10th
Brajamohan Sarma Memorial Annual Lecture
MANUFACTURING
CONTENT
The ‘Business’ of Media and the
Crisis of Indian Journalism
Siddharth
Varadarajan
Senior Fellow
Centre for
Public Affairs & Critical Theory
Shiv Nadar
University
7
Septmber 2014
Vivekananda
Kendra, Guwahati
Respected
family members, friends and comrades of Shri Brajamohan Sarma,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is a great honour for me to deliver this, the 10th
Brajamohan Sarma Memorial Annual Lecture.
I come before you today conscious of the solemn tradition
I have to uphold. Brajamohanji combined excellence in his chosen profession –
law -- with a deep commitment to emancipatory politics, the kind of politics he
knew was the only way in which the people of India could fight against the
injustices that were woven into their everyday lives. One of these injustices,
of course, is that individuals like Brajamohan Sarma, who embody the best
ideals of humanity, are often snatched away from our midst while in their
prime. But they do leave behind a body of work that nourishes us, a community
of commitment and solidarity that mobilises us, and a vision of a better future
that inspires us and gives us courage to move ahead even when the present seems
dark and foreboding.
The subject I have chosen for today’s lecture is the
state of journalism in India.[1] This is not just because I
am a journalist and the subject is matter of great personal concern to me. The
fact is that
journalism and law are a lot closer than many of us
realise. Both professions involve the gathering and dissemination of
information, a feel for advocacy and the ability to communicate. In class
society, both have served as essential pillars of the establishment, defending privilege
and the status quo when required to do so, but also functioning as a safety
valve whenever a crisis presents itself. And then, every now and then, the
right sort of hands and hearts come along, and we find law and journalism becoming
poweful instruments for progressive and even revolutionary change. Brajamohan
Sarma was one such lawyer, and there are many more like him.
At a time when there is no opposition to speak of,
either within Parliament or outside, when a reconfiguration of power is being
effected between the executive and the judiciary, and when all kinds of
regressive social and political forces are making their presence felt, India
needs fearless, objective, professional journalism. There are many individual
journalists whose work tells us a great deal about what is happening behind the
veil, the façade of Incredible India, India Shining, and Achche Din. But the
Indian media ecosystem, and Indian journalism as a whole, is today mired in
deep crisis.
At a time when the people of India most need its
assertiveness and independence, the media has lost its moorings. It has lost its
anchor in the public interest it is meant to serve and is drifting aimlessly,
buffeted by the fickle headwinds of a business and governance model that prefers
risk aversion, trivia, entertainment, ephemera and opinion mongering in the
guise of news to actual in-depth, objective reporting. The fact that this
business and governance model is itself coming under strain and showing signs
of breaking down is only adding to the pressure on good journalism.
Dean Starkman has just published a critique of
American business journalism’s failure to predict the 2008 financial meltdown and
called his book The Watchdog That Didn’t
Bark. Let’s see what he says:
“To
read various journalistic accounts of mortgage lending and Wall Street during
the bubble is to come away with radically differing representations of the
soundness of the US financial system. It all depended on what you were reading.
Anyone “paying attention” to the conventional business press could be forgiven
for thinking that things were, in the end, basically normal. Yes, there was a
housing bubble. Any fair reading of the press of the era makes that clear, even
if warnings were mitigated by just-as-loud celebrations of the boom. And yes,
the press said there were a lot of terrible mortgage products out there. Those
are important consumer and investor issues. But that’s all they are. When the
gaze turned to financial institutions, the message was entirely different: all
clear. It’s not just the puff pieces or the language that sometimes lapses into
toadying … It’s that even stories that were ostensibly critical of individual
Wall Street firms and mortgage lenders described them in terms of their
competition with one another: Would their earnings be okay? There was a
bubble all right, and the business press was in it.” [2]
Stark notes that the odd story critical of what was
happening on Wall Street did run in Forbes
or the Wall Street Journal but these
never became central to the business press’s perception of what was actually
going on and were never followed up.
Turning to India, in the face of persistent warning
signs of what lies ahead on the social, environmental and economic front as the
new government at the Centre gets down to business, the Indian watchdog is not
just failing to bark. It is busy wagging its tail. A “bubble” may not be the
best way to describe the hothouse of adulation that has been built up around
the cult of Narendra Modi but the national media is very much in it.
It is this media crisis – and the silences and even complicity
it has brought -- that I hope to describe and analyse in my lecture today.
II
Before I describe the present, it is worth remembering
that the sins of the media have a hoary past.
In a remarkable lecture delivered in 1943 on the
occasion of the 101st birth anniversary of the social reformer M.G.
Ranade, Babasaheb Ambedkar had this to say about the Press in India:
“Journalism
in India was once a profession. It has now become a trade. It has no more moral
function than the manufacture of soap. It does not regard itself as the
responsible adviser of the Public. To give the news uncoloured by any motive,
to present a certain view of public policy which it believes to be for the good
of the community, to correct and chastise without fear all those, no matter how
high, who have chosen a wrong or a barren path, is not regarded by journalism
in India its first or foremost duty. To accept a hero and worship him has
become its principal duty. Under it, news gives place to sensation, reasoned
opinion to unreasoning passion, appeal to the minds of responsible people to
appeal to the emotions of the irresponsible. Lord Salisbury spoke of the
Northcliffe journalism as written by office-boys for office-boys. Indian
journalism is all that plus something more. It is written by drum-boys to
glorify their heroes. Never has the interest of country been sacrificed so
senselessly for the propagation of hero-worship. Never has hero-worship become
so blind as we see it in India today. There are, I am glad to say, honourable
exceptions. But they are too few, and their voice is never heard.”
Ambedkar was speaking, of course, about Gandhi and
Jinnah but his words have a familiar echo, don’t they? He then went on to make
another prescient point:
“In
establishing their supremacy [these leaders] have taken the aid of "big
business" and money magnates. For the first time in our country, money is
taking the field as an organised power … For in these days, with the Press in
hand, it is easy to manufacture Great Men."
In the past three decades, we have seen the media lionise
one leader after the other -- Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari
Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh and P. Chidambaram – almost always because they
represented at various points in time the hopes and aspirations of the rich and
privileged. Now let us consider the most recent case of what Ambedkar would
consider manufactured greatness. Modi is where he is today not just because he
was a more capable contender for the post of Prime Minister than the
inexperienced Rahul Gandhi, or only because voters were fed up with the United
Progressive Alliace government, but because his capabilities were the subject
of a relentless and well-funded marketing campaign that got off the ground as
early as 2010. This campaign was fuelled by the impatience of the corporate
sector for a return to the ‘achche din’ of rent-seeking – the processs of
earning superprofits from favourable allocations of spectrum, coal, land etc.
-- which the weak and “indecisive”government of Manmohan Singh was incapable of
defending in the face of an independent judiciary and an assertive Comptroller
and Auditor General.
It is an open secret that the corporate sector
deserted the ruling Congress and started pouring money into the Modi campaign. Indications
are that the amount spent in the 2014 Lok Sabha election, especially by the
BJP, runs to a figure at least ten times higher than five years ago. One
estimate pegs the BJP’s advertising spend across all media including hoardings
at a staggering Rs 5,000 crore. That’s just a bit less than the roughly $1
billion the Obama campaign spent under all heads in the 2012 US presidential
election. Once other expenses are added, the overall BJP budget will have exceeded
that.
What about expenditure limits you might ask? Well, you might ask the question but the media
didn’t. For the 2014 election was a reminder of the one big loophole in India’s
election rules designed to favour parties backed by the rich: While there is a
limit on what individual candidates may spend (currently either Rs. 54 lakh or
Rs 70 lakh depending on the state/constituency), there is no limit to what
political parties may spend in the course of an election campaign.
In Britain, whose election system India broadly
follows, there is cap on both the individual candidate’s expenditure and the
party’s. It would be naïve on our part to believe the deployment of money on the
scale it has been would not have had an impact on the election result and the
policies of the government which was elected.
In the Amar Nath Chawla case, the Supreme Court in
1974 recognised the principle that election expenditure must be limited in
order to ensure equality between candidates and to “eliminate as far as
possible, the influence of big money in the electoral process.” Though it did
not set a limit, it ruled that “some limitative ceiling” on expenditure for
general party propaganda during elections “is eminently desirable”.[3]
If election expenditure were not limited, it said,
political parties “would go all out for collecting contributions and obviously
the largest contributions would be from the rich and affluent who constitute
but a fraction of the electorate. The pernicious influence of big money would
then play a decisive role in controlling the democratic process in the country.”
This is precisely what is happening with the
corporate sector now fully into the act, making both open and hidden
contributions. In a story that was barely reported and certainly not followed
up, the Delhi High Court this April found both the Congress and BJP guilty of
illegally accepting money from the UK-based firm, Vedanta.
If it seems as if I have digressed from the main topic of my lecture by
looking at the role of big money in elections, the reason I have done this is
to underscrore the fact that big money, big politics and big media are part of
the same ecosystem of democracy as we know it today. Indeed, big media is
integral to the political economy of “governance” in which content and consent
are manufactured,
‘reform’ is
valorised, greatness is forged, and controversies and panics continuosly
summoned and dismissed, even as the fundamental problems of the majority of
people go unaddressed year after year, decade after decade.
We got a glimpse into the workings of this system –
I have likened it elsewhere to The Matrix – when the Radia tapes containing
conversations between politicians, industrialists, lobbyists, journalists and
fixers were leaked in 2010:
“The Niira Radia audio archive … reveals the source
codes, networks, routers, viruses and malware that make up the matrix of the
Indian State. The transmission of information, also known as “news”, between
different nodes is vital for the system to work efficiently. The news is also
the medium for reconciling conflicts between different sectors of the
establishment. If you hear the recordings, you begin to understand the truth
about the Wonderland that is India.”[4]
As breaking news goes, the Radia revelations was one
of the most under-reported stories of the decade. Why should this have been so
when the Indian media is normally so hyper-competitive?
II
The answer to this question lies in the nature of
the media business, which is competitive but within a framework that is largely
oligopolistic and hence prone to little or no ‘product differentiation’, and
dependent on advertisers (including the government and large corporations) for
as much as 90-95 per cent of total revenue rather than on their readers or
viewers.
On the face of things, of course, the Indian media
looks in great health. There are thousands of print publications of which at
least 150 daily newspapers spread across various languages could be considered
serious. Unlike in the West, the circulation and the number of editions of established
newspapers are both continuing to grow, though it is clear that the heydays of
growth in circulation and readership of English newspapers is coming to an end.
This is clearly because readers are slowly migrating to the Internet as a
source for news and views; as the price of smart phones falls and high-speed
data plans become cheaper and more reliable, English newspapers will continue
to be hit. Regional language newspapers, however, continue to show impressive
growth. All told, as can be seen from Table 1, the print media has increased
the size of its audience by nearly 100 million in the decade from 2002 and
there is clearly further scope for huge growth, especially since newspaper
readership is a function of literacy.
Table 1: Reach and revenues of the Indian Print
industry, 2002-2012
2002 2012
Print
Audience size (million readers) 252 351
Industry revenues (billion rupees) 63 224
Source: Vanita Kohli-Khandekar, The Indian Media Business (2013)
While the newspaper market seems crowded,
there is an equilibrium of sorts in different cities and territories where one
daily tends to be market leader in its language segment, attracting the lion’s
share of advertising. Delhi is a rare example where the Times of India and
Hindustan Times are neck-and-neck; as a result, both attract advertising.
News television, too, by all accounts is
booming. There are more than 100 channels providing news on a virtually
24-hours basis in English, Hindi, Assamese, Tamil and every major Indian
language. Though the number of viewers has increased steadily, just as English
newspapers are beginning to feel the presence of digital readers, TV too finds
itself competing for time with viewers who either spend more time online or
“multi-task” and surf the net while watching TV.
(Source: Vanita Kohli-Khandekar, The Indian Media Business (2013)
If you look at Figure 0.1, which is based on
data gathered by the Indian Readership Survey (IRS) over a 12-year period, it
is that the times readers or viewers spend on newspapers and their television
sets has slowly declined, while radio and the Internet have registered an
increase in the time consumers spend with those media forms.
However, this does not mean time spent on the
internet is time spent away from a newspaper, for a 2012 survey by DeLoitte found
that newspaper stories (read online, presumably) topped the list of media
topics that internet users discuss online:
Table 2: How frequently do
you discuss each of the following with your friends, family, and workplace
colleagues?
Source: Deloitte: The state of media democracy – India
Changing the Game, 2012
The third major media form, radio, is the
least developed in India as a source of news primarily because there is still a
government ban n private GM radio stations broadcasting news and current
affairs. Howere, judging from the growth in radio audiences in India, even if
for general entertainment programming, and the vibrant nature of news radio in
neighbouring countries like Nepal, it does seem as if News Radio will emerge as
a vibrant segment of the media as and when the regulatory system changes.
The Internet, which represents the fourth and
newest media form is still in relative infancy when compared to the inroads it
has made in other developing or developed countries worldwide. Broadband access
is still very low – hardly five per cent of Indians use high-speed Internet.
Interestingly, the last Indian Readership Survey (IRS - Q4, 2012) revealed that
only 6.8 per cent of all media consumers use the Internet, compared to a figure
of 87.6 per cent for television and 53.55 per cent for newspapers.
But my sense is that we are on the cusp of
exponential growth thanks to the future intersection of cheap mobile
technology, cheap data plans, rising literacy and the growing use of Indian
languages in computer applications. I am willing to wager that just as most
Indians skipped the landline phase of telephony and went straight to using
mobile phones, the same may happen with the internet: that the first point of
access for new users may be a cheap handset rather than a desktop computer. As
we shall see, this will have profound implications for the future evolution of
the media. The internet has already blurred the lines between newspapers,
television stations, radio and websites because the delivery of programming
happens wirelessly and does not require the direct use of satellite uplinking
and downlinking and all the costs (and regulatory hurdles) that go along with
that.
III
If the broad statistical picture of the Indian
media industry– in terms of newspaper circulation, the number of TV channels,
the size of the audience – seems encouraging, its financial reality is anything
but that.
Consider the following facts. Most TV news
channels make losses and are either in debt to banks and large companies or
have to be cross-subsidised by the entertainment channels of the parent
company. The Internet is also loss making, as advertising revenues are low and
virtually no website in India has succeeded in getting readers to pay for its
content via a paywall. Print, of course, is profitable in the main, but its
business model is increasingly coming under strain.
To my mind, the business model of
the newspaper industry in India consists of the following elements: (1) a very
low product price, so that sales or reach is maximized, with (2) upwards of 90
per cent of all revenues coming from advertising; (3) keeping newsgathering
costs as low as possible by substituting reporting with opinion-mongering; (4)
squeezing revenue out of news columns to compensate for declining advertising
yields; and (5) using a media property to attract new business partners or to
develop additional business interests in other sectors.
Let us consider each of these
elements in turn. Indian newspaper prices are easily the lowest in the world.
Newspapers sell for anywhere from Rs1.50 to Rs. 5 per copy, even though the
material cost of production alone is likely to be upwards of around Rs 8
depending on page levels and quality of newsprint. This means, marginal revenue
– the revenue earned from the sale of each additional copy of a newspaper – is
usually negative. As cover prices have held steady over the years due to
cut-throat competition, the share of advertising in the total revenue of
newspapers has risen from around 40 per cent in the 1950s to around 90 per cent
today. This excessive dependence on advertising revenue makes newspaper
establishments vulnerable to pressure from advertisers, especially the Central
or state governments, who tend to be the largest advertisers, especially in
smaller or regional language newspapers.
The quest for high profits even as
advertising volumes and yields come under pressure from television and the
internet (eg. certain categories of once lucrative advertising have almost
entirely moved online -- eg. classifieds
for employment, matrimony, motor cars, property) or from the slowdown in the
economy has pushed newspaper and TV proprietors towards cutting back on
newsgathering expenses. Now, how do you run a news business if you spend less
and less money gathering news? You do it by substituting news with views and
opinion-mongering. That is why we see the bluring of news and opinion in the
reportage of many newspapers; on television, this blurring has reached epidemic
proprtions. It is difficult to come across stories that are reported
straightforwardly, without a slant. On TV, the reporter and anchor both vie
with each other to appear partisan; the latter, in any case, sheds any
pretension of partisanship on some channels during the evening discussions that
have begun to occupy prime time with depressing monotonousness. A 2000 study by
Thomas E. Patterson of soft news (as opposed to hard news) and opinionated news
(Patterson calls it ‘critical news’ as opposed to ‘credible news’) showed how
these emergent forms of journalism were weakening the public’s interest in news
in general and politics in specifics and thereby weakening democracy. [5] Both
forms of journalism are rampant in India today, and flow directly from the refusal
of media proprietors to invest in newsgathering.
As if this were not bad enough for
journalistic standards, the fourth element of the business model for
manufacturing content is positively lethal. This is the increasing tendency for
proprietors to supplement declining or insufficient advertising yields by using
news space to generate revenues. Paid news is one way in which this is done.
The phenomenon began with the launch of Medianet, a division within Bennet
Coleman and Company Ltd, the publishers of Times of India, in the 1990s.
Medianet’s mandate was to “monetize” the lifestyle and entertainment news that
was carried in the city supplements of the TOI like Delhi Times or Mumbai
Times. The ostensible rationale at the time within the organization was the
allegation the company’s management made that journalists were presumably
trading coverage for money and that it would be better if this process were
streamlined and made “transparent”! After years of monetizing this coverage,
the TOI finally decided to be transparent with its readers, adding a tag line
under the masthead of these supplements describing them as ‘An Advertorial, Entertainment,
Promotional Feature.”
But paid news has made steady inroads since
then. The Press Council of India has documented the manner in which several
leading newspapers sold coverage “packages” – favourable, of course – to
politicians at election time. Many of these instances came to light when the
politicians concerned either declared, or failed to declare, the monies spent
in purchasing this coverage in their formal expenditure returns to the Election
Commission. As of now, only one legislator, Umlesh Yadav, an MLA from Uttar
Pradesh, has been disqualified for failure to disclose expenditures incurred
for paid news. While other cases, including the celebrated one of the former
Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan, are still pending, the wider irony is
worth noting. A politician who pays for news coverage and declares this
expenditure will have done nothing wrong in the eyes of the law, nor indeed
will the newspaper that accepted this money (unless it took cash and failed to
pay tax on it). The point is that paid news may be immoral and repugnant from
the point of view of media ethics and democratic politics but it is not
illegal. That is why the phenomenon continues, and has presumably taken on
forms that are difficult to detect. On television, particularly business
channels, it is not uncommon to come across panel discussions devoted entirely
to messaging by an individual company; these discussions are almost invariably
sponsored, though the channel may not be transparent in the way it informs
viewers about this.
The use of ‘private treaties’, by which a
newspaper acquires a stake in a company in exchange for an advertising (and
sometimes news coverage) package is another crucial element of the emerging
business model of the media industry. Companies like BCCL, which pioneered the
concept of private treaties, strenuously deny there is any editorial quid pro
quo involved. But as Vanita Kohli-Khandekar has argued, there is a definite
conflict of interest involved in these sorts of arrangements. Especially since
the idea is for the newspaper to sell its stake at the time its private treaty
client is ready to list itself on the stock exchange. Obviously, there would be
enormous internal pressure to ensure there is no negative coverage of these
clients.
The fifth element of the media business model
is the role side business interests play. This is important given the new trend
of big companies acquiring stakes in media companies. Apart from the obvious
conflict of interest – journalists at the media company are unlikely to be able
to do critical stories about the businesses their owners are involved in.
Often, industrialists like to keep a small media platform afloat as a lobbying
arm for their main business interests.
It is not difficult to see how the five
elements in this business model are likely to discourage, rather than
encourage, professional, objective, hard-hitting journalism.
IV
What makes the situation worse is the
governance structure within most media organisations whereby editorial
decisions are either taken directly by the owners or by their designated
management appointees or are taken by editors who tend to second guess what
their proprietors want. Most media organisations in India are family owned and
it is not uncommon to find family members taking the editorial decisions
themselves. Given the nature of the news business, where editorial decisions
ought to be the product of discussion, argument, and sometimes vigorous
contestation, it is not surprising that family-edited newspapers tend to
operate on feudal lines with little or no debate. Sadly, even in those
newspapers and TV channels which are managed professionally, the owners are
reluctant to locate the prerogative for editorial decision-making solely in the
hands of the editor, even where such a designation exists. Often, “brand
managers”, the advertising department and other corporate interests are encouraged
to intervene, obviously to the detriment of professional journalism.
V
All told, given the business and governance
model driving the Indian media, it is no surprise why Indian newspapers and TV
channels are the way they are. And if one adds into this mix the average
proprietor’s decision to either actively back the current government and ruling
party or to not court trouble by annoying them, it is clear that the space for
professional, independent journalism that is free from corporate or political
pressure of one kind or another has shrunk quite dramatically.
That is the only explanation for the silence
with which the media accepted the appointment of Amit Shah has president of the
BJP despite his being chargesheeted in a serious murder case. Many of the
decisions the NDA government is taking – on the environment, for example – are
passing below the radar, with the media content to lament the absence of “bold
reform”. The disconnect between the so-called development campaign that
Narendra Modi fought and the obvious attempts by the sangh parivar to stoke
communal tension in Uttar Pradesh over the bogus issue of ‘love jihad’ has not
excited the kind of sustained coverage it ought to have.
It is almost as if media proprietors and
journalists want to remain within the bubble that they helped create and are
terrified of one day finding themselves outside it.
If the business and governance model is the
Achilles’ heel of Indian journalism, surely the future lies in creating media
that operates within a different financial and structural framework. Online
journalism does not require a major budget but sustainability will always
remain a problem. Since print products are virtually given away free, i.e.
there is no print paywall to speak of, it is hard to see how online paywalls
will ever succeed in India. But if readers qua
readers won’t pay, what about readers who are members of civic associations?
Can we think of a model of journalism where the reader as citizen consciously
decides to pay for news that she knows is essential to the political and social
health of the society and country she lives in? Patient, philanthropic capital,
coupled with citizens who recognize the intrinsic value of journalism and are
willing to pay for what they read – this is the direction the media in India
needs to take.
Thank You.
[1]
This lecture is a work in
progress and draws upon some earlier published material of mine. It will
eventually be thoroughly revised for publication as a short book.
[2]
Dean Starkman, ‘The Great Story,’
Columbia Journalism Review, January
2, 2014 http://www.cjr.org/feature/the_great_story.php?page=all
[3]
Siddharth Varadarajan, ‘Time
to curb unfettered electoral expenditure by political parties that impacts poll
outcomes,’ Economic Times, 30 April
2013
[4]
Siddharth Varadarajan,
‘Welcome to the matrix of the Indian state,’ The Hindu, 29 November 2010.
[5]
Thomas E. Patterson, Doing Well and Doing Good: How Soft News and
Critical Journalism Are Shrinking the News Audience and Weakening Democracy–And
What News Outlets Can Do About it. (Harvard, 2000) http://shorensteincenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/soft_news_and_critical_journalism_2000.pdf
