Distortions in news broadcasting

Voters don’t read the Constitution, Scott. They read the newspapers. Well, some still do, but the others watch TV.” — Mark Gimenez (Accused)

There are several threats to the future of India’s news broadcasting industry, which generates a minuscule ₹ 2,000 crore in advertising a year between a little over 410 national and regional level television channels. While the sector’s financial vulnerability has been a concern, the bigger worry is the rise of Jimmy Jib journalism, poor editorial quality and corporate ownership of news media.

To a lay person, Jimmy Jib journalism is gobbledegook. But to news channel editors, the robotic camera crane available for hire at ₹ 10,000 per eight-hour shift is their ticket to hype for grabbing eyeballs by creating larger-than-life images on the small screen.

Jimmy Jib allows the camera to be used for high shots or shots that need to move a great distance—horizontally or vertically. The view through the aperture makes a crowd of 5,000 seem like 50,000. When repeated with breathless frequency, the footage becomes believable. No prizes for guessing how Jimmy Jib may have overstated the case for Anna Hazare’s people’s movement for the Lokpal Bill, Baba Ramdev’s yoga congregations or Narendra Modi’s political rallies. Opinion may be divided on the extent to which Jimmy Jib journalism played out in recent public protests and elections, but few broadcast editors refute its role. Enquiry and analysis is lost to a crane, lament others.

Wonder what Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, the celebrated authors of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, would make of Indian broadcasting’s new journalistic template. Their treatise of 1988 talked of the influence of “propaganda” and “systemic biases” in mass media and explained how consent for economic, social and political policies is “manufactured” in the public mind, a result of the way advertising and media ownership is structured. The perils of Jimmy Jib, too, cannot be underestimated in manufacturing consent.

The team behind the publicity campaign for Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) prime ministerial candidate, not only understood the importance of television news, it profited from jimmy jib, too. The wonder machine has been a part of the multi-camera set-up for live feeds of Modi’s public addresses. Shorn of sufficient staff on the pretext of a slowdown, television news channels lapped up the live feeds from the Modi camp and fed their viewers the pretty pictures that the politician wanted them to see—the enchanting angles, crowds and cheerleaders closer to the dais.

The decision of news channels to plug into the party-generated feeds highlights the other issue afflicting the news broadcasting industry: poor editorial quality.

News television has exploded in the last eight years, giving little time to train and expand the talent pool. Media schools that mushroomed over the years were driven more by commercial considerations than any serious intent to promote excellence in broadcast journalism.

However, some senior editors in the sector hold editorial leadership directly responsible for the declining standards in television news. For instance, it was poor editorial judgment that allowed channels to hook up to a party’s live feeds and relay it to unsuspecting viewers, whatever the economic compulsions. Only when some alert editors raised a stink in internal meetings did some channels start identifying it as “BJP feed” on-screen. The disclosure did not make the action right, though.

While taking decisions on covering a rally or a protest march may be less complicated, it is the nuanced judgement calls that need to be taken with care. After all, being an audio-visual medium, television has a greater impact than most other media and the news genre reaches close to 130 million cable and satellite homes. By 2014, cable and satellite television is expected to reach 150 million homes, according to estimates by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry and KPMG. Penetration of the current 54 million direct-to-home connections, most of which are in rural India, must also be kept in mind when decisions on the treatment of sensitive news are made.

News assessment cannot be driven by ratings. Nor can it be motivated by the agenda of the media owner. That brings us to the third threat to the medium: corporate ownership of media, especially news broadcasting. The dangers of direct ownership of media by big industrial houses are known. Corporatized media are either found guilty of blacking out information that doesn’t serve their masters’ interests or of using prime time news to settle scores with their rivals.

An editor who joined a relatively smaller group of news channels recently was asked to ferret stories specifically against a particular business group. He quit. The buzz in the media market was that after his spat with the Zee group, Congress member of Parliament Naveen Jindal has been eyeing news assets. While there is no evidence of his direct stake in any news channel, he got embroiled in an ownership row of a media company operating news channels in the North-East. Abhey Oswal, his father-in-law, meanwhile, picked up a 51% stake in broadcasting company News Nation Network and informed the stock exchanges in August 2013. The equity was bought by Oswal Agro Mills Ltd and Oswal Greentech Ltd. The latter also acquired a little more than 14% of New Delhi Television Ltd two years ago.

In May 2012, the Aditya Birla Group picked up a 27.5% stake in Living Media India, the holding company of TV Today that owns a bunch of news channels. Earlier that year, Reliance Industries Ltd’s Mukesh Ambani, too, announced a multi-layered deal with Raghav Bahl’s broadcasting company Network18. The impact of the deal was recently highlighted in an article in The Caravan, published by Delhi Press. “Reliance and right-wing politics gain a foothold at Network18,” the article said.

To be sure, increasingly, news media will be owned by corporate houses as it is a very capital-intensive business. And to be fair, the situation for Indian news broadcasting may be grim, but it’s not hopeless. For a start, the telecom and media sector regulator, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), is hoping to propose an “institutional buffer between corporate owners and newspaper managements” to the government.

In an interview to The Hindu, Trai chairman Rahul Khullar said he would recommend a special organizational structure in which the corporate owner will have only a financial interest in the firm, restricted to owning of shares. The editorial management will be done under a different structure, where the owner will have little say.

Till that happens, media proliferation and plurality will save the day for us, other than the fact that self-regulatory bodies such as News Broadcasting Standards Authority and the Broadcast Editors’ Association are constantly striving to improve quality through explicit guidelines.

Media in India is too spread out and too large to be effectively clamped down on. If eight channels buckle under pressure and withhold stories that need to be told, there will be four others ready to splash them. Else, there is always social media to leak the news.

This is the fifth in a series of essays in which Mint’s editors take stock of 2013 and look at what the new year holds for India. To read the other essays, go to www.livemint.com