Media stretched in bid to preserve its freedom

Last October, Tripura reacted violently to reports of sacrilege against a Hindu shrine in neighbouring Bangladesh. Angry mobs took out some 250 rallies in the northeastern state and burnt mosques, prayer rooms, and shops of the minority community. No one died, but these incidents were used, with the help of a friendly media and the toxic world of WhatsApp, for polarising communities to benefit in the forthcoming local elections.

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True to the wont of many state governments, independent reporting of these events by Tripura government, too, was perceived as part of a grand conspiracy to destabilise a democratically elected government. More dangerous, in their view, were the journalists — like the two women reporters who were detained by the police for tweeting and reporting from the scene of violence — who came to Tripura from other states. As they cannot be influenced by the same devises that the government agencies use against the local media — threat of withdrawing government advertising or worse, raiding their premises or stopping the publication of newspaper or a channel on spurious grounds — they are considered more lethal.

Contrary to dominant belief peddled in the right wing universe, it is not an easy life for media in many of the states — irrespective of which party is in power — as they are compelled to chase government advertising for survival. In BJP-ruled states, media houses face a stark choice — either play up to their ‘muscular majoritarianism’, as described by Editors Guild of India’s report on Tripura violence, or shut shop. As there are no other sources of advertising or revenue in many parts of the country except government or fast fading public sector companies, media owners, invariably, are forced to conduct themselves in a cloying manner to extract advertising from the bureaucrats or touts of the government.

In recent years, news channels and publications have lost their freedom to report independently.

In their desperation, publications even end up allowing fake news on their platforms. Is it a surprise that the Indian media has been sliding on the global freedom scale for some years now? Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans Frontieres or RSF) shows India standing on a dismal 142/180 spot with its journalists having to contend with “Orwellian content regulations”— many of them routinely visible in Kashmir and conflict-ridden Northeast.

The Indian media’s misery has been aggravated by the economic slowdown post demonetisation of 2016 that drove away readers and also small and medium enterprises from advertising space. Pandemic and the subsequent lockdown further smothered the industry. While digital editions benefited during this period, advertising became scarce for print for many quarters forcing increased dependence on the government. Indian Newspaper Society (INS) estimates losses in the print media — in 2020 — to the tune of Rs 16,000 crore. Since then, they have grown. INS wanted an increase in advertisement rates from government, but an RTI query revealed that the demand may come to grief. Till now, the Central government has not cleared Rs 200+ crore of dues of print and TV.

Press was an integral part of the country’s freedom struggle. Gandhi, Nehru used the pages of newspapers to spread awareness about the freedom movement and subsequently about creating a Constitution-based society. Contrary to other pillars of democracy, they located the fourth pillar, press or media in the private sector, to keep it away from the control of the government and to preserve its freedom? All that is forgotten. The government now controls even corporate advertising. No company dare put an insert in a newspaper or magazine that is seen hostile to the government. Some celebrities, who spoke out against the government on some social or political issue found to their mortification that they were eased out by their sponsors.

Save for the bias that the government allegedly displays for a few large media houses that also own TV channels, most of the publications have been in dire straits.

The human impact on this sector is staggering. The Centre for Monitoring of Indian Economy (CMIE) has discovered that in the last five years, 78 per cent of those who were in the media in 2016 and publishing had lost their jobs. Expectedly, the government plays a Shylock here by extracting its pound of flesh — publicity for the political party and the leader — at the expense of publication’s credibility.

The government does not really mind the media’s dependence on them. It worries when private sector advertising, liberally distributed, allows the media houses to breathe easy.

A case in point has been the sharp increase of advertising from cryptocurrency into media last year. For a short period of time, the spike in the value of ads from cryptocurrency exchanges made the government sit up. While the reservations expressed by the bureaucrats in a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi were packaged to show the government’s concern over the promises that crypto ads were making to gullible young investors, the truth lay elsewhere. The government was unsure how to deal with a situation when the media is not financially dependent on them.

Cryptocurrency exchanges spent Rs 150 crore in 2021. Exchange for Media, which observes the business side of media reports that during the T20 cricket World Cup in 2021, rivals of a crypto exchange, WazirX, roped in a few celebrities and spent Rs 50 crore. More funds were on their way till the government put a spanner in their works.

Now media houses have no option, but to hanker for UP government advertisements in print, TV and digital media. An RTI reply last year had revealed that the UP government spent Rs 150 crore at a time when lakhs were searching for relief from the pandemic. The spend went up exponentially during the run-up to the elections, as UP government advertisements can be seen everywhere, even in southern states.

Many a time, newspapers have carried advertisements that violate our constitutional values as they are divisive and have been accused of pandering to fake news.

In their desire to control even digital platforms, whose penetration has been growing, the government first reined in Twitter. And now has zeroed in on Google, whose algorithm drives traffic through its search engine. Most of the digital news websites that have proliferated and exercise a certain degree of freedom are at the mercy of Google search engines and advertisements. The government is trying to get hold of this algorithm so that it controls what the country sees and reads. Till the balance between private and the government is restored, there will be no free media in the country.

The inconvenient truth would continue to be photo-shopped.