Many years ago, during the course of a seminar in Hyderabad, I encountered a gentleman who had just recently returned to India after spending nearly 25 years working for a company in a small town of Texas. We got talking about the US presidential election that George W Bush had narrowly won. The gentleman, whose knowledge of US politics was rather elementary, was convinced that Bush had won through electoral fraud. “I don’t know a single soul who voted Bush,” he explained.
It is indeed possible that the gentleman in question had never discussed politics with a Bush supporter. But the fact that he interpreted this to mean that there were no Bush supporters in Texas — a State he won convincingly — was not surprising. like a lot of people, not least in India, he was living in an echo chamber and engaging with only the like-minded and quite forgetting there is a larger world outside.
A private citizen can be excused for seeing his surroundings through an anecdotal prism. Keeping an ear to the ground is not his principal responsibility in life. Unfortunately, it is the bread and butter of the media whose prime task is to be mindful of what the proverbial Man from Matunga is saying and thinking. It is, of course, not his only business to reflect majority sentiments but an awareness of how events are perceived outside the watering holes frequented by the like-minded does help. It was this disinclination to step out of the echo chamber that explains why much of the English-language media underestimated the emotional impact of the Ayodhya movement of the average Hindu, cutting across caste. It was probably a belief in ‘responsible’ self-censorship that may explain why the very same media failed to report the curious internalisation of the 2002 riots in Gujarat by the local Hindus, and not least the middle classes. And it is this eyesight of convenience that was also a factor in the failure of the ‘liberal’, cosmopolitan media to detect the huge mobilisation around Narendra Modi in the 2014 general election.
To suggest that ‘liberal’ journalists are incapable of understanding the ‘real India’ is facile. There have been many occasions in the past when ground realities have been accurately deciphered and portrayed by the very same journalists. If the ‘liberals’ got the State Assembly election of Bihar in 2015 broadly right, why did they err so horribly the previous yearIJ The reason is obvious. Faithful coverage in India’s polarised media depends almost entirely on whether you like or dislike what is there on the ground. If the reality is seemingly wholesome, there is an outpouring of sanctimonious honesty. On the other hand, if the truth is bitter and cruel, a manufactured reality is imposed on the readers and viewers.
I saw this most vividly in the coverage of the Gujarat Assembly elections of 2002 and 2007. Anyone moving around the districts could see that Modi had a clear upper hand and that the Congress was struggling to keep a credible campaign going. Yet, the English-language media maintained the fiction of a gathering storm that would blow Modi and his saffron flags away. So insidious and self-serving was this propaganda that on counting day, NGO activists (the advance contingents of the Congress) burst into tears when they discovered that they had built castles in the air.
The controversy over the slogan shouting in Jawaharlal Nehru University has been partly on account of a few ultra-left students playing revolution inside the campus. But equally it has been a civil war involving the media. Why, for example, has a large chunk of the English-language press and electronic media decided that the occasion warranted firing at the Government with all guns blazing, and even taking out a march that sought to link media freedom with a defence of political permissivenessIJ Part of the anger was of course directed against a Government that gave the media no bhaw and no junkets. But equally, it was aimed at stealing the thunder from those channels and publications that had broken the liberal consensus and, worse still, grabbed the eyeballs. This was quite apparent from the manufactured outrage against Arnab Goswami by colleagues in other channels. Beaten in the TRP war, they sought to win the aesthetic war by positing themselves as voices of sobriety, reason and openness in the face of bigotry. Alas, it didn’t wash in a society that doesn’t believe that rubbishing India should be treated as a juvenile lark.
What seems to be increasingly happening in both the print and the electronic media is the inclination of journalists and editors to write/broadcast for either their own peer group or their echo chamber. I wonder, for example, why a Kolkata-based paper should have as its lead story a retweet on India by Martina Navaratilova. This is what I call The Hindu syndrome — when a venerable paper succumbed to leftist tripe and consequently lost market share to the challenger. When the needs of the reader are drowned in arrogance and condescension, the media itself suffers.
The social media offerings of individual journalists, where they are less constrained, display a great deal of Americans call “attitude” and an amazing belief that all those who disagree with their assumptions are fools, cretins, bigots and worse. With the rash of online publications, the criterion for journalism is no longer information and old style ‘contacts’ but a cocktail of ready-made opinions, obliteration of the inconvenient and plain insolence. Just witness the relentless targeting of Smriti Irani. No wonder the viewers are voting with their remote controls.