MEDIA AND LOKPAL: ‘ANGER AND FRUSTRATION VS OBJECTIVITY’ CONCEDES TO THE MAD RUSH FOR TRPs

2nd write-up in the series - MEDIA AND INDIA’S ANTI-CORRUPTION JANLOKPAL MOVEMENT
Continued from: http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/2012/01/media-and-indias-anti-corruption.html 

According to the TAM figures, the market share of news channels increased by 1.15 per cent to 15.01 per cent on the week ended August 27, 2011 while the time spend rose by 7 per cent. In the weak ended August 20, 2011, the time-spend of news channels had almost doubled from 15 minutes to 22.7 minutes. Market share of Hindi news channels almost doubled to 11.02 per cent from 5.9 per cent during the first weak of Anna Hazare’s agitation while it reached to the level 12.33 per cent in the next week. Stories related to Hazare’s agitation fast for the Lokpal Bill had a coverage share of 83.4 per cent while the India-England test series was a distant second with 2.4 per cent share. Any comparison! An absolutely no! April 2011 was the same rosy story. According to a report on the website of Moneylife, coverage of Anna Hazare’s agitation fast of four days helped news channels get advertising revenue worth around Rs. 176 crore.

It was rush of the public at different media platforms that drew home the good return. It gave the editors and the reporters a ‘leeway’ to exercise their social obligations beyond the ‘objectivity’ anthem that is already a thing of bygone era in the era of managed communication and marketers’ news media.

And we cannot say media created the phenomenon that some like me wrote as Anna Symbolism reviving Gandhian thought in the Indian psyche. Here media did not set the agenda. Instead, it was the rapidly intensifying public outpour and media did help by giving it a larger than life coverage. Corruption is an endemic in India and everyone including the media persons who went on to cover it identified with it (that might have been their dominating mood of the time). Corruption being an endemic was the basic tenet that created the phenomenon of Anna Symbolism. Here we can say the many in the media gratified themselves while covering the story. It has been an internal observation that I have come across while talking to the people across the media outfits. Media coverage has always been subjective and when it was impregnated with anger and frustration of the media persons (after all they are common men like you and me), the already shaky ‘objectivity’ saw a dominant tilt ‘pro-‘ to the anti-corruption movement.

So what happened that made this ‘anger and frustration vs. objectivity’ impulse conceding the ground to the mad rush for TRPs?

Indeed the April and August fasts were high decibel events where both reporters and editors tasked themselves to add their own flare to the fight towards having an effective corruption tackling mechanism in the country. Government’s autocratic ways like presenting a unilateral draft in the Monsoon Session or arresting Anna Hazare only added to the sentiments. But once, the high-octane acts of the fasts were over, the ballgame was reduced to the environs of media managers and editors’ desks. Media managers had seen amazingly higher returns during the fasts and since the Lokpal agenda was a long and strenuous one with much spicing still left (first with the joint drafting committee meetings and war of words and later on riding on Team Anna’s referendums in constituencies, bickering of Monsoon Session of the Parliament, Winter Session of the Parliament, and in-between twists and turns like Anna’s vow of silence – what a lure, what a recipe!), Lokpal still dominated the media coverage though not so heavily.

As many editors had taken a stand, they had to continue (added with the lucre of jumped up revenue). And so many reporters had to continue. But once the eyeballs started setting their focus to their regular places of attention (sports, entertainment), it was just the mad rush of unfocused news coverage to be ahead in the TRP game. On one hand, it did serve the feeling of contributing to the fight; on the other hand, it placated the media managers of programming around a story with high potential of attracting eyeballs. Media has been operating like this in this country and it was business as usual for them, certainly with a higher prospect of return this time. But it proved detrimental to the anti-corruption movement.

Team Anna - Brilliant media management or managed by media?

Continued..

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/