MEDIA MATTERS
Convenient convergence
SEVANTI NINAN
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Election times are profitable times, as news and advertising come together…
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PHOTO: RAJEEV BHATT
Old habits, new products…
Old wisdom: elections are good for the media because people engage more with the media in those few weeks, and advertises tend to advertise more in that period.
New wisdom: elections are good for the media because the political class engages more with the people through the media. And pays good money for it.
Wondrous shifts are taking place in our land which do not attract attention until they erupt on the surface like a large red boil which you cannot ignore. And so it was in the last two elections this year: the Lok Sabha elections and those which took place last month in three states. The innovative new role of the media became suddenly more conspicuous than before. It has transformed itself into a proactive PR agency, eager to aid candidates in selling themselves to voters.
New surge
The new surge in barefaced pragmatism which has teams from newspapers going out to entice and negotiate with candidates for the polls is, like the red boil, only a symptom of the maladies which lurk beneath. Yes, it is a Terrible Thing. But the good thing is that greed brings overreach, and by forgetting to be discreet, the problem of election coverage for sale is now out in the open. Where we can poke at it, examine its manifestations, and ask, how did things come to such a pass?
Like any other corrupt practice (corrupt more in an ethical than a legal sense) this one has been a while in the making. It dates back to the shift in newspaper expansion trends which is more than a decade old, and in the case of Andhra Pradesh, two decades old. Local editions arrived in many districts of rural India, and brought with them the need to create local advertising. And one of the categories they thought up sitting in the cubicles of newspaper marketing departments was that of political advertising.
I first encountered it in 2005 when a Samajwadi candidate in Bhopal described what the Dainik Bhaskar had done. It had evolved packages of advertising to sell to candidates for every category of election. In the districts local editions have plenty of competition, so the idea caught on in a jiffy and the practice multiplied.
While we are fixated on what Maharashtra saw this year in the run up to the Assembly polls we have not noticed all these years the election time flowering that takes place in the pages of district editions during the panchayat polls. You have to advertise your poll symbol through these newspapers, and entire pages are devoted to these ads. And though panchayat polls are not supposed to have political affiliations, what’s to prevent a candidate from affixing the photograph of a national leader to his little advert? More to the point, panchayat elections too have therefore become far more about money than was originally envisaged.
Shifts and changes
What the convergence of news and advertising at election time represents is a series of shifts and changes taking place in the public sphere. The localization of mass media has coincided with shifts in the culture of politics. Politics is changing: election candidates are chosen differently from the way they used to be, and they now need to win elections in ways that are different. G Krishna Reddy, a professor at the University of Hyderabad describes it quite pithily in his essay “The press, television and election campaigns in Andhra Pradesh” in a new volume, The Indian Public Sphere (Oxford.) When candidates get tickets to contest elections primarily because they are close to leaders, and perhaps because they have the money to pay for a party ticket, they have to find non-traditional ways of reaching the electorate. He writes, “It is this change in the culture of politics that has created the necessity on the part of politics and political actors to explore new ways and means of approaching the voter environment. It has created the space for new modes of political campaigning and brought in the mass media in a big way.”
What follows from that is the explosion of coverage packages that Maharashtra saw last month, and districts like Warangal and West Godavari saw in April this year in Andhra Pradesh. What political parties used to do through their political networks, Reddy says, is now done through the mass media. Which is fine, you will say, but why not just buy advertising? Well, would you buy advertising if you could choose between friendly coverage for a price and an ad which looks like an ad, and would therefore be discounted by an increasingly media savvy rural voter?
So what should we worry about more? The money power in our political process? The subversion of elections by hard cash? The eager self conversion of press into paid PR? Or the fact that the Election Commission finds it easier to order repolls on the basis of ballot box stuffing that on the basis of what P Sainath calls “misrepresentation to voters for consideration?”
If Mr Navin Chawla and his colleagues wanted to declare a few contests null and void to make a point that such misrepresentation is a serious electoral malpractice, they could find the evidence because they enough witnesses around in both Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra.
But then what is the next logical step? Taking on the media owners whom the CEC and his fellow election commissioners regularly hobnob with? Because they too will then be prosecutable under the Representation of Peoples Act, 1951.
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