Elections in India are often described as a carnival of democracy. They pave the way for the smooth transition of power from one party or a set of parties to another. They reflect the will of the people. However, over the last decade, the process has also become a source of disinformation, calculated lies and falsification of history. How did we reach here? What can we do to redeem the information space for credible, trustworthy and reliable news? What should we do when our leaders deliberately misrepresent facts?
Disinformation campaigns
The just-concluded Assembly election in Karnataka exemplifies the problem. Some readers may point out the role of disinformation in the election of U.S. President Donald Trump and in the Brexit referendum. This may indeed be a global problem. But my concern as a Readers’ Editor of an Indian newspaper is about the Indian information ecology which is getting murkier by the day. The problem with disinformation campaigns is that they develop a trajectory of their own where even well-settled facts are reduced to mere conjecture.
I am neither nostalgic nor romantic about the past. But this does not mean that I do not have a historical perspective, especially in the way the media handled sensitive information during elections until recently.
The Indian media has never been a monolith. For every credible news outlet, there has been a corresponding sensationalist tabloid as a counterpoint. But the sensationalists were kept under control; there was some form of a social leash. There was an invisible firewall that separated these two universes. However, in the last five to six years, this firewall seems to have lost its power — disinformation is seeping into credible sections of the media because the source of disinformation happens to be our own leaders. This poses a difficult question about the nature of reporting. Faithful reporting means reporting what was said. But if statements themselves are wrong, do reporters write about them or not? Wouldn’t not reporting amount to censorship?
For a legacy newspaper like The Hindu, the procedure is multilayered. Reporters file stories on important speeches without adding their own comments. Then they report the counterarguments. The opinion pages are used to debunk the lies. This demarcation between news and views helps in three ways: it documents statements as they are made; it records the statements of those who contest their truth; and the opinion pages provide not only the right information but also the context. The growth of the electronic media, with its single-minded focus on prime-time cacophony, seems to undermine the balance between reporting and opinion.
The methodology for exit polls
The fact-check website, Alt News, has listed some of the most viral false stories in the run-up to the Karnataka elections. We may never know how many voters believed these stories, but the fact that political parties believe in engaging in disinformation campaigns for electoral gains is disturbing. While a section of the media is struggling to retain the public’s trust by walking the extra mile in ensuring due journalistic process, another section is actually undermining the public’s trust by indulging in weird exit polls.
I am unable to see any robust methodology in these exit polls. What formula do they use to convert the vote share to the number of Assembly seats? How are regional variations in voters’ preferences factored into these numbers? The problem becomes more acute when the media tries to cover all the possibilities. How can one make sense of Times Now’s two exit polls with two different agencies? While one predicts a victory for the Congress, the other predicts a victory for the Bharatiya Janata Party! NDTV’s idea of working out a mean figure based on diverse exit polls defeats all rules of statistics.
At a deeper level, we are witnessing a gradual erosion of values in public discourse. The corrosive power of this will undermine our democracy. It is not just the cordial relationship between the Army commanders, General K.S. Thimayya and Field Marshal K.M. Cariappa, and the civilian leadership that was distorted. It is contemporary history that has come under severe strain. If the media were to provide some relief from this assault on truth, then it should refrain from meaningless exit polls.
readerseditor@thehindu.co.in
