The media as an institution has a versatility that the other estates of public life do not possess, and vast real estate in cyberspace, TV and print on which to deliver it. A US president's visit is this absolute godsend, a news event for which you can get hotel chefs into the act as much as security analysts. Not to mention silk sari weavers, college kids, and the marshals in Parliament House.
Slew of stories
On the one hand, newspapers and news channels came up with a flood of tutorials on the serious business lined up. TV anchors wrestled verbally with panellists who questioned their hyped up figures on defence deals. The Hindustan Times even did a daily, subject-wise preview series. On the other, this was a celebrity visit to beat all others. Who else in the world would come visiting with not just his own security, but also food, cars and telephone exchange? So even the venerable The Hindu had a photograph of the bathtub in the Maurya's presidential suite and informed us that the shower rooms would have mother of pearl accessories.
You could carp that it takes the US to capture the Indian media's imagination quite so totally. The Hindustan Times' Vinod Sharma wondered in a blog whether any hotel would care to name even a bowl of soup after Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao when he comes visiting a little later, let alone a platter. But then, one could also ask if his paper would do a daily series on how much is at stake when the Chinese or French leader comes visiting.
Nor was it just the media that seemed to be going overboard. What about Parliament House giving itself a makeover, getting new livery for its staff, and our good President hiring an event management company to help her host the banquet? They do all of that for other countries' leaders, do they?
It is also interesting that in the nationalistic obsession with the power balance in the give and take that will take place during the President's visit, and the comparisons with Pakistan, the issue of Bhopal victims got little attention in the panel discussions one saw, except in the statements from the Left parties. Guess who brought it up in the run up to the visit: The New York Times did, in a long story which said that while it would not derail the visit, it would remain simmering in the background.
But to return to the breadth of ways in which you can play a potentially serious event in the media, American politicians perhaps exploit this versatility of options better than ours do. I don't know how well or badly Mr. Obama's party finally fared in the US congressional elections because this column has to be filed before those results are out. But the day before the polls, the President did an interview with the American Idol host Ryan Seacrest, and in the run up to it the latter was soliciting questions to be asked, over Twitter. Obama also appeared in an interview with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central's Daily Show, a daily news spoof which is much watched. Unfortunately for him, the host grilled him on healthcare and the economy as much as any serious talk show would. Sarah Palin ,meanwhile, is not just a paid commentator for Fox News, she is going to be hosting an upcoming show on The Learning Channel, on Alaska. Useful positioning for a future election.
Sober coverage
Here in India, as the election in Bihar came to a close, it remained a soberly fought and covered event. Even as they floated around in tethered boats, Prannoy Roy, Shekhar Gupta and Dohrab Sopariwala discussed issues, not candidate lifestyles. And I don't think Nitish Kumar went on the Bhojpuri entertainment channel Mahua to canvass popular support, though he could have. The media now offers many ways to reach a candidate's heart. Lalu Yadav knows that perhaps more than other contemporary politicians, and can get away with going on any channel, even MTV. He had launched the Mahua channel back in 2008. But just as the Republicans said Obama going on American Idol was a new low in US politics, one can imagine what Nitish Kumar's opponents would have said if he been adventurous in any way about his choice of media.
Tailpiece:
Last fortnight the issue of paid news bounced back into public discourse with a long, unapologetic interview in Outlook by Ravi Dhariwal, the CEO of Bennett, Coleman and Company Ltd., which publishes the Times of India, Maharashtra Times and other publications. He said the company's paid news scheme, Medianet, only operated in the supplements, not in the main paper, and the supplements and features were not news: “To say that our Education Times is news, or our Delhi Times is news is to change the meaning of news.” But what of the fact that the acronym TNN, for Times News Network is used at the bottom of some of the stories in these supplements? The question was not asked.
Dhariwal also denied categorically assertions which have appeared in The Hindu and in the Press Council report on Paid News which suggest that a Times of India supplement, apart from other BCCL publications, have carried paid news at the time of the Maharashtra elections in 2009. “This is absolute rubbish. We would we take paid news in a Vidharba paper? Why, we could have made thousands of crores by aligning ourselves with major parties like the Congress or the BJP!”
Finally Mr. Dhariwal said that while he was aware of SEBI's (Securities and Exchange Board of India) new guidelines — that when you publish stories about companies you have private treaties with, you must state clearly how much of their equity you hold — he did not see why it had to be stated in every story, and that the Times group had written to SEBI on this issue.
