The following excerpt is taken from the chapter, ‘Paid News: Cocktail of Media, Business and Politics’

THE issue of ‘paid news’ in India must be considered in the context of the historical role of media in nation building and in the context of politics post-Independence, particularly post-liberalisation. Leaving aside the role of English newspapers in the freedom movement and of regional newspapers in post-Independence India, which are well-documented, I focus on more recent developments, particularly post-economic liberalisation. While it has been noted that political developments of the time had an effect on newspaper circulation, the most significant development has been ‘nation building’ on state-controlled radio and television giving way to ‘entertainment’ in private television. The historic role of the press as a public service was replaced by a more conspicuous self-serving role with profit making becoming the prime and often only objective, post-liberalisation.

Developments in the media industry correlate with developments in the political and socio-economic environment. The growth of the Hindi press was in part politics-driven; religious programming on television followed the rise of the Hindu right BJP; the rise of regional satellite channels was a result of the lack of regulation and availability of Soviet satellites for uplink following the collapse of the USSR; the privatisation of FM radio has led to the revival of the medium and a focus on the ‘local’ as against the ‘regional’ or ‘national’, and the availability of new communication platforms has extended the reach of mainstream media, while at the same time providing space for alternative media.

Similarly, the emergence of ‘paid news’ can be traced to increasing incidents of corruption, particularly in electoral politics, notwithstanding the fact that “the political class did not ... go out and ‘seduce’ the media.” At the same time, one must remember that corporate houses and even governments in India flexing their ‘advertising muscle’ to dictate editorial policy is not a recent phenomenon. The large public sector, which was a result of the mixed economic model followed in early post Independence India, made the state and central governments the largest employers and largest advertisers. Calls for tender bids and announcements for vacancies in government establishments and the public sector were a common feature in most newspapers until the 1980s.

In 2012, the BBC named Indian Railways, with 1.4 million employees, the largest employer in India and the ninth largest in the world. In the post-liberalisation era, government continues to be a major advertiser. One of the means by which state governments seek to bring ‘errant’ media outlets to book is by withdrawing government advertisements, often crippling them into submission. However, ‘paid news’ of course is not coercion in this form. It is an attempt to disguise advertisement as ‘news’ and to place it in the news space, not flagging the distinction between objective information and persuasion, with the complicity of the media organisation.

The Press Council of India (PCI) situates its report on ‘paid news’ in the background of large-scale corruption in society, which has extended to the media. Of particular significance, also referred to in the report, is the series of articles by the then Hindu rural affairs editor P. Sainath on irregularities relating to the electoral campaign of chief ministerial candidate Ashok Chavan in the state of Maharashtra in October 2009. Chavan’s re-election was preceded by some choice coverage, an investigation into which revealed identical stories (word for word) in the three Marathi dailies, Pundhari, Lokmat and Maharashtra Times, besides 47 “full pages of news” in more than one daily, but predominantly in the multiple editions of Lokmat, none of which was termed ‘advertisement’ or ‘advertorial’. It was later revealed that his accounted expenditure on advertisements was a mere Rs. 11,379, of which six were in print publications amounting to Rs. 5,379, and the rest in cable television. As advertisements in these dailies would have run to millions of rupees, and in the light of the nature of the articles, it could only be concluded that the coverage was a result of “special deals struck between the advertiser and the newspaper”.

On March 17, 2011, the Hindu published in partnership with Wikileaks a cable sent by the US embassy in New Delhi to the state department on July 17, 2008, in which Charge D’Affaires Steven White conveyed that five days before the UPA government of Manmohan Singh was to face a crucial vote on the Indo-nuclear deal, Nachiketa Kapur, an aide to Congress leader Satish Sharma, had shown him two chests of cash, reportedly containing Rs500-600 million, to purchase the support of MPs, and also told him that four MPs belonging to Ajit Singh’s Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) had been paid Rs100 million each for the same. While White’s version could have been based on conjecture considering some of the inaccuracies, the revelation was in consonance with charges of horse-trading made by opposition leaders in the run-up to the nuclear deal vote in 2008, particularly those made on July 22, the day of the vote, when three BJP MPs displayed wads of cash that they claimed had been paid by Congress ally and Samajwadi Party veteran Amar Singh to buy their votes. The satellite channel CNN-IBN had in fact mounted a sting operation ahead of the vote and had whipped up a storm. A section of media alleged that it was not the Congress but the BJP that had used its own MPs to “entrap the Congress or the Samajwadi Party”.

The purpose of recounting the two incidents above, even when charges have not been proved against any party at the time of writing, is first, to underscore the nexus between media and politics in which each seems to have become a part of the other, so fused that they no longer work as partners but as one, and second, to underscore the challenges that the development poses to democracy.

It could be argued that the prevalence of investigative journalism in the unearthing of numerous scams in recent times indicates that media are not oblivious to their role as a watchdog for the people. The ‘critical-investigative-adversarial’ role of media has been evident in recent times no doubt, but I assert that the nature of adversariality is not in the ‘public interest’, but in the interests of media corporations. Adding credence to the assertion are the ways in which media, business and politics have also come together to protect their common interests. A good example was the public discourse in alternative and social media in December 2013 on the alleged involvement of a powerful industrialist’s son in a car crash in Mumbai, which did not make it to the media. What is worse is that the media is becoming predatory, for according to Sainath “those who did not pay were simply blanked out of newspaper columns and the airwaves”. There is also the practice of forcing advertisers to buy thousands of copies, thus increasing circulation, or, as Sainath sums it up, “if your rival has paid up, you might even cop a lot of nasty flak in those media”.

Books & Authors reserves the right to edit excerpts for reasons of clarity and space

Excerpted with permission from Indian News Media: From Observer to Participant

By Usha M. Rodrigues, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia and Maya Ranganathan, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

SAGE Publications, India

ISBN 9789351500506

256pp.