Midway through Narendra Modi's term in office, what is the state of the news media? As someone who writes opinion pieces, I can report that the papers I write for haven't suddenly begun to censor me. No edit desk has returned a copy with sentences underlined in red because it has felt uneasy with the political implications of something I had written. Can this be generalized? As far as opinion writing in metropolitan, English language papers is concerned, I think it can be, though it's always presumptuous to speak on behalf of others. Had there been a concerted effort by political establishments to lean on annoying punditry, this would have become news.
This freedom from pressure has something to do with the fact that I write in English. Nikhil Wagle used to say that Bal Thackeray was unconcerned by hostile punditry in the Times of India, but the same opinion published in Marathi in the Maharashtra Times was likely to earn a newspaper editor broken windows and smashed knees. English isn't read by enough people to matter politically.
Even the relative immunity that political insignificance buys English editorialists depends on where they write opinion from and how far outside the republican consensus they stand. Kashmiri journalists in Kashmiri papers and online sites are much more liable to be held to account for expressing their views. Given the latitude afforded by the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act and the fact that many Kashmiris use the language of azadi, the spectre of anti-nationalism can be handily invoked and the charge of sedition more conveniently made.
The intimidation of reporters and correspondents is more commonplace and easier to cite. Malini Subramaniam was bullied out of Jagdalpur in Bastar after she wrote a series of stories on sexual violence, fake encounters and atrocities committed by security forces.
The erstwhile inspector general of police in Bastar, S.R.P. Kalluri, was notorious for his police force's intimidation of local journalists and its attempt to implicate the professor, Nandini Sundar, as a murder suspect and intimidate the activist, Bela Bhatia. All of this was clearly done with the tacit permission of Raipur. It is increasingly the case that journalists who don't enjoy the the institutional shelter that big newspapers supply, are constrained and unfree.
Still, it's hard to explain the absence of concerted reportage on the Vyapam scandal for a year and more. There was a week of intensive coverage which shone the spotlight on what must be one of the most sinister scams in republican history. The deaths of whistle-blowers and suspects, the intimidation and stalking of those associated with the uncovering of the scandal, the involvement of people at the highest level of the Madhya Pradesh government, resulted in... nothing. Just this last month Ashish Chaturvedi, a whistle-blower formally complained to the IGP of Gwalior about being threatened by a policeman. This was reported in the Times of India, but the lack of sustained investigative reporting on the scandal is genuinely worrying.
While all governments aim to manage and massage the fourth estate, there is a rhetorical difference in the relationship between the State and the news media before the 2014 elections and afterwards. The sangh parivar has always had a gift for sneering neologisms: pseudo-secular and sickular are useful examples of this facility. More recently 'presstitute' as a rude description of journalists was pioneered by the former army chief, V.K. Singh, and subsequently adopted by social media trolls.
Presstitute is a Trumpian term. It's a token of something that we didn't recognize till Trump exploited it to the hilt: calculated offensiveness amplified by social media to a level where it becomes a rhetorical weapon. Borges once wrote of Kafka that not only did he influence those who came after him, he changed our view of writers who preceded him. Thus, the term Kafkaesque allows us to see a shared quality in otherwise radically different writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Joseph Heller: the uncanny absurdity of the modern world.
In the same way, Trump's success helps us recognize the viral quality of the leering humour that makes the BJP's mockery of the mainstream media effective. Criticized for comparing journalists to prostitutes, V.K. Singh took to calling them 'media workers'. Trump's online avatar allows us to see Giriraj Singh and Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti for what they are: offline trolls.
We have seen the NDA government, the prime minister and the BJP's online army exert real and concerted pressure on liberal journalists, forcing them off Twitter and driving them into defensive crouches and centrist triangulation. With the possible exception of Karan Thapar and Ravish Kumar it's hard to think of any major anchor who hasn't been forced into performing 'balance', which, given the nature of current political common sense, constitutes a move to the Right.
The hectoring nationalism of the BJP has remade news television. Arnab Goswami's success at Times Now and the size of his viewership has made Modi-fied nationalism a business proposition. Sudhir Chaudhary on Zee and the unctuous Rajat Sharma on India TV have likewise proved that patriotism is profitable: it helps boost viewership and revenue. Ravish of NDTV India has come closest to inventing a counter-rhetoric, but on television, at least, the liberal centre hasn't held.
I can't remember a time when there was as strong a rightward tilt in television news as we have now and the worrying thing is that it makes sound business sense, not just in terms of political access, but in terms of advertising, revenue and profit. The reverse is true of sceptical, adversarial positions: they seem to lead directly to the knacker's yard.
But more worrying than the imbalance between Left and Right is the existential threat faced by the news business. Given the theft of advertising revenues by social media behemoths like Facebook, newspapers face savage cuts. Since news television channels long ago abandoned the task of reporting the world in favour of endless talk shows with zero news value, where is reported news going to come from?
Online news sites, whether stand-alone or attached to newspapers and television channels, don't seem to have a viable revenue model. They don't make enough money to meet the payroll costs and operating expenses associated with large-scale news gathering. The Wire and Scroll and ndtv.com are lively and nimble news organizations but they 'curate' the news. They sample and remix narratives produced by newsprint establishments which, if the fate of Western newspapers is a guide, have no long-term future.
The Guardian, for example, sells a mere 150,000 copies. It's website is one of the most trafficked news sites in the world but it is free. Despite being subsidized by the Scott Trust, the paper has been haemorrhaging money. It is now reduced to begging its readers for contributions. If this is the future of one of the oldest and most storied liberal papers, what is the future? Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, bought the dwindling Washington Post and has restored it to something approaching health, but billionaire ownership can't be the answer. If news organizations can't pay their own way, news runs the risk of becoming a vanity project.
In his great book, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argued that the political community that we call the nation was constituted by the expanding world of print and its products, particularly newspapers. News as a regularly consumed commodity was invented some three hundred years ago at the start of the 18th century. Will it die in the online world of the 21st, because the digerati weren't willing to pay for it?
