Audiences and new media genres
The Hoot excerpts a section of the Introduction from Arvind Rajagopal’s edited volume ‘The Indian Public Sphere’.
Selected and introduced by SUBARNO CHATTARJI
Interpreting Media
April 2010
As part of The Hoot’s continuing commitment toward creating greater media awareness and fostering debates related to media issues we are excerpting a section of the Introduction from Arvind Rajagopal’s edited volume The Indian Public Sphere. New extracts will be posted on the site every month and readers are invited to send in comments, book recommendations, and reviews.
The collection of essays in The Indian Public Sphere explores a wealth of material from a variety of perspectives. A part of Rajagopal’s editorial intent is to push back discussions of media public spheres to the colonial era thereby indicating continuities and disruptions in present-day
Arvind Rajagopal, ed. The Indian Public Sphere:
Extracted with permission from The Indian Public Sphere:
Audiences and New Media Genres
A media professional has remarked, ‘[Earlier] the market was driving media, by the late 80s media started driving the market.’23 The statement expresses something about the way in which the power of the media has been perceived as both quantitatively and qualitatively different. From being considered a passive instrument of policy, media have taken on a life of their own, in this perception. The capacity of television to generate consumption in areas that marketers had previously ignored, and the sense that further growth will multiply the wealth to be reaped, has led to a kind of gold rush. With media industries growing at more than twice the rate of the Indian economy as a whole for the last several years, the reasons are of course obvious.24 Economic success is not the whole story, of course, although in some accounts it may seem to be the case. Assessments of the content and quality of the media are more sober, and often pessimistic, as the businesses involved appear to have joined in a ‘race to the bottom’,25 engaging in sensationalism and trivialization of all and sundry news, led by the august The Times of India. The effects on an Indian mass audience that is hardly well educated are obviously feared.
What kinds of effects? To explore this adequately would require a separate volume. If we define our question in terms of the politics of media, we notice, for example, a new symbiosis between the police and the media with the rise of live action news, with the police often scripting stories that do not withstand logical scrutiny but are designed to provide vivid footage that will assuredly draw audiences. In return, crime reporters may be richly rewarded with gifts from police officers, in addition to advancing in their own careers.26 Police encounter killings have received a boost with the prospect of television glory, and since the victims are always designated as criminals, it may appear a win-win proposition for both the police and the media. One
Pictures and stories cannot be chosen arbitrarily, but must conform to reporters’ judgement of news values.28 As the realm of publicity expands, the worldview that media professionals have, which they assume their audiences share, tends to be reinforced. Scandals and other episodes that violate the shared norms receive copious coverage, often sensational, but the moral is always evident, and meant to assure audiences of the rightness of their own views, even if the threat to these views is constantly presented. Publicity as a realm where the lowliest person may stage a virtual meeting with the highest, takes on a different quality with 24-hour TV news stations, especially when there are dozens of competing channels. Thus, we are told that a killer wanted by the police recently offered to surrender live in a television studio; one channel head declined the offer and to his regret a competitor jumped at the chance.29 Here we see a keen awareness of the media’s political effect, and of publicity as a way of generating capital from previously non-negotiable events, for classes that earlier had little access to it. It is the comprehension of broadcast news that is challenged in the process, as the existing conventions of publicity retain fairly orthodox conceptions of good and bad events, reputable and disreputable characters, and so on. The increasing resort to publicity by non-conventional actors is hardly surprising when the media are clearly far more open to popular issues than government institutions are. The reliance on a law-and-order frame is the received frame of reference, inherited from colonial times, and applied to all events concerning collective association of any kind. Thus, for example, the poor or low castes are not able to be perceived as political actors; they are typically treated as victims or as requiring uplift, when they appear at all in the news. Any form of action on their part may, thus, appear as aberrant and threatening, even when it involves a reasonable assertion of their rights, and it is the police rather than, say, community leaders or academics, that are called in to offer expert comments. By contrast, the sympathy of the media for students and professionals striking against government-mandated reservations for lower castes has been striking.30
If the media continue to be dominated by political coverage, the space given to non-political subjects in the media has also expanded greatly. The demarcation of a sphere as ostensibly separate from politics, which occurs alongside the liberalization of the economy, is significant; needless to say, the very act of separating a non-political domain imbues it with a political significance. To address it, however, we need to acknowledge the new institutionalization of different kinds of political spheres, which are themselves linked within the same organizations and engaged with by the same audiences. Television channels have talk shows and viewers participate through telephone, text messages, and email, and also, in person. Magazines are now available for a host of non-political interests, and these interests are also reflected on television. A host of informal means of censorship continues to exist and perhaps, has even grown, and government institutions from the police to the Ministries of Home and of Defence expect their press releases to be treated as sacrosanct. At the same time, social norms have widened somewhat in their scope, at least on the media if not in the country; the ban on the kiss has faded away, for example, and a wider range of public expression, less constrictive to personal desires but often less tolerant to minorities.
The genre of Indian soap operas is no doubt in its early stages of growth. At present, many of the production values of
What are some of the salient factors and trends we can discern and distil from the plethora of developments in the media? There are several. With state regulation having proven unaccommodating to popular voices and bottom-up pressures, it is difficult to propose the need for a cultural policy without appearing to ask for a return to a bygone era, with all the accoutrements of a licence•permit raj. Clearly, a dictatorial form of policy prescriptions is impractical where the most influential players are private, and the race to establish the main players in the media market is under way, with dozens of channels targeting relatively small audiences. In 2007, for example, one newscaster counted thirty-six 24-hour news channels, far more relative to the existing audience size than anywhere else in the world. Nor is the quality of news improved by the contest; if anything, there is a pressure for greater sensationalism and a clustering around the same topics, themes, and angles. Market competition generates its own forms of censorship, clearly, in ways that are harder to detect because they are self-imposed. Precisely because market pressures may generate non-rational solutions to existing problems, however, it seems that some kind of oversight by an advisory body would be important. After several decades of resisting challenges to government autonomy over broadcasting, numerous foreign television channels are received in millions of Indian homes, with the tacit consent of the Indian government. From a tightly regulated situation, in which ‘education, information, and entertainment’ were supposed to represent the priority in broadcasting values, there appears now to be a free-for-all contest to corner the most lucrative segments of the Indian market by any means necessary. When half or more of the population does not even own a radio set and more than a third cannot even sign their names, a reliance on market forces is not adequate since this segment of the market is not guaranteed to attract businesses. Government controlled television still retains the majority of the audience; this section of viewers cannot afford the nominal charge required to receive cable and satellite channels. The quality of the programming in government broadcasting seems to be a carry-over from the past, with insufficient attention to audience needs and interests.
Meanwhile, the entry of the private sector into broadcasting appears to have been received enthusiastically, judging by audience ratings and growing business revenues. What is striking is the rapidity with which an obsession with secrecy and rigid supervision of programming content•all justified by a developmental mission•has given way to an apparently exclusive interest in generating revenue. The irony is that decades of investment have gone to establish the government’s own broadcasting infrastructure, which is unparalleled in size and reach, whereas apparently revenue is almost exclusively being sought from new, private entrants into the market. Thus, when radio broadcasting was opened for competition in 1999, the licence fee was at such a high level that it ruled out any non-commercial ventures from contemplating entering the market.32 Chanchal Sarkar remarked on the media ownership patterns emerging in this environment:
The Indian public is as yet not protected by any rules on cross-ownership. There are no public interest tests anywhere, and no delicensing by a public body. In 2005, the I&B Minister said he was seeking counsel on the matter, and said also that there would be a body to license foreign channels. From when he didn’t say and they have been broadcasting for some time. Like the 44 families who controlled
At least two issues can be mentioned that could benefit from policy intervention of some kind. First is the continuing need for a genuinely autonomous public media, at least partially insulated from market pressures. The familiarity of this demand has perhaps dulled the awareness of its importance. We have witnessed decades of criticism about the abuse of government control of the broadcast media. Now that private forces are free to operate, there is strikingly little discussion of the new forms of censorship and control existing in the media, via more informal mechanisms of business practice, including judgements about audience taste that use ratings as the sole evidence, and the need to enhance advertising revenue. The market provides no inherent guarantee of competition between alternative programming formats; if anything, we notice a diminution of choices and a tendency to replicate market leaders. Meanwhile, developmental needs have not disappeared; if anything, they are more pressing with economic growth.34 However, there is reason for optimism. For instance, the cinema industry has shown a surprising expansion in its own creative range over the last decade, partly aided by affluent multiplex audiences, where smaller, niche projects can circulate, and overseas markets. The difficulty of replicating this in broadcast media is due to the size of the potential audience and the resultant increase in commercial pressure; hence, the need for some kind of institutional buffer.
Second, and more specifically, amid the euphoria over the expansion of the media and the growth of Indian language media in particular, the divide between English and Indian languages is unlikely to disappear simply via market proliferation of Indian language media. Given the continued reliance on bilingual mediators whose ability to interface with a more cosmopolitan English language world reinforces the status of English, an automatic transition to equal opportunity for Indian language users seems unlikely without conscious political intervention.
23G. Krishnan, cited in Vanita Kohli, The Indian Media Business,
Books, Sage Publications, 2003, p. 28.
24Price WaterhouseCoopers, The Indian Media and Entertainment Industry. Sustaining Growth. Report 2008, p. 164,
25The phrase is from P. Sainath, Personal interview,
26Vartika Nanda, ‘Television Crime Reporting in
Handbook of the Media in Contemporary
27The quote appears in the research transcript of a 2007 documentary film, Morality
TV Aur Loving Jihad: Ek Manohar Kahani, written and directed by Paromita Vohra. My thanks to Paromita Vohra for sharing it with me.
28See Stuart Hall, ‘The Determinations of News Photographs’, in Working Papers in Cultural Studies No. 7.
29Rajdeep Sardesai, ‘Ghosts in the machine’,
30This new symbiosis may explain why, when bureaucrats publish volumes on the media these days, they are not from the Information and Broadcasting Service, as used to be the case, but from the Indian Police Service. See Uday Sahay (ed.), Making News: Handbook of the Media in Contemporary
2006.
31Personal interview, Shailaja Kejriwal, Star TV; Nivedita Chatterjee, Balaji Telefilms, November 2004, Mumbai.
32Sevanti Ninan, ‘This Signal is Faint’, Media Pulse, The Hindu,
33Chanchal Sarkar, ‘Has Media Liberalisation A Price?’, Mainstream,
34Ibid.
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