Election coverage in this country demonstrates three things. One, the only time when media houses invest in coverage of the aam aurat and aadmi in the country’s farthest reaches is when citizens assume the periodic role of voters. That is when mainstream media television or print invests in reporters venturing out. When supplemented with coverage by YouTube journalists and those of online websites, voluminous feedback on what is changing and the quality of governance emerges. That is the sort of feedback that ought to be coming to state governments right through their period of governance if it is to create pressure for better performance. Not when their term is over. If the press at all levels is doing its job. But that is only done by stringers and other local reporters who are the most vulnerable to State bullying.
Two, each concluded election only serves to demonstrate that while media coverage can explain election outcomes, it cannot influence them. Its exposés do little to keep the process honest, even when the manipulation of voters’ lists is being documented by reporters on the ground. The reporting has been colourful with YouTube anchors chasing voters removed from lists as dead, asking, ‘Are you alive, have you voted?’ Indeed, they have.
Ajit Anjum, who worked for Hindi news channels and then started his own YouTube channel, had a criminal case filed against him in July for investigating serious lapses by booth-level while officers uploading voter registration forms without photographs and other crucial details. He got a call from local officials asking him to delete a video he had shot 30 minutes after he had finished interviewing the BLOs. A press note about him and a first information report followed.
The latest election helps underscore, once more, the irrelevance of such media exposés to poll outcomes. What makes news for journalists does not influence voters. Realpolitik, such as freebies that have the Opposition and media spluttering, delivers far more to the deprived in terms of what they can use in their lives than exposure of political or Constitutional impropriety. Also, in not taking a sufficiently long view of why the pre-election benefits were succeeding, in terms of the schemes and infrastructural changes that preceded them in previous years, the reporting did not fully capture what the voter was responding to. Not everybody did that.
The third point is that how a government treats the media is not of much significance to how a voter evaluates democracy. Nitish Kumar has become the chief minister for the 10th time after two decades of helming both single-party and coalition governments. His relationship with the press has made news over the years. It varied from incentivising with government advertising, to intimidating reporters, to tweaking laws.
In 2009, nearly four years after he became chief minister for the second time, Kumar took annual advertisements placed in newspapers from Rs 4.5 crore to Rs 25.25 crore, a Right to Information activist found. On November 24 that year, on the eve of the completion of four years of Kumar’s government, advertisements worth Rs 1.15 crore were given to 24 different national and regional dailies in a single day. If Bihar is the poorest state in the country, this is a reflection on how it was using its money.
In the same year, the chief minister also moved to disincentivise RTI activism as well as information demands by citizens. His government amended the RTI Act to allow only a single piece of information per application and restrict the number of free-of-cost pages. Even though the Act itself says information should be given free to below-poverty-line citizens, the amendment restricted them to receiving only ten pages of information without cost. In the following years, though, RTI continued to be used by journalists to track the state government’s expenditure on media advertising. By 2019, the Bihar government had spent close to Rs 500 crore on advertising in five years.
Intimidating the press was flagged by the Press Council of India in 2012 when Markandey Katju was chairman. Later that year, the PCI sent a fact-finding team to Bihar to enquire into charges of government pressure on the media in Bihar. It invited all stakeholders, including readers, to bring their complaints to the team. The same year, the
PCI also took up complaints against the state government’s policy of advertising to silence the media and appointed a committee to investigate. But the latter’s recommendations for an independent body to oversee the disbursal of ads came to nought.
Journalists in Bihar were also penalised for their Covid-19 coverage. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Bihar government and the Bharatiya Janata Party led a widespread crackdown on journalists, with at least ten journalists having faced cases under serious charges, including criminal conspiracy and extortion. In 2021, Kumar’s administration brought “objectionable comments” against the government and its functionaries and lawmakers by individuals or organisations under the ambit of cybercrime. It sought to operationalise this by roping in the economic offences unit of the Bihar police. The latter asked senior government officials, no less, to report objectionable comments they came across.
The state also keeps free-speech trackers busy. Free-speech violation is a polite term for the 11 attacks, 6 killings of journalists, and 8 cases filed against them for their reporting, which took place between 2020 and 2025. This year’s Pew Research survey on free expression, and press and internet freedom globally looked at 35 countries, most of whose citizens said they valued these things but did not rate their own countries as having total freedom on these counts. Indian respondents ranked the availability of all three freedoms in the forties in terms of percentage.
One survey finding was that views on the value of press freedom vary by education. Forty per cent of the less educated in India thought press freedom was important, while 50% of those more educated thought so. Even the latter percentage
is not very high compared to the other 21 countries on the list, with the exception of Israel and Kenya. One can only surmise what the figure might have been for a state like Bihar.
Given the track record on media freedom of the two major constituents of the coalition that has come to power in Bihar, journalists reporting from the state will need to strategise on how effectively and safely they can deliver professionally, and the kind of alliances they must build with civil society and lawyers.
Sevanti Ninan is a media commentator. She also publishes the labour newsletter, Worker Web. https://workerweb.curated.co/issues