The TV element in India’s socio-political matrix

When television came to India in 1959 it was not considered relevant to the then government’s political and development agenda. If Nehru were alive today he would have ruefully admitted this fuzz in his vision. However, Indira Gandhi realized its potential as mass media and an effective propaganda tool. During her regime, whether the content was oriented towards entertainment or information its purpose was to brainwash the masses in the manner suitable to her regime (this Orwellian worldview would have accentuated the havoc during the Emergency if television was around in India). 

Nalin Mehta, in his seminal book – “India on Television” (Harper Collins) – describes how Indira Gandhi had transformed television into a “Trojan horse” that the citizens willingly allowed into their living rooms; it eventually turned out to be a gigantic propaganda tool for the ruling party, creating a vast patronage network. In the 1980s TV was consciously turned into an instrument of political strategy. Although an agent of the socialist state it also simultaneously accommodated the steady growth of Indian capitalism, gradually turning commercial from the latter half of 1970s onwards with the introduction of advertising. These developments facilitated nationwide television advertising. In the process it augmented the creation of a ‘new consumer class’ and this formed the basis for a new notion of collectivity expressed as ‘the middle class’. 

The arrival of satellite TV technology heralded the lessening, and eventual disappearance, of the State’s stranglehold on electronics media. However, before that, another transformation was going on in the media scene. If serials like Ramayan and Mahabharat on DD willingly or unwittingly helped revive Hindutva then the Chanakya unabashedly promoted this trend by adding the element of jingoistic nationalism. The frequent references to “Ma Bharati” by the protagonist and his depiction as a tireless nation-builder via temple pathshalas certainly were ultra-right in theme and content. However, coming back to the news channels, Nalin Mehta is right in averring in his book that BJP successfully ‘mediated’ the anti-BJP coverage of 2002 Gujarat riots to reach out to its constituency. However, Mehta’s contention that Babri Masjid would not have been demolished if private news channels had existed in 1992 is open to debate, because here too the coverage could have been mediated to BJP’s advantage with Narasimha Rao unwilling to face up to the gathering storm.

Coming back to satellite television, and the consequent proliferation of TV channels in different languages and on different platforms, one can’t help notice the transformation in the content and form of news gathering and dissemination. Today, it is possible for the viewers to choose from a wide variety of political, economic and ideological debate on the small screen. More strikingly, as epitomized by the recent Anna Hazare movement against corruption – despite the profit motive, which is inherent to the capitalist private news channels – the television has impacted national, regional and local politics as well as public discourse thereupon thanks to the creation of what Mehta calls, “new visual publics”. Since India has a rich tradition of public debates and discourses that goes back to Vedic times it has enabled us to strengthen, and not just tolerate, dissent. Consequently, the process of influencing and even gauging public opinion through TV debates has become a powerful element in the country’s political matrix. 

However, the media’s increasing propensity for sensationalism is a worry. Just consider the following examples:

1. The so-called sting operations that have “exposed” politicians accepting bribe have set off a dangerous trend of blackmail and unhealthy sensationalism.
2. A Bollywood actor is captured on video camera soliciting sex from a female wannabe in lieu of promoting her career in the movies. The electronic media goes to town with the ‘details’ of the ‘sting operation’. Later on, it turned out that it was the other way round! So, instead of being a sting operation it turned out to be an entrapment.
3. The media had already damned some domestics in the Arushi murder case. But the CBI’s report left a lot of egg on many a righteous face.

These are but a few examples of the cavalier functioning of our media. There are countless others where media pundits prejudge issues or take sides – the bias being the offspring of ideological predilections, the function of vested interests or plain callousness. Worse it could be a deliberate resort to sensationalism to augment viewership. In 1949, the then Daily Mirror editor, Sylvester Bolam, had written that sensationalism “does not mean distorting the truth… It means the vivid and dramatic presentation of events so as to give them a forceful impact on the mind of the reader. It means big headlines, vigorous writing, simplification into familiar everyday language.” 

Today, I don’t think that it would be considered “a necessary and valuable public service” (as Bolam had contended in his defence of sensationalism), especially after what happened to Murdoch & Co. in the aftermath of the News of the World scandal and subsequent shutdown – an object lesson to the sensation mongers among our new age television journalists. Sensationalism obfuscates and thus hides, if not kills, the truth. The average viewer accesses television news for understanding all that is happening around him and the world at large. Sadly, television journalism is slowly distancing itself from this role. John Birt, a British TV executive wrote in an article in The Times, “There is a bias in television journalism. It is not against any particular party or point of view – it is a bias against understanding.”

Although, occasionally, India’s television news journalists surprise us their bias against understanding the real import of an event becomes manifest more often than not. This is unacceptable in a society that is still in the process of maturing into a confident socio-political entity.

 Randeep Wadehra