Election Beat – Indian Media and the 2024 General Election

In this episode, former Chief Election Commissioner, S. Y. Quraishi, says that transparency is the key to public trust for an institution like the Election Commission of India. Even though he refused to comment on the conduct of the Election Commission now, he says he would never have kept political parties waiting for a meeting. He would have held as many press conferences as required to clarify any issues. “Transparency is the key”, he says, adding that he would be available 24x7 for anyone who wanted to meet him. He talks about how the media was once both a watchdog over the ECI as well as “an ally — our eyes and our ears”. He says it was a “complicated” relationship but it worked well. Quraishi also speaks in detail about his certainty that Electronic Voting Machines could not be tampered with, but noted that suspicion has persisted in the public mind because of the absence of communication and transparency.

In this episode, Pratik Sinha, founder of AltNews, the fact-checking and media watchdog website, says the amount of misinformation spread directly by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections is much more than in 2019 or 2014.  He also says that misinformation peaks during periods when “narratives have to be managed”, giving the example of how blaming the Tablighi Jamaat for spreading COVID was a way to deflect attention from people walking thousands of kilometres during the lockdown to return to their villages. However, now the spread of misinformation seems to be at a constant high, instead of the coming in waves, he adds. Pratik Sinha says while AltNews may not have succeeded in reaching as large an audience as possible due to financial challenges and the restrictions placed by social media companies, their real success lies in making fact-checks a part of popular and media vocabulary. He describes AltNews as a journalistic organisation, and says he does not see a conflict between journalism and activism. When media organisations do not fact check fake speeches by the Prime Minister, and report them verbatim, they are not doing their job, he says.

In this episode of Election Beat, senior broadcaster Pervaiz Alam, who began his career at All India Radio and worked at BBC World Service for several years, says the coverage of the 2024 elections by YouTubers is a point of interest in the western media's coverage of the elections. Pervaiz Alam also speaks about the restructuring of the BBC after the “tax survey” carried out by Indian Income Tax authorities soon after it released the two-part documentary India: The Modi Question, which was eventually banned from screening in the country by the BJP. He says that since that incident, the British public broadcaster is no longer as harsh in its criticism of Prime MInister Narendra Modi or the government. He also recalls a time when the Indian state broadcaster All India Radio and the BBC collaborated to cover the 1993 assembly elections in five states — something that he cannot fathom happening now given the political atmosphere.

In this episode, K G Suresh, Vice-Chancellor of the National University of Journalism and Communication in Bhopal, and formerly PTI's chief political correspondent who’s also worked at Asian News Network, says television journalism in India has been a "big disappointment". He asks what credibility can studio analyses of the ground situation have without reportage from the ground. TV audiences, he says, are now choosing channels according to their ideology, and TV journalists are choosing sides to keep their audiences. Meanwhile, serious audiences are moving to online media, to You Tubers and to some extent, even newspapers.  K G Suresh says for most students who wish to take up journalism, it is just a source of livelihood, with issues of media freedom not being of priority for them. But he also speaks of students who are passionate enough to travel on their own to Punjab or Manipur to find out why people are protesting.

In this episode, Umesh Upadhyay, a former head of TV18 and author of Western Media Narratives On India: From Gandhi to Modi, claims that international coverage of India is biased and is used by western governments to further their own foreign policy goals in the country. He says foreign media’s coverage of India’s situation and circumstances during COVID was “very biased”, even to the extent of being “racist”. He also speaks about how the merging of the dual roles of anchor and editor in one person has been responsible for the downfall of television news. He says that it has resulted in all resources of the channel being focussed on primetime half-hour shows hosted by this anchor-cum-editor, and there’s no one to question them.

In this episode of Election Beat, Vamsee Juluri, professor of Media Studies at the University of San Francisco, and the author of Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia and the Return of Intelligence, says the Indian media is too focused on Hindu nationalism to please politicians and therefore fails in its duty of civilisational revival. He observes that TV channels are noisy and the polarisation in the name of ratings is driving a “race to the bottom”. He argues that the relationship between news media and India as a democracy has changed “foundationally” and to understand this, one needs to go back into colonialism and the Enlightenment “project” to understand why news exists.

In this episode, Manisha Pande, managing editor of Newslaundry and writer and host of TV Newsance, a critique of broadcast news, says the most troubling development of the last few years is that television news has turned against the people whose travails it is supposed to cover. Even public rejection of certain TV channels by people on the ground, their refusal to speak to reporters of these channels, is not forcing a rethink in studios about their pro-government news format. This, she says, is because access to the government has become all important to the business of TV news channels. Manisha Pande also speaks of the communalisation of television news from 2016 onwards, in which anti-Muslim tropes are now part of the nightly news format. She says if people are prepared to vote for Modi and the BJP in spite of their economic condition worsening, it is because of 24x7 propaganda on TV news channels that “Modi has made the country great”.

In this episode of Election Beat, Sitaraman Shankar, editor of Deccan Herald and CEO of the group that publishes Deccan Herald and Prajavani, says the government needs to be more transparent, interact with the media more and do less headline management. He says the newspaper’s editorial positions that are often critical of the Modi government  are not about being anti-BJP, but are critical of certain policies.  He also points out that the newspaper is an “an equal opportunity offender”, criticising the Congress-run state government, just as it has done when other political parties in the state were in office. He describes the Deccan Herald as a newspaper with a long ethos of “speaking up for the little guy”. Shankar, whose two designations put him on two sides of a wall that is supposed to exist in a newspaper, says his double hat is in fact an advantage, because he can see both sides and protect both.

In this episode of Election Beat, senior political journalist, commentator and writer Saba Naqvi speaks about the sanitisation of hate speeches in the mainstream media through “factual coverage”, and the absence of outrage at the egregious statements made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. She says media houses are “running” to do “safe” interviews with Modi, in which follow-up questions are not allowed. As a reporter who has covered the saffron party since the 1990s, she observes that BJP beat reporters now know little of what is happening behind the scenes, and have to stick to party briefings. Saba Naqvi also speaks about how being a Muslim in the present atmosphere poses some challenges to her work as a journalist. She says those in the party whom she has known over the years  “stay in touch” but are “very careful”. On the ground though, she says, her identity has never been a problem in her interactions with BJP and RSS workers. Saba Naqvi says she has more courage than “comfortable caste” Hindus who decide to go along with the narrative rather than hold the government accountable.

In this episode, Vinod Pavarala, Senior Professor of Communication at the University of Hyderabad, says news media are promoting a singular narrative which permeates across the society and ends up negating the country's plurality. He says that the free media in a democracy like India is expected to do a lot more than follow “objectivity rituals”, such as he said-she said reporting. But, he says, in the present atmosphere, the idea of holding a government to account is not widely understood.  Pavarala commends YouTubers for asking the tough questions, but also points out that it’s not the same as “hardcore journalism”. Their lack of resources means their newsgathering capabilities are restricted and they are confined to analysis and commentary. He also adds that there is hope in the richness of alternate media, and the questions that his students ask about the egregious developments around them. 

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.