The øFoxificationø of Indian TV news

IN Media Practice | 28/11/2005

 Prasun Sonwalkar

Indo-Asian News Service

The outcome of the recent assembly elections in Bihar was noteworthy not only for the defeat of Lalu Prasad`s party and his alliance but also for the way the results were announced and analysed on Indian television. If the quality of the editorial content of the many 24-hour `news` channels has caused much hand wringing in recent years, the `analysis` of the Bihar results provoked a sense of despair, particularly to viewers outside India.

As elsewhere, more does not necessarily mean better in the media business - having several news channels in a nation`s mediascape does not guarantee better journalism.  Since 1996, when STAR News was launched as India`s first 24-hour news channel, India`s public sphere has taken an increasingly visual turn. India and Indians have never seen themselves in such visual dimensions earlier. But as the initial novelty wore off, the new channels competed with one another other fiercely to drive ratings and corner the increasing advertising pie - but in the process the very idea of what counts as news was redefined.

The frenzy to corner new eyeballs in new markets ensured that events, issues and regions that were earlier not considered newsworthy found space on television news. For some time, it appeared that the proliferation of the Indian news media would further democratise Indian politics and give voice to people and perspectives that were hitherto ignored or marginalised.

  But as Tuesday`s coverage of the Bihar election results showed, the downward spiral towards infotainment - or the dumbing down of news - has well and truly been entrenched in the newsrooms of Indian television. What was clearly a significant event in Indian politics was turned into a garish rigmarole of cheap entertainment.

All pretence of journalistic fairness was jettisoned as the news anchor on STAR News led the celebration of Lalu Prasad`s defeat. The anchor gleefully turned to stand-up comic Shekhar Suman for his expert comments (antics?) on the election results and went on to ask the icon of infotainment inane questions about what should be the priorities of the new government.

 Also in the studio was the well-known film director Prakash Jha, who also got to pontificate on issues that even he would otherwise not claim expertise on. Jha has been a candidate in a recent election and his association with Bihar is well known, but asking a leading film personality to comment on a serious political issue fits into a news culture in which drama, entertainment and sensation are privileged.

The news coverage on STAR News has been symptomatic of the editorial content in most Indian 24-hour `news` channels. The channel`s editorial frames have undergone a sea change since it was launched in 1996 in collaboration with Prannoy Roy`s NDTV, a respected Indian television production company. The arrangement between STAR News and NDTV ended in April 2003, and since then the revamped STAR News has increasingly taken on the ethos and colours of other Rupert Murdoch-owned television channels such as Fox News (US) and Sky News (Europe).

Indeed, the news culture of Fox News - and its phenomenal commercial success - has spawned new terms in media discourse: the Fox effect, the Fox formula and the foxification of news. Fox represents a new approach to television journalism, one that sidesteps traditional notions of objectivity and impartiality, has contempt for dissenting voices and has nothing to do with the scepticism of the government of the day - something that has always been at the core of the mainstream media. Its blatantly pro-American, pro-state coverage of the Iraq conflict in 2003 made it the most watched channel in the US.

In the market-driven broadcasting environment in India, Murdochisation - a term that refers to a corporate approach to news and has infotainment as its key element - has been entrenched for over a decade now. In the early 1990s, the English-language `national` press in India adopted Murdoch`s strategy to privilege the marketing side over the editorial and soon generated windfalls in annual revenues. The strategy percolated to the language press and now is in full display on television. Indeed, due to the sheer diversity of cultures and multiplicity of languages in India, Murdochisation on Indian television may well acquire newer dimensions than it has in the West.

Granville Williams, a senior British journalist and academic, was the first to introduce the term Murdochisation and called it an "ugly sounding word to describe an ugly phenomenon". The word emerged in the 1990s to describe the use and abuse of media power by Murdoch`s company, News Corp. Williams coined the word following a number of high-profile cases which demonstrated the dangers of excessive media power in the hands of one person. The two key

elements of this phenomenon, he says, are:

  * the use of predatory pricing to weaken and eliminate other newspaper titles; and
  * the subordination of freedom of expression to the higher priority of commercial expansion.

Terms such as `Murdochisation`, the Fox effect, the Fox formula or the foxification of news are synonyms of the same worldview that drives the kind of news coverage now available on the many Indian news channels. The use of popular Hindi film songs in news items about issues affecting millions of people is just one of the many devices adopted in the Murdoch-driven news culture of STAR News, which ironically claims to accord top priority to the viewer in its slogan, `aapko rakkhe aage (You remain in front)`.

On Tuesday, as Shekhar Suman carried on with his ribaldry and street-smart jokes with a `lathi` and a lantern (the symbol of Lalu Yadav`s party) by his side, as the results were being announced, it was more than clear that rational, informed debate on issues of the day is unlikely to take place on Indian television in the near future.

  Perhaps, like the government, people get the media they deserve.
 

 As American media scholar Neil Postman presciently observed some time ago: "When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when a cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainment, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people becomes an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility."

  (Prasun Sonwalkar is a UK-based journalist. He can be reached at sprasun@yahoo.co.uk)