ABC of Media

Snippets from One of the most glaringly frank articles in the recent times by Magsasay Awardee Journalist P Sainath. (columnist in The Hindu).

“Issues today have to be dressed up in ways certified by the corporate media. They have to be justified not by their importance to the public but by their acceptability to the media, their owners and sponsors”

Every issue is now reduced to a fight between individuals, heroic, villainous or just fun figures. So the complex issues behind the shunning of Pakistani cricketers by the Indian Premier League are reduced to a fight between Shah Rukh Khan and Bal Thackeray. (As one television channel began its programme: “Shah Rukh stands tall. His message to the nation …”). The agonies of Bundelkhand are not about hunger and distress in our Tiger Economy. They are just a stand-off between Rahul Gandhi and Mayawati. The issues of language and migrations in Maharashtra are merely a battle between Rahul Gandhi and Uddhav Thackeray. And the coverage is all about who blinked first, who lost face.

The devastating rise in food prices (let’s skip the boring factors) and the mess in agriculture are a face-off between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar. The pathetic squabble within the Samajwadi Party is virtually a television serial. A blow-by-blow account of Amar Singh’s valiant bid to retain his honour against Mulayam Singh’s yahoos. (Indeed, some Hindi channels have begun using the language of theatre to report it — Act II, Scene II. And there was one programme which Mr. Amar Singh ended humming verses from his favourite film song). The Bt brinjal story had mostly only one villain — Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh. He had no visible adversary unless you pose the humble Brinjal as the hero. But that won’t work for television. The other, more sinister heroes in this media story preferred to function from behind the scenes, plying newspapers and channels with faked data and false information. Hell hath no fury like a powerful corporate scorned, as the Minister is learning.

Leave aside escaping a recession, India Shining is back. The cover story of a leading weekly gushes over the fantastic ‘rural resurgence’ that is, in fact, saving all of us. Farmers are doing just great. Drip, micro-sprinkler, and other micro irrigation, the stories in it suggest, played a major role in this hidden-from-the-human-eye revival. And the proliferation of such stories across the media spectrum reflects, in part, the strenuous media efforts of a major Maharashtra-based company. A corporate group that spends a fortune on propaganda and whose interests in this line of irrigation are pushed by some of the most powerful members of the Union Cabinet.

The main ‘rural resurgence’ story hit the stands the same day the National Crime Records Bureau officially brought the 2008 data for farm suicides on to its website. The 16,196 suicides that year brought the tally of farmers’ suicides since 1997 to 199,132. That’s the largest single, sustained wave of such suicides ever recorded in history — anywhere. Guess nobody told them about the resurgence. Farmers in 2008 did know of that year’s loan waiver, but it didn’t stop large numbers of them from taking their lives.

Whether it’s the Suresh Tendulkar committee, the BPL Expert Group, or earlier the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised sector, Or a U.N. study which reports that 34 million more Indians remained poor or joined their ranks in 2008 and 2009, because of the ‘slowdown.’ That is, 34 million more than would have met that fate prior to the 2008 crisis. It matters little if Census data show us that 8 million cultivators quit agriculture between just 1991 and 2001. (That is, on average, well over 2,000 a day, every day for 10 years.) Or that the 2011 Census just months from now will show us how many more have fled agriculture since then, un-seduced by the rural resurgence. Never mind the facts. One giant private irrigation company stands to make its already huge fortune bigger. Good for growth.

The ABC of Indian media roughly translates as Advertising, Bollywood and Corporate power. Some years ago, the ‘C’ would have been cricket, but that great sport is fast becoming a small cog in the large wheel of corporate profit. (In the IPL, the ABC of media converge, even merge.) And, of course, everything but everything, has to be bollywoodised. To now earn attention, issues have to be dressed up only in ways certified by the corporate media. They have to be justified not by their importance to the public but by their acceptability to the media, their owners and sponsors. The more entrenched that ABC gets, the greater the danger to the language of democracy the media so proudly claim to champion.

Kalyan

Love playing Tennis. Love Movies