Indian media’s selective coverage

I was struck by two headlines in the papers this week. The first was from an opinion piece written by the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) member of parliament, Feroze Varun Gandhi. It read: “An uncertain Hobbesian life”. Gandhi assessed the state of farming in India, concluding that “India’s marginal farmers have been worse off for centuries” and that many of them “face an uncertain Hobbesian life: poor, brutish and short”.

The second headline was “Mumbai woman worth Rs30 crore dies of neglect, high court lambasts state”.

The story was about how “an angry Bombay High Court pulled up the state after hearing how a 68-year-old woman died of neglect despite owning property estimated at Rs30 crore off Yari Road in Versova”. This is a suburb of the city where many of the wealthy live.

“The court said it was unfortunate that neither her family nor the state took care of her though a law for the welfare of senior citizens mandates medical support and old-age homes. Other senior citizens should not face a similar fate, it said, adding it wishes to examine the scope and ambit of the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007”.

The lawyer representing the woman said that “for five years, she was in such a wretched condition. The same fate must not be suffered by others,” adding that under a new law, “anyone neglecting a senior citizen which ultimately leads to unfortunate consequences is not entitled to the person’s property”. However, the court noted that from the woman’s post-mortem report, “it appeared that she died of natural causes”.

As the headline announces, what seemed to have been most offensive in the story was the fact that a wealthy woman should have suffered in this fashion. In a nation where, as Gandhi’s piece makes clear, millions struggle to survive, the media attention is focused on the wealthy individual. To some extent, this is a global thing and the idea of covering celebrities is accepted as proper practice and their lives are more worthy of coverage. However, in India, this is extended to the wealthy and even the middle class, often to the exclusion of the large mass of population. India has one of the highest accident rates in the world, but often the stories selected will be headlined ‘BMW accident’, because a fancy car deserves more coverage. This is taken to disturbing levels as those familiar with our newspapers will verify.

A second example of this is the employee of the big corporate firm, usually the software firms, which do not have much advertising clout. Infosys, the Bengaluru firm, has more than 100,000 employees, and incidence of suicide or rape or violence or theft is as likely in such a large set as in the general population. However, the media will inevitably use the name of the firm in its headline and on searching the internet for the words “Infosys employee suicide” and “Wipro employee suicide”, this will become obvious. The media may argue that this fact of their corporate employment is interesting but try searching for “Reliance employee suicide” and it is apparent that the treatment is reserved for some. Either Reliance employees do not commit suicide, or that when they do, the media backs off from associating the company with the act, though it is enthusiastic about doing this for Infosys and Wipro. Why? Because Reliance is a big advertiser and has much more clout than the software firms, which have no use of advertising in Indian papers and television stations.

I am not saying that the media should begin associating the doings of Reliance employees with their company, but that they are wrong in doing it for the software firms. The same problem of selective reporting is to be found in other coverage. There are about 25,000 rapes in India annually (which is actually quite low compared with other countries, including Western countries), but of these the media will pick those victims whom it sees as more important. The story of rape in a taxi service for the upper class will get disproportionate, and in fact, obscene amounts of coverage over a similar crime elsewhere in the same city. The media constantly taps into the middle class Indian sentiment that the poor are not important enough to be covered, because their lives (“nasty, brutish and short” in the words of Thomas Hobbes) are not important.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 18^th, 2015.

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