The reader no longer knows where advertising and public relations end and news begins.
But moves towards regulation could have a chilling effect too
India’s growing global importance and ambitions have had a detrimental impact on free speech, creating a discourse that drowns out diversity in the media. Its “big power discourse” has been shaped primarily by two processes — economic liberalisation, which began in 1991, and the nuclearisation of India, in particular the five nuclear tests India conducted in 1998. The former has propelled the country, along with China and East Asian countries, into the role of a future growth engine of the world economy. And the latter has fed its aspiration to be recognised as a legitimate nuclear power.
The Indian media was initially critical of the attempts by international financial institutions to prise open the Indian market. However, it quickly fell in line as media owners realised that they stood to gain directly from economic liberalisation and the new class of consumers it created. If readers with disposable incomes increased, so would advertising revenue. This led to an increasingly insular focus on the emerging middle class, which represents less than 25 per cent of India’s population.
As it became an active partner in promoting a consensus on economic liberalisation, the media shaped the image of a new middle class as atomised and individualistic consumers united only by their disdain for state intervention and their aspirations towards international patterns of consumerism. New restaurants with international cuisine — often with chefs imported from abroad – serviced them, as did international fashion outlets, fast-food chains and giant malls for a world class shopping experience. The schools their children attended had the epithet “international” in their names, and school trips metamorphosed into travel to foreign destinations. The media helped to invent this “aspirational” middle class and to shape it ideologically. Editors of big newspapers prided themselves on their ability to double as food writers and experts on matching Indian curries with this or that wine, or on being experts on fashion, lifestyle and popular music. Newspapers and television channels introduced special sections and programmes to bring the world in all its consumerist glory to the Indian living room.
Increasingly, the middle class was seen as a homogeneous group of consumers with one voice and one set of values, a ripe constituency for buying into the “big power” dream. At the same time, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War made the Non-Aligned Movement, which had sought to represent the interests of developing countries during that period, in many ways irrelevant. So India began its search for a seat at the international high table. The nuclear tests of 1998 followed and the subsequent US attempts to create a halfway house for India as a nuclear power outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty boosted India’s aspirations.
Internationally, the size of the Indian market, the shifting of international economic growth engines to the East, and India’s own growth story helped re-invent the country as a potential world power. The “big power” discourse has been fuelled by the creation of new blocs of emerging economies like the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) and IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa); by India’s G20 membership to its forging of a new strategic partnership with the US; and by US talk of and plans for strategic rebalancing of US interests in Asia.
The impact on the media has been all too apparent. Firstly, it has wholeheartedly adopted an agenda that puts primacy on sitting at the international high table over tackling internal inequities. Secondly, the re-invention and re-imagining of India has largely been taken over by strategic affairs experts and diplomats — to the detriment of other voices and other national priorities. They get a disproportionate space in the media as compared to those working with the issues of the poor, migrants, displaced people and other socially and politically marginalised groups.
The media has also pandered to nationalist sentiment, which has been used to curtail the activities of civil society and silence critical voices. These groups are regularly accused of sedition, anti-national activities and undermining the unity and integrity of the Indian union. By perpetuating the “big power” discourse, the media has helped create a feeling of belligerence towards India’s neighbours, often adopting more hardline positions than the government and egging it on to demonstrate its might when it comes to relations with countries in the region, particularly Pakistan, China and the Maldives.
This rhetoric drives opposition politicians and the wider public discourse towards jingoism. Those who have no stake in this “big power” discourse and feel left out of the policies that emanate from it are pushed away from mainstream political parties and towards insular political groupings and organisations. As more of the country’s citizens become literate and witness an increase in their disposable incomes, the media explosion in India continues unabated. Internationally, newspaper readership is on the decline, but in India it continues to grow and is expected to continue doing so for some time. There are more than 2,000 daily newspapers in the country, and it is estimated that for each percent of growth in literacy (currently at 74% of the population), newspaper readership increases by five million readers.
In 2001 there were only 60 million TV-owning households in India. That number had gone up to 117 million by 2011. And the number of TV channels grew from nine in 2000 to 122 in 2010 – and to 825 by December 2011. However, the competition and market expansion have not led to an improvement in quality or diversity. In fact, every TV channel and newspaper looks like a clone of the next.
Irresponsible reporting and ‘paid-for’ news
The media has often made serious errors while reporting on terrorist acts, declaring arrested Muslim suspects as the perpetrators of crimes even before their trials have begun, publishing their names and branding them as terrorists prematurely. And when the media has been proven wrong, it has not taken corrective action.
There are a number of examples of the broadcast media behaving in an irresponsible manner, with television programmes displaying visuals that could be described as insensitive to certain groups of people, sensationalising news, invading people’s privacy, slandering public figures and wilfully misrepresenting news. Some news programmes seem to take covert pleasure in depicting violence against women, while at the same time sounding indignant about it: in December 2012, one channel broadcast a multi-media message that depicted the gang-rape of a woman even as it denounced the crime.
The news-for-cash or ‘paid-news’ controversy in 2009, when it was exposed that various newspapers had sold news space to politicians, exemplified the falling standards of journalism in the country. Major newspapers have entered into lucrative partnerships – such as equity for coverage deals called ‘private treaty partnerships’ – with the corporate world. The reader no longer knows where advertising and public relations end and news begins...
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