From Statesman, (Peshawar, Pakistan), October 24, 2002
By Sultan Shahin
The Statesman published from Peshawar criticizes the dumbing down of the Indian media.
It¿s the circulation figures and the television rating points, not the news that counts in the Indian media nowadays. The result is a sea change in priorities and a skewed presentation of what is happening in the country. On the positive side, though, it also means a more lively writing style, even on the traditionally staid opinion pages, with illustrations drawn from the world of sports and films, and even occasionally from peep shows.
A simple circular issued by Delhi police commissioner last week - that the police will no longer harass young couples in public parks - caught the imagination of most editors in the print as well as electronic media and edged out many an important political and economic development. And how can it be otherwise, when editors of not just the Times of India and the Hindustan Times, but even financial papers such as the Economic Times, are being reminded by their masters every day, "And don¿t forget, you belong to the entertainment industry."
The media to boost circulation is exploiting no wonder, then, that the pre-occupations of the so-called Generation X - the famous three Fs - food, fashion and fornication -. This is the age of feel-good news. Bad news has no place, unless it has the dramatic potential of a caste war or communal carnage. Four hundred journalists covered Lakme India¿s Fashion week recently. Few were sent to cover starvation deaths in Kalahandi in Orissa or farmers committing suicide in India¿s most prosperous state, Maharashtra. India, with a population of over a billion, has the world¿s largest pool of poor and unemployed or under-employed people. But one would be hard put to find a single article on poverty or unemployment in mainstream Indian newspapers in the past decade or more. If starvation deaths are at all reported, they are buried in the inside pages.
When Digvijay Singh¿s docudrama ¿¿Maya¿¿ on the ritual rape of a devdasi (a girl given away by her parents as a slave to gods, a part of an ancient tradition) by temple priests was banned by the government, CNN was the only channel that reported this. No Indian newspaper or TV channel bothered. But the circulation of newspapers is soaring, even though some families have stopped buying the larger circulated
newspapers. Could the phenomenal increase in the number of gang rapes in moving luxury cars in the streets of Delhi have something to do with the attitudes being pandered to in the newspapers and in the soaps shown on television, many people wonder.
This issue has many veteran journalists and social scientists worried. Star television recently devoted one of its prime-time shows to discussing the impact of what has come to be known as Page 3 on the media. A large-circulation news magazine, Outlook, carried a cover story on the subject entitled ¿¿Dumbing Down - Degeneration X¿¿ criticising its own behaviour among that of others. In an interview on the subject, social scientist Shiv Vishwanathan told the magazine: ¿¿India must be the only country where at any given time 30 percent of our population is trying to secede and we don¿t even know it nor do we care. And the real tragedy is that people still read papers and watch TV for the news.¿¿
P Sainath, journalist and author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought, pointed out, ¿¿While the total number of correspondents covering poverty at the national level is zero, the number of articles by journalists on the Lakme India Fashion Week this year was 400. This makes for a 1:1 ratio between journos and buyers. We have 40 million unemployed in our country, but not a single labour journalist.¿¿