Gods own newspapers

BY BINOO K. JOHN| IN Opinion | 01/07/2015

OUT OF PRINT
Binoo K John

With declining interest and validity, newspapers and magazines  find themselves in  a blind alley.  Most live in denial. Some soldier on, despite mounting debts , the arrest of owners, and/or the taking over of their assets (the Deccan Chronicle, the Statesman). Others get into circulation wars. Most just suffer like Alzheimer’s patients, losing even their memory of past glory, with no indication of any future solace.

There is some sort of upward movement in the regional newspapers but it doesn’t seem for real.  In Kerala, the state where everyone starts the day with a newspaper, a bidi and  black jaggery coffee, the circulation wars have crossed all limits of decency.

The market leaders always set the trend.  So Malayala Manorama (claimed circulation two million daily) has  a strategy that seems to be a winner: Convert religious events into news and give the clergy pride of place beside the politicians.

Kerala has more than 24.7 per cent Muslims and 19 per cent  Christians and both together form a very affluent  45 per cent of the population.  Consequently, many  freelance evangelists and fundamentalist  preachers get free play.  

This newspaper practice may seem obscurantist  but  survival is the name of the game. Though there is no conclusive evidence that a preacher’s edict or his mug shot stabilizes circulation, religion and obscurantist stuff is spread thick on the pages of most newspapers like double cream on toast. The tactic seems to be that if mankind cannot stabilize or increase circulation, the gods can.

So on most days readers can see a Muslim event picture, a Christian priest picture and a Hindu event in the Manorama. Take the edition dated June 22. It has a picture of  an event in the Institute of Koranic studies on the inside page and a mug shot of a Jehovah’s Witness  preacher on the last page possibly trying to save souls from the treacherous  bait of  XXX Rum or Mansion House brandy.

The needs of the two affluent  communities  having been satiated,  the paper  then moves on to publish a picture of an event in an ashram in the inside pages, to perfectly block out allegations of minority appeasement.  

This dangerous elevation of  trivial religious events into important news,  this triple-headed trishul strategy which, in its worst form, inspires various freelance fire-spewing evangelists, is a desperate manifestation of the belief that since circulation cannot be fully entrusted to managers, a bit of divine interpolation may help.   

This is a clear case of the Malayala Manorama taking the “God’s Own Country’ tag a bit too seriously.  The reality is that there is no evidence that the appeasement of Jesus freaks or fiery mullahs or various godmen is what helps the circulation cross a million because the state has a large liberal readership.

What is shocking, however, is that the Times of India’s Kerala edition has joined the game. Not willing to be a silent spectator in this game of seeking divine help, the paper ran a full page story on the glories of Ramzan on June 22. 

It had numerous boxed stories of people recounting memories of Ramzan. Just about OK, you might say. But the editor of the page, not willing to let matters be, came out with the most astonishing and meaningless eight column, 24 point, strapline for the stories. “Right to left, night turning day, sacrifice and sumptuousness - Ramzan captures the antinomies of existence like few religious experiences do.”  We can burp after having been fed a sumptuous strapline and a declaration of Ramzan as the winner in Kerala’s  three-cornered religious battlefield but what do we do about the “antinomies of existence”?