Election Beat – Indian Media and the 2024 General Election

In this episode of Election Beat, Mrinal Pande, writer, journalist and former editor of the Hindi daily Hindustan, tells Savyasaachi Jain and Nirupama Subramanian why Hindi news organisations have bought into the narrative of Hindutva. According to her, from the time when the Hindi press was ignored by most political parties, the right wing was cultivating it, having sized up its reach across 11 populous states. 

Mrinal Pande recalls that at the height of the Khalistani movement in India, Hindi newspapers wrote “derisively” about minority communities. She makes the point that while English speakers in India have access to a large pool of news sources, those who read, write and speak only one language are completely dependent on newspapers published in that language. 

She also flags the cutbacks in news gathering expenditure and the dependence on stringers who are paid low salaries and supplement their incomes with paid news and by procuring advertisements for the paper.

In this episode, R Jagannathan, editorial director of Swarajya, a centre-right publication, tells Savyasaachi Jain and Nirupama Subramanian that the ruling party has always been very keen on managing the media, referring to Narendra Modi’s lack of willingness in being interviewed as something not new to India’s media landscape. 

He claims that the use of draconian laws being used against journalists today is not unique to the BJP government, adding that other state governments use the same instruments, as did the preceding UPA government.

Jagannathan also talks about the media revenue model that has made news organisations dependent on the government of the day, but argues that the diversity of ownership across the country ensures that all shades of opinion are represented.

In this episode, Kalpana Sharma, who has worked at Times of India, The Indian Express and The Hindu, and is a columnist writing on the print media for the online platform Newslaundry, tells Savyasaachi Jain and Nirupama Subramanian that with a few exceptions, mainstream print media has failed its task of critical examination of politics, restricting themselves to coverage of events and speeches without questioning, fact-checking or investigation. 

Kalpana recalls the years after the Emergency as a time when, according to her, the media was adversarial and unafraid. She talks about how “corporatisation of the media” — not referring to the ownership, which has always been private, but the approach to news as a consumer product rather than public goods — set the stage for what she describes as an overall decline of the print media. She praises non-mainstream online news portals for stepping up to the role journalists ought to be playing despite their scarce resources, with investigations, for example on the electoral bonds issue.

In this episode, Girish Kuber, the influential editor of Loksatta, the Marathi daily from the Indian Express stable, says media often get their election coverage wrong because journalists tend to report what they wish or hope to happen as opposed to what is actually happening on the ground. They tend to write for their peers and sources, not for the reading public, and this in turn affects credibility.

Kuber tells Savyasaachi and Nirupama why he believes traditional media that once had the ability to influence political outcomes, is now largely sidelined. He points to the advent of social media ahead of the 2014 elections as a turning point for India's traditional media. Kuber says the sweeping reach of social media led to the sidelining of traditional media by political players such as Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

He also reveals that politicians are finding innovative ways to influence coverage, including through “readers' lobbies” who threaten to boycott a newspaper if the coverage does not cater to their political preferences, and wield enormous clout over advertisers.

In this episode, Neerja Chowdhury, the veteran columnist, political commentator and author of the bestseller How Prime Ministers Decide, takes a long-term view of election coverage over the decade.

She talks to Nirupama Subramanian and Savyasaachi Jain about how journalists try to catch the prevailing mood and undercurrents in an election.

The dominant issue in this election is Prime Minister Narendra Modi, she says. She also reveals how the relationship between journalists and politicians has changed over the decades, with the latter becoming less tolerant of criticism.