is less crime in UP). But he put his own brand equity on the line with this TV campaign and the rest of the year saw him wrestle with other controversies and lose his sheen more than a little.
Timing has much to do with the effectiveness of a TV selling pitch, and surfacing as this advertisement did as the horrors of the Nithari killings in NOIDA were still unfolding, it created cynicism in viewers. Was the actor really endorsing an administration which had failed to detect the gruesome disappearances of several poor children?
Then, in a completely different demonstration of the uses of advertising as political communication, came U.P.’s new Chief Minister’s experiments with publicising a State’s demand for central government allocations. Mayawati’s election campaign might have been noticeably lacking in advertising expenditure, but she made up for it when she assumed Chief Ministership and acquired a State advertising budget. Huge advertisements in the State and national press publicised the size of grants that the State was seeking from the Centre and what they were intended for. It was quite a breathtaking attempt to win brownie points for simply thinking big. At the expense, of course, of the State exchequer.
Parting ways
At different times of the year, in different States, the relationship between politicians and media houses came into focus. This was, memorably, the year when the DMK in Tamil Nadu distanced itself from a relationship that must have been the envy of political parties elsewhere in the country. After a decade and a half of having Sun TV, India’s second largest media empire, available for its use, the ruling party in Tamil Nadu moved away from it and sought to create a TV channel of its own. The falling out reverberated for some time in the media, and interestingly the new channel lost little time in buying rights to movies and carving out a niche for itself in the State’s viewership pie. For the moment, neither Sun TV nor the DMK seems much the worse for the parting. The test will doubtless come when the next election in the State takes place. But while the Sun-DMK alliance lasted, it certainly created media history. A network of channels with a clearly identifiable political alignment went on nonetheless to become the country’s second biggest media house.
In neighbouring Andhra Pradesh, the year began with Chief Minister Rajashekhar Reddy’s tussles with the Eenadu group which Mr. Ramoji Rao shrewdly converted into a press freedom issue. And throughout this year stories have surfaced time and again of Mr. Reddy’s allegedly heavy handed ways with the press. Along with Mr. Buddhadeb Bhattacharya’s encounters with the media over events in Nandigram, 2007 saw a considerable dilution of the assumption that Chief Ministers pamper the press because they need them, and do not really take them on. Both these Chief Ministers did. Mr. Reddy did not hesitate to slap cases on media workers and owners alike, and Mr. Bhattacharya memorably abused a newspaper that was a constant critic by referring to it as a bandicoot.
Disturbing trend
At least three prominent politicians this year, the West Bengal Chief Minister, his party colleague and CPM politburo member Brinda Karat, and the belligerent Narendra Modi in Gujarat, made speeches which will go down as case studies in political incitement. Do we then view political communication in this country as evolving or descending to new depths?
Tailpiece: The year ended, tragically, with the death of a man who did more than any other to catalyse media research. Tejeshwar Singh founded Sage, a publishing house which created a niche for communications and media studies in Indian social science research. Beginning in 1991, it has published some 90 titles in this field. That is one of his legacies. On a personal level, he was a wonderfully involved publisher to have. Among the many emails from him in my inbox is one which reads, “Have you been seeing the Dainik Jagran ad on TV? It would have been an even better illustration on page 100!” This, after the book came out.
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