MEDIA MATTERS
Getting it wrong
SEVANTI NINAN
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If reporters talk to candidates more than voters, how can they get their predictions right?
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They are good at being wise after the event, and they are very good at being prescriptive.
Photo: PTI
Tasting success: Rahul on the campaign trail…
The media earns from an election, more so in a year when advertising has fallen very sharply. Particularly on television, that sets the tone for what follows. They chase newsmakers and personalities, and they chase controversies with breathless tenacity. This year, there were more than a dozen to live off, beginning with Varun Gandhi and ending with Jayapradha in suicide mode. In between you had shoe throwing, the PM and Advani’s slanging match, Quattrochi, the issue of black money in Swiss banks, Karunanidhi versus Jayalalitha on Sri Lanka, and much else.
Reporters talk to candidates much more than voters, so how would they know the voters’ mind? They follow Priyanka Gandhi, smitten. Because the leaders of the Left never refuse a sound bite they get inordinate TV time. If some of that time was spent talking to their voters in Kerala and West Bengal, there might have been a clearer sense of voters turning away from them in these two States. Yes, the media did say there was disenchantment in these States, but not with enough confidence to indicate a sharp drop in seats.
No lack of issues
The two mantras of this election were that there would be no clear winner, and that it was an issue-less election. As Saba Naqvi wrote in Outlook before the results were out, the issues were there, journalists just didn’t see them. There were quality of life issues. Ask a voter, and he or she will tell you.
The media these days covers press conferences more than rallies, unless it is hopping around with a Chief Minister on his plane. The rallies covered for television are not the countless ones in the interior of a State. For all the airtime given to the young Gandhis, Rahul Gandhi got much less during these elections than cousin Varun or sister Priyanka. But once he had proved his credentials, the sound byte brigade went straight from zero to hundred. Would he now be made Prime Minister? If you ask that question 10 times over to 10 different people, you keep up the pitch on TV for an entire day. Because, one of those 10 will stray from the party line and prompt another feeding frenzy.
They are good at being wise after the event, and they are very good at being prescriptive. Half a dozen wise men and women wrote edit page articles or editorials and held forth on TV on the Es, the government now needs to focus on: education, employment, environment, as so on. That is a no-brainer in a country like this, but the media feels virtuous nonetheless, pontificating on it.
Finally, it is interesting how the analysis can differ depending on whether you look at seat share or vote share. Shekhar Gupta in the Indian Express came up with an eloquent formulation the morning after: the politics of aspiration had trumped the politics of identity and grievance. Do you judge by seats or votes? Mayawati increased her vote share, and her seats by one seat for that matter. Does that mean she now represents aspiration rather than identity politics?
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Should you believe everything you read about a candidate in a newspaper? Not after these elections.
They saw clear evidence from at least two States, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh, of money being charged for press coverage of candidates. That gives a whole new dimension to the business of media impacting elections. Women journalists from AP wrote to the Chief Electoral Officer of the State, pointing out that every Telugu newspaper and some of the Telugu news channels had charged for positive coverage, at the same column centimetre rate as they do for advertisements. They said it leads to a ludicrous situation where exactly the same story about a candidate appeared in more than one newspaper, and the paper would often rate the chances of opposing candidates equally positively.
Apart from misleading voters, this helps candidates circumvent the limits on election spending. As for Madhya Pradesh, journalists there produced a report on this issue, and the Delhi bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal filed a colourful story for his newspaper on the charming new fraud of paid election coverage. He listed the rates an independent candidate was offered: “One broker offered three weeks of coverage in four newspapers for 10 lakh rupees ($20,000). A reporter and a photographer from a Chandigarh newspaper told him that for 1.5 lakh rupees ($3,000) for them and a further 3 lakh rupees ($6,000) for other reporters, they could guarantee coverage in up to five newspapers for two weeks.”
Nothing new
The trend is not new, earlier district editions of the regional press did it, now metropolitan newspapers and TV channels do it. The Press Council has no teeth. Does the Election Commission then need to do something about the way a corrupt press vitiates the election process?
Tailpiece: NDTV24x7, Headlines Today, CNN IBN and Times Now were some of the channels that could not resist endlessly showing footage of a dead Prabhakaran. On NDTV, you had looping footage of someone holding up and adjusting the dead man’s head running for several minutes even as Srinivasan Jain kept quizzing the foreign secretary of Sri Lanka about the propriety of the government releasing such footage! So much for self regulation: the guidelines of the News Broadcasters Association specifically says, “The dead should also be treated with dignity and their visuals should not be shown.”
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