The amount of rural reportage in the Indian media remains far too low, with even important stories such as those on farmer suicides tending to be ignored. One of the outspoken critics of this trend has been P Sainath, rural-affairs editor of The Hindu and 2007 winner of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts. He was also the journalist who originally broke the story on farmer suicides in India. He recently spoke to Himal about the hyper-commercialisation of the Indian media, and how this has created a structural compulsion to hide the truth about poverty and avoid covering important issues of rural India.
A decade and a half ago, you said that in India, where half the children go to bed hungry every night, the mainstream newsmagazines carry cover stories on weight loss. Things have not changed much since then, have they?
Well, in some minor ways things have improved. There is a growing number of journalists who are working hard to bring social-sector stories into the media. So there's some energy being built up on these issues, particularly among district-level journalists. It's not yet a critical mass, but at least it's a start. On the other hand, the media as a whole has fallen prey to what I call hyper-commercialisation. Of course, this is a larger problem – the media is very much a part of larger society, and cannot stand aside from larger social and economic processes. But I would challenge the proposition that the Indian media are pro-corporate and pro-establishment, for the simple reason that now we are big business, we are the establishment. The Indian media are deeply, directly invested in hundreds of sectors of industry. Corporate houses have investments in media, and now the media is itself invested in big business.
How has this impacted coverage by the media?
Arrangements like private equity partnerships creates a structural compulsion to lie. With a media house holding large amounts of equity in corporate entities, when the dramatic fall on the Bombay Stock Exchange Sensitive Index [BSE Sensex] took place in October 2008, dropping by almost two-thirds in value, the value of the holdings dropped precipitously. But since the media house has signed treaties, it has to continue giving the advertising space and paying the tax on it. Thus, in October 2008, the media companies found themselves in a mess. On paper, they had lost thousands of millions. As such, we had a situation where the fate of the media houses was linked to what was happening in the stock market. So there was a huge compulsion to lift the market – and to create an appropriate mood, one has to lie. Thus was created the great myth that India was not affected by the global meltdown.
So the media is compelled to write feel-good stories?
The corporate media have no choice but to lie. They can tell the truth when it is not unprofitable to do so, but they have to lie on large things like the economy, how the stock market is performing. It is not just about that the media has to do positive, feel-good stories – they particularly have to do so when the economy is doing badly. Two of the largest newspapers in India instructed their reporters to say that there is no recession in India, and the 'R' word cannot be used in any story. Recession happens in the US; in India, it is to be called an economic slowdown. The front page of the a Times Group paper had a headline 'What recession?' So it's not just about feel-good stories; it's about having to create a myth in order to save your neck