A Note on News and Media

The year was 2006-7 and twitter appeared on the tech horizon and through tech-savvy people, the news reached my ears. Users and audience for twitter was about to emerge. Gurcharan Das extolled the virtues of brevity and instantaneous reach of twitter, in an unpaid promo in a mainstream newspaper column. This ‘liking’ and new found love for 140 characters was contagious. A pending invite was lying in my mail and one evening I clicked join.

Before and a few years after Indian sports-star and celebrities joined( suspect they were paid to do so) there was not much to see on the timeline of twitter; one could scroll through all the content from India posted over weeks in less than 3 minutes. Facebook was growing in bursts and at times exponentially and yes WhatsApp came a few years after. To the young readers this may sound as tinged with nostalgia and less to do with how things were back then. Those were the days of SMS packs and Blackberry( Imported IPhone needed a fix to work). People gradually began to communicate with electronic text on phones and electronic mails rapidly took over snail-mail as the preferred mode for official, formal and informal communication.

Lying low I would log in to twitter bi-monthly. To take a break from the boredom and tiredness which day long work ensures? I guess I tweeted a couple of times in the first decade of use. One American commentator has observed in a NYT article that twitter is for the narcissism that typically afflicts America. Those types are very much on twitter today with their thousands of tweets and they tolerate the exhibitor-performers, alarmists and paid and unpaid soldiers of causes and interests, who have taken over the social media.

While ruminating from my ‘personal’ experiences of accessing media in its various modes, media's and mediums, in this note, I intend to relate it to the complex and inner relationship between revenue, news and influence. The subject of examination and exploration itself transits and avenues, mediums and forums of media themselves witness transformation.The transformation is complex and crucial. This transformation produces and reconstructs both the landscape and milieu of modern day life. Hopefully, 'I' in this exploration, reflection and rumination ably shifts for the task/role it has assigned itself!

The childhood impressions and influences endure and are immune to modification and re descriptions. And yet the more I think of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, I find that they were most friendly to ads and revenue. During the cartoon show they would announce ‘we will be back after the ad break’.

The rise, spread and fall of news

Earlier news was mostly heard over air( AIR, BBC, VOA). The news that is heard has largely remained within the ambit and control of state, in India and the third world. The news in print could be read and reread at any time unlike news on air(radio), although print is dependent on literacy, familiarity and felicity with a language. Compared to news on radio news in print was ‘limited’ by its spatial reach. Before the disclosure clauses of ‘interest’ appeared footnoted with news, corporate funding was slowly changing the content and appearance of news and the forms and forums in which it will show up. It began with print media and electronic and digital media was logically next. Seasoned observers rightfully label the development, expansion and effects of these forces as implosion rather than explosion.

News that circulates via social media for its users are often found in a form and content that one may be unable or find it difficult to distinguish between news and ad, ‘dis’ and ‘mis’ information mingles with facts. Promotions and campaign floats and at times sink relevant information. What might be lying in public interest or that can be taken at face value as a good for the public is a casualty. A gap has opened between what arouses, outrages and engages the public and that info which shines bright and true as public interest. The difficulty is not, I believe, solely due to a lack of education or exposure. Those lines and markers which distinguished them before have been effectively blurred or altogether disappeared. Announcements within and during the show about the ads that precedes and follows news is not of much help.

Cancelled my magazine subscriptions in 2014 but newspapers were a childhood habit and continued till 2018. For most days of the month the newspaper remained unopened from the rubber roll(role?). They would be thrown into the neat rising pile of ‘height’ that newspapers have assumed in one corner of city life. Somehow I never got hooked to news on TV and so turning off this medium was super easy for me.

When the rivalry between HT and TOI and their ‘circulation numbers in circles’ became news on the front page, credibility took a hit. Previewing a mainstream Hindi daily at-least every week was a self assigned task and the anglicized press remained the reference for news in vernacular. As news shrank by and within the columns, around 2010 newspapers in India had BULK, 64 pages became a marker( earlier we got 4-6 pages) and one could buy one month’s subscription by selling three months ‘raddi’(trash?) to ever present kabariwala.

This ratio of ‘raddi’ to fresh and relevant news over the years deserves an index and it isn’t just about the shelf life. I often thought about it but never executed this plan to build this index. Most days of the week there was a supplement, as if more news was available, while the ads and marketing side of the product became aggressively visible and dominant. The spurt in cable news and channels in TV saw the same forces and factors playing out their role, however what happened over decades with newspapers ran its course with electronic medium within a decade. Those who leaned on, opted or switched to social media for news would witness the same logic of power and influence with revenue and ads playing out even faster. Technological meditations would of course assume new forms and flare up in uncharted directions. And the state bound by the intertwined and internally articulated logic of generating consent and releasing coercion will remain preoccupied by what can be legitimately said -- across the forms of the media and medium.

Analogy : Rip van Winklle and I

While the baton of carrying news was passing through the print to electronic and digital and I was busy switching off its media, I forgot to delete twitter. Months after deleting my annoying Facebook account which I would check less and less, it occurred to me that I have closed most of the mediums, channels and windows to the outside world. The exact year of their occurrence appears insignificant. After weeks of deliberation and thought, I realised that one must leave a window open towards the world. The best bet in the conditions flashed in the mind-- sign in to your least used X account. Signed in and it was like Washington Irving’s story Rip van Winkle!

The lilting tune that has led to the deep slumber and the incomprehension, unfamiliarity and strangeness that followed was overwhelming and paralyzing. What had changed so drastically -- was it the world, or the medium through which one negotiates and assembles a semblance of order? An order for existence and another for survival? The fact that COVID followed after these unnerving experiences ensured that this growing spiral ran into a rising tide and they got lost in each other.

I resorted to explaining. Mostly things to myself. Other people are hell, Jean Paul Sartre opines, unless they are busy. Thankfully, people appeared to be busy. Most were not after explanations, so it wasn’t exactly like answering questions.

Vector of influence and Transformations

Newspapers, magazines and periodicals had a physicality, they took a corner of your room but also found space with vendors, in your neighborhood and in the market. Those who point out that bookstores and libraries are closing at an alarming rate often fail to factor that news in print has also vanished from the neighborhood. They were read and passed over in tea-stalls. Earlier in many cities, towns and mofussil they were displayed and pasted at ‘public’ places, bus stands, schools, libraries. TV and digital news do not have that property, although it is easier to share them. Spaces- commercial, educational, official and public- print and what it carried initiated and sparked conversations. The rise of social and tech media is accompanied by a distinct drop both qualitatively and quantitatively in terms of conversation – staring/glaring at the screen is accompanied by a rise in rumbling in the head.

The intangible impacts of the physical and material of the print and what all it could help funnel, channel and lead to were of more consequence than the black letters it imprinted. Historically print, the language it used, its geographical reach led to emergence of a new community and was an avenue to converse about its matters and provided the community a distinct sense for itself.( Anderson, Habermas, Taylor, Warner) The re-configurations of pre-modern communities into its modern moulds and avatars is too large a canvas to transverse in a ‘short’ note.

 

Two central and distinct developments that have changed the landscape of news. First,  as TV, digital and tech medium’s reach expands these bounds, it usually leads to deeper fragmentation within the local to global audience it seeks to connect! Second is due to the advent and rise of social media.  Reporter, editor and reader matrix and related mediations that structure print and electronic medium have been reconstituted by social media through the simultaneous, dual role and connection between user and audience. In social media users are audiences and the audience is also a user; the tech platforms take the role of broadcaster and telecaster.

What is broadcasted and telecast-ed privileged as news on TV or receives amplification in social media and presented as trending and relevant may not engage a community or ring with a neighborhood or a region. Yet, rouse and arouse its users and incessantly precipitate the proverbial storm in a tea cup.

Inventions, resources and interests

Inventions within science( Print technology, Digital and Satellite based telecasting, Internet and mobile based communication techs) do not come with their own inbuilt business models. They are arranged, built and sustained and resources and its allocation is vital. Inventions and innovations are not always worthy of a business model and many never find resources to see their full realization. Resources are not a handmaiden of capitalism and have been and can be sourced from the logic's that fall outside the realm of profit and loss. Resource mobilisation and its expansion may lead to intrinsic and extrinsic biases and costs. One needs to factor them while evaluating innovations and inventions, their spread and for tapping the potential they harbour.

 

The constraints that revenue imposes, investments implant and corporate funding induce and issues and interests they promote and establish are systemically hidden and kept out from the public eye. Apart from the issues that have been flagged already they erode trust in institutions and generate suspicion in how things are playing out. While the available data suggests that the media, forums, platforms and users are expanding, the same cannot be said unequivocally about their efficacy and relevance. Digital news report 2023 by Reuters observed, 'consumption of traditional media, such as TV and print, continues to fall in most markets, with online and social consumption not making up the gap.'

Ownership and control Or a resource

When I encountered the first newspaper/magazine in my life and earlier in India, industrial and business houses were the owners of publication houses. Would naming and tagging them together highlight or foreground an entrenched interest, today? It is not new. So what has changed if anything with respect to managerial and editorial freedom of the press from the owners and censorship and regulation that the state imposes balancing it with the resources( advertisements) it provides. The informal rules and norms that an acolyte learns to imbibe or break as part of training within the milieu of working as a press person also works as a filter of what is printed, telecast-ed and posted as news, but is of far less importance than many would admit.

Earlier Industrial and business houses had their own business and they also funded publication houses. Media, publication houses and networks were not their primary business and they were not run as businesses. From my own experience and reliable information I am not in a position to say whether their earlier tryst with print and publication, and its recent forms as CSR, whether they actually controlled and interfered with editors and publications or not. Ownership was to control or another resource among many? A resource which they can leverage for influence and use as a bargining chip while dealing with state.

 

My hunch is that the influence the print and publication commanded was visible and perceptible and they decided to foot the bill required for their sustenance and it provided them a bargaining chip while dealing with the state. In the dynamics between state and incipient and big capital within India, press had its place and freedom2( sourced through reporting to the public). Most of the dominant players in the private, corporate, industrial and financial sectors seek or maintain a foothold with media houses and network companies for aforementioned reason?

Corporate funding and crony capitalism occasionally generate a lot of heat and the constraints of revenues end up as a long spell of despair and helplessness. The thick crust that most things are rigged and irredeemable gathers another layer. The reason that resources are required for ventures and so they must carry with them interests that are non-negotiable, lying beyond transparency or scrutiny is an arrow that wheels around and on most occasions it is unclear who and what is a target. Corporate funding and crony capitalism are facts but as explanations, they often fail to account for the range and depth of issues they are tied with.

Economic competition and media

Mentioned TOI and HT, I could have as well named MTNL, Reliance, Vodafone and Docomo in the telecom sector, ONGC, NTPC and Reliance and Adani power. After liberalisation there was an attempt at policy and state level to have some sort of competition( between public sector and private undertakings and among private players) now that has changed. Monopolies do not face discouragement from the state and are getting entrenched. I believe crony capitalism combined with emerging monopolies can explain more developments and turns. For news that the public needs to effectively work as a democracy the consequences have been telling.

Coming back to the more perceptible world which twitter presents to its users to scroll where recently viewed becomes news. Cost cutting, corporate funding, expansion in user base and trends becoming news has brought the corporate funded media and new tech giant in a closer embrace than anyone could have imagined moments before this alliance was forged and routinised. Twitter placed itself a platform to disseminate news far more quickly and accessible through web and mobiles, where TV lagged. Soon tweets became news for print and electronic media. Cost-cutting dictated and allowed the electronic networks and media houses to cut down their field offices and reporters and with ground reports and experts logging in to the platform, most news were sourced through twitter. If Elon Musk ex board member and now X owner is hard selling a subscription for revenues can you fault him for business sense?

Once the B, C and D graders of celeb world( Films, TV, sports, art and culture) gathered more following and visibility by being more interactive and available to audiences, A grade stars were forced to do the same, hiring PR agents to run their accounts. Newspapers, TV and digital outlets and channels cut down their many verticals and sourced news through social media. Newsroom cloaked itself with a sanctity by closing its rank while under the garb of news ideas and stories, news is ‘manufactured’ and unapologetic and intransigent peddling of agendas commenced. As news originates through subscribed feeds or the internet all they can attempt is a 'spin'. It is a swirl and many emerging and settled currents run into each other.

Movements, Migrations and Media

Last 30 years in India( urban, cities and towns and beyond) has seen unprecedented commercialization and privatisation of public spaces. Social, cultural, public places and spheres are now primarily commercial. Rapid and many would add with rabid commercialization and privatisation, a ‘moving mass’3 had emerged. Their mobility and migrations within/across the nations are the primary drivers of communication and digital technologies. Their movements and migrants and the process that brought moving mass into being, affects most places and countries.(David Held) Some of these movements and migrations are characterised better as regional-global. This moving mass(a significant size of people) had been uprooted from their old largely static world. They have lost touch and now have the means to keep in touch. The process(globalisation?) depends on communication and digital technologies to harness their labour. I am aware that this moving mass( at times migrants on other occasions slaves, labourers) are the engines and driving force that brought about globalisation. Some footnotes acknowledge them.

News on Television in India

TV and satellite based news providers and services began when commercialisation and privatisation already had a run and so the operating logic would dictate -- work within the parameters of TRP. When sectors and arenas work with finer, minute and many fold checks and balances through insulated and instituted independence and relative autonomy; somehow cohere and coalesce they are unlikely to develop synergies geared to new dynamics. When corporate funding, revenue and news and its media were brought close, the rigging of TRP followed. A rigged TRP system ‘freed’ the producers of news from economics as the main function of working with democratic and tied them with those who are enjoying political power in the center. Most of the hastily formed and barely functioning regulatory mechanisms( CCI, SEBI, TRAI) in India have followed roughly the same trajectory?

In the last couple of years TV screens are vanishing/receding from the commercial and pseudo-public spaces, however few could deny that TV and the news it carried had their moments.

The lights and sets of TV studios, the corporate-cosmopolitan attire are distinctively modern and urbane while in order to engage their audience they invoke Nukkad, Chaupal, panchayats, goshti, baithak, dangal, akharas and yatras and what is overt and visible receives more attention than the organising logic of their workings and dealings. They have to appear as representative and the only mode available to them to represent is by being and appearing nationalistic. In this process they end up as caricatures and cartoons, if not as parrots for the causes they want to champion.

While they pay lip service to gender justice and environmental degradation, security and lapses around it; privilege and power is their mainstay. A hyper mode is activated by default when they deal with issues that terrorism and nationalism raises. Silences that has enveloped social, cultural and public conversation in India about caste for example have been funneled within the arteries of media and reinforced by media by following the social and cultural norms. Caught between scandals( they hobnob with brokers and holders of power) and strings of sensationalism that has always followed news as shadows and ghosts consume their content and presentation. In order to appear not silent or complicit they resort to screaming and so appear perpetually outraged? A mode of addressing the audience which was intended as a right reaction to how things stand has gradually seeped in most of the public conversations. Three modes are common and characterise TV and social media -- incite, outrage and rouse. To the quality of debate, TV’s contribution in India to public discourse, civic engagement and public culture has been dismal and coverage of international issues or the lack of it, is not worth a mention.

As a user of social media and twitter in particular like everyone else I did follow my favourite stars, heroes, news outlets and magazines only to unfollow them later. People I follow/following on social media are those I have met in life. Though an old but irregular user I have no experience of social media. When immigrant civilization like America turned explicitly against migrants, I did write about the tragedy of commons and social media. White supremacy and the campaign to make America great again brought Trump at the helm and emboldened followers mobilised by social media decided to invade their own democratic institutions.

To the readers it may sound as an obituary it is not meant as one.

1.Censorship and independence of press and the norms that protected and sustained public interest and the changes that pave the way for its decline must be placed within the matrix and mediation's of these informal norms. They cannot be addressed by legislation or community guidelines of any medium, for the time being, is my opinion.  Whether a reintegration is possible is an issue I believe is of paramount importance and seeks a distinct and separate treatment.

2.The mainstream analysis of Press freedom works with the registry of censorship laws but often fails to see how the dynamic of State vs Capital constraints or enables it. The abolition of privacy purses, nationalisation of Banks, War, MRTP Act and emergency can be seen as occurrences in the same decade. Another issue that deserves more analysis and not just a historical reference point.

3. Uprooted from their social milieu and having been thrown into the orbit of mobility, this mass consists of blue and white collar workers, moving within and across cities. Some cross national boundaries others aspire to do so.