Guest Post by NISSIM MANNATHUKKAREN

We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning—Jean Baudrillard

Recently, there has been an outpouring of scathing critique against Arnab Goswami and his television programme, The Newshour in some sections of the English-language Press. One magazine cover story called him, “The Man Who Killed TV News.” The immediate context of this critique is Goswami’s branding of some prominent ecological and political activists as “anti-national” and his calling for a ban on the Nirbahaya documentary and legal action against a competing channel which was supposed to be air the documentary. This unprecedented and shockingly ironic position against free speech by a leading media personality was rightfully termed by a critic “as low as a journalist can sink.”

While these criticisms of the “murderous rage” evoked by Goswami draped in the nationalist tri-colour every night and the punishment he metes out to his opponents in a “medieval-style kangaroo court,” also known as an “open debate,” are entirely apt and necessary, they also miss the forest for the trees. Goswami is only a symptom of the post-liberalization corporatized and privatized media landscape of India. If Goswami did not exist, he would have been created. It is not Goswami alone who has killed news, it is the vast majority of the media, especially, television that has done so. What is more obscene than Goswami’s execrable theatrics is how he is deeply enmeshed in the structures of capital and power that he seemingly rails against every night. These structures have not just enmeshed him, but the others as well who are aghast at his aesthetics (or the lack of it). 

One of the great contradictions plaguing India at the moment is the rising democratic aspirations of the marginalized and the oppressed and a corporate-driven media which stands in complete opposition to those aspirations. Or, to put it differently, a private media which is completely governed by the imperative of profit seeks to represent the public interest! Unless this contradiction is resolved we will be lulled into believing that what happens on television debates every night sums up what is happening in the nation.

Sociologist Daniel Dayan has argued that television is imbued with the power of “showing:” how it “calls for, organizes and manages collective attention.” At the same time, we can extend this to argue that its power also lies in not showing. Thus, farmer suicides, atrocities against Dalits, caste oppression, stories of searing economic deprivation and stories of a nation that is still ranked 135 (out of 187 countries) on the Human Development Index do not make primetime television where as the fluctuations of Sensex do. Daya Thussu, a media scholar, points to some key features of Indian television journalism: neoliberal economics, cricket and popular cinema, urban and metropolitan bias, sensationalism and complete ignorance of foreign news.

Goswami is merely a cog in the media machine that has transformed from the press as the fourth estate and as the upholder of public good to one that promotes purely private interests while masquerading as a public watchdog through its superficial critique of politicians and corruption. In demonizing Goswami we miss the demons that are inherent to the system. From a tele-density of 1 per cent and one television channel until the 1980s, there are more than 350 channels now which constitute a market worth 1.5 per cent of the country’s GDP. In the Forbes India list of the 100 richest Indians, there are 12 media barons who are collectively worth $ 54. 6 billion!

The Goswamis are created in an atmosphere where media organisations pay nearly 90 per cent of their salaries to non-journalists in the firm and their owners assert that “newspapers are nothing but commodities.” And this is an increasing tendency among media outlets. This is, following Rupert Murdoch’s philosophy, the Page Three-fication of news, where the business and market functions of media completely override its journalistic side.

Accompanying this is the most pernicious feature with regard to the media, the increasing concentration of its ownership in fewer hands which also means big corporations taking over media houses. Three English-language television channels control about 90 per cent of the market. This is dangerous for democracy especially when the privileged tiny English-speaking classes already wield a power far disproportionate to its size. There were reports that government officials decided on banning the Nirbhaya documentary after watching the debate on Goswami’s Newshour. The arrogance of TRP ratings translates into the belief that whatever is good for the business bottom line is good for the nation.

Corporate power increases also with burgeoning cross-media ownership with media houses having interests across multiple forms of media: television, print, the Internet, cable, and both production and distribution of content. The other facet of the corporatization of media is that corporations have interests in multiple areas of business and industry which have nothing to do with journalism. Similarly, political class too owns stakes in media entities. This effectively generates many conflicts of interest at every step, and also dilutes the role of the media as neutral arbiter. When those who make movies also “make” news for the people, we can imagine the quality of journalism. Media today is thus by no means an impartial entity above the state and the market.

This is why Goswami’s daily fulminations against Lutyens’ Delhi and its cosy club is hollow for they do not go beyond pot shots at the political class and its VIP culture as in a recent campaign on his channel. But the largely invisible VIP culture of the nexus between the political and corporate classes that is at the root of the nation’s economic misery goes untargeted here and elsewhere in the media. How could it be otherwise when big media is dependent on the state and the market, the first for the creation of the conditions for its own expansion, and the latter for advertisement revenues? Its views are thus completely in sync with both.

In what would be a classical moment in Indian television history, in the debate on the government prohibiting the Greenpeace activist Priya Pillai from travelling abroad due to her alleged ant-national activities, Goswami mockingly asks Kavita Krishnan, a political activist with deep roots in Bihar and Jharkhand whether she knows the history of Birsa Munda! This is the sorcery performed by capitalism in which a corporate television channel with the highest TRPs becomes the protector of Birsa Munda’s legacy and the flag bearer of people’s rights while activists who are amidst the people, in the most inhospitable of terrains, fighting for their rights against corporations become anti-national! The ludicrousness of this position was exposed by the Delhi High Court later when it upheld Priya Pillai’s “right to criticise and dissent” even when it might seem anti-national to the government.

What is curious is that in the dumbing down of serious public issues, a lot of responsibility is placed on the audience itself. After all, the masses are dumb. As one description put it: “Goswami’s great talent was he could tap into what his audience was thinking and then literally amplify it.” This view ignores that people are in fact capable of critical thinking as well. But there are not enough conditions to foster this critical thinking. The corporate media plays a huge role in suppressing and deflecting the critical aspects of people’s consciousness. In an important study, Constructing Public Opinion, scholar Justin Lewis shows how opinion polls in America rather than record responses actually manufacture responses through the wording of the questionnaires and by excluding progressive responses. That is why when Goswami opens his phone lines you hear callers becoming Goswamis themselves. And Americans polled on the budget believing that 45 per cent of it goes to foreign aid and 32 per cent to welfare while in reality, the figures are 1 per cent and 4 per cent!

With the concentration of news production in fewer hands, the masses do not have enough alternative and independent sources of news. In this scenario, even their critical and utopian aspirations will be wrung through the capitalist media machine which finally spews them out as degraded dregs. Even then the viewers are not passive consumers as demonstrated by the Twitter campaign #ShameOnTimesNow in response to the channel’s shaming of the Indian cricket team’s performance at the World Cup.

The conditions in a neoliberal India are increasingly inimical to the formation of independent and non-profit media outlets. They are also inimical to the revamping and strengthening of the publicly funded media. Ultimately, a corporatized media and democracy are contradictory terminologies. The former does not want the latter

to flourish. A real and substantive democracy will have restrictions on cross-media ownership; it will have rules ensuring fair and balanced reporting and create conditions for the diversity of media ownership; it will allow small voices to speak and ensure accountability from the media.

Arnab Goswami does not give interviews or take questions from other journalists because for him, “Journalists are not the story.” Here, the moral voice that stands for the voice of the nation and demands answers from everybody does not want to subject itself to democratic scrutiny: a classic case of private media wanting untrammelled and unaccountable power in the guise of protecting public interest.

Is it surprising, then, that we get to witness coverage like that of the Sunanda Pushkar death by the Goswami-led television in which there was a carnivorous gobbling up of the most dignified aspects of human life and death? But any move away from this would require not taking vicarious pleasure in a moral ridicule of Goswami but understanding the systematic erosion of the concept of the press as the fourth estate. Even when we should recognize the damage caused to the democratic fabric by individual media persons like Arnab Goswami, what is really needed is a radical rethink of the structures that produce such media personalities. And these structures can only be upturned through sustained democratic struggles in building an independent media.