Media spotlights leaders, but misses stories of those affected by their decisions

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on September 11, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/09/11/media-spotlights-leaders-but-misses-stories-of-those-affected-by-their-decisions

 

While Trump and tariffs continue to dominate our headlines, there is an important difference between why he is in the news, and why our leader, Narendra Modi, also continues to dominate the news. 

That the actions of the US President are headline news, not just in the US, but around the world is partly because of his open desire to be the centre of attention. He lets the media watch cabinet meetings, interactions with international leaders, and even going out to a seafood restaurant in Washington DC. As a result, he ensures that he is always in the news. You could argue that this demonstrates his commitment to transparency and democracy. Or that he is simply narcissistic and wants to stay in the limelight. Either way, no news organisation can avoid reporting on Trump. 

In India, in contrast, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has successfully avoided any unscripted interaction with mainstream media after 11 years in office. Yet, he dominates the news in India, much like Trump. Every action, every reaction, every statement, all of them carefully scripted, are faithfully reported prominently by mainstream media. 

What’s more, op-ed articles, quite obviously written by his chosen speech writers, are sent out to all publications. Yet despite them being no more than press releases, several newspapers give these perorations pride of place on their edit pages, a space meant for exclusive contributions that are not offered elsewhere. This has become so routine that it fails to draw any comment. It is what it is, we are told. No point getting worked up.

But moving away from these attention-seeking political personas, the media can, and must, make space for the less prominent, the almost invisible, whose lives are being permanently affected by the policies propounded by the powerful.

Take the controversy surrounding the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on Indian exports to the US. The news has dominated our front pages. Economists and experts have analysed the fallout. There are explainers with charts and figures spelling out the impact. 

Yet, the price for these policies is being paid not by those who find space in our media, but the voiceless, the millions of workers in the industries that have been hit by these policies.  The women who shell prawns for export, the women who work in the garment industry, the men who polish diamonds in Surat, the smaller home-based workers who do a part of the finished products. 

There have been some detailed reports in the English language media such as this one in The Hindu on the garment industry in Tamil Nadu. Many such articles focus on the owners of these industries without enough on the impact on workers, often women as in the case of the garment industry.

International media including the BBC, Al Jazeera and DW have also carried detailed reports on export industries such as the diamond cutters in Surat. This detailed report in an independent digital platform, Behanbox, is one of the few that has focused on the impact of these tariffs on women workers. The reporter points out: “In the frozen shrimp industry, women constitute over 70% of the 8 million workforce, and they perform low-end processing jobs such as deheading, peeling and sorting shrimp in cold processing plants. In apparel and textiles, they make up almost 70% of the 45 million workers, while the electronics industry is known to largely hire young women because electronics manufacturing needs ‘small and soft hands for small pieces’.” 

But by and large, such reports are few and far in between in Indian mainstream media. As a result, the majority of readers of print media probably have not understood this human angle to the tariff controversy. 

An explanation for the paucity of such reporting is the perennial challenge facing the media: even as you cover an event, how do you also ensure that you report the process that resulted in the event. The former has immediacy, is often dramatic, and draws attention. The latter requires an understanding of history, politics, and society to ensure that there is context in the reportage. It can be done. It has been done. Yet, we see little space devoted to such reporting in mainstream media today.

Another example of the importance of understanding process even as you report an event is the coverage of the horrific death of a young woman in Greater Noida on August 21. Nikki Bhati was allegedly set ablaze in her kitchen, in the presence of her three-year-old son, because she failed to meet demands for more dowry in her marital home. Her death would have been one more statistic had it not occurred in a place within easy reach of so-called “national” media and that it was also spread via social media platforms. 

But what above all her tragic death illustrated was how even the most effective laws are ineffective in changing societal mindsets. Dowry was banned by law in 1961. The law was further amended, following widespread protests and demands by women’s rights groups across India, in 1984. Yet today, in 2025, the reported deaths of young women linked with the amount of dowry they did or did not bring into their marital homes is still shockingly high.  

Remember, that for everyone reported death, there are many more that go by unreported. And as this worrying piece in Hindustan Times points out: “Dowry is perhaps India’s most normalised illegal activity, going by anecdotal evidence, but credible data on the prevalence of this menace is hard to come by. Yet there is enough evidence to flag this as a major problem.”

It is the “process” story leading to these deaths of young women that needs telling not just when there is a dramatic incident that draws media attention, but at all times. Why, when there have been decades of programmes by the government and by non-profits, to “empower” women and the “girl-child” are we still at a place where women can be murdered with impunity even in our major cities for dowry demands? Why is it that even today, parents who know their daughters are victims of extreme violence in their marital homes, still send them back and ask them to “adjust”? 

At the height of the protests by women’s groups demanding changes in the dowry law in the 1980s, the print media – and at that time there was only print – did respond by conducting its own investigations. For instance, in 1983, Indian Express carried a front-page series by two senior reporters under the banner “Why women burn” where they followed up on the so-called accidental deaths of young newly married women in Delhi.  

Although the death of Nikki Bhati did provoke some media houses to do follow-up reports such as these in The Hindu, Times of India, and Mid-day, we are now back to reading what we used to call “crime briefs”, small items spread across a newspaper reporting horrific incidents of violence against women.  

Yet, as the article in Hindustan Times quoted above points out, dowry is perhaps the most “normalised illegal activity” in India today. It calls for more focus and more investigation, to remind Indian citizens that behind the bombast about how this country is progressing, the fact that women can still be killed for dowry is a necessary reality check. This is the story behind the headline that the media needs to pursue.

Bihar’s silenced voters, India’s gagged press: The twin threats to Indian democracy

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on August 28, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/08/28/bihars-silenced-voters-indias-gagged-press-the-twin-threats-to-indian-democracy

The Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, probably expected that his August 18 press conference would settle the controversy surrounding the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in Bihar and Rahul Gandhi’s “vote chori” charge. He was wrong. This is a story that has refused to die, notwithstanding Trump’s tariffs, or even the tragic floods in parts of India.  

In fact, it should not die as it is, by a long measure, one of the most important stories that any self-respecting media organisation needs to investigate. For it is more than evident now that the state of our electoral rolls, as exposed by the SIR in Bihar and subsequent media exposes, raises many important questions about our electoral system and our democracy.  

So far, only one mainstream newspaper, The Indian Express, has put its heft behind investigating the many lacunae in the SIR process in Bihar. More granular details have emerged from the stories done by independent platforms and journalists. 

Here are links to several important investigations carried by independent platforms, with several of them collaborating and pooling their resources. 

Journalist Ajit Anjum has assiduously followed up on people declared as dead in the list of 65 lakh people who have been struck off the electoral rolls. So has Saurabh Shukla of The Red Mike. 

The women and men declared dead are very much alive, as you will see in these reports. The common thread that runs through them is that these are poor people who are not even aware that the one right they have, to vote, has been denied to them because some official has decided they are dead. 

Others who have pursued this story include independent news platforms like Reporters’ Collective.   

While Reporters’ Collective found that an incredible 80,000 voters had been clustered together at addresses where 20 or more of them were supposed to be living in just three constituencies that they investigated, the latest report in Newslaundry goes further to show that even in places where people live separately according to their caste or religion, over 100 voters belonging to different castes and religions are shown as living in the same house.

For readers who would have missed much of the action because of the neglect of this story by mainstream media, it is worth taking the time to read these detailed reports and watch the videos. They tell us not only about the way this particular exercise is being conducted in Bihar but the reality of India, where despite boasts of “digital India” and elimination of poverty, millions of poor people do not have the proof that is demanded of them to establish that they exist.  

Interestingly, the latest story in the series in The Indian Express on SIR in Bihar tells us that out of 36 assembly constituencies in three districts, in 25 of them, the number of voters whose names have been deleted exceeds the margin by which the candidate elected won. Of these 25 seats, the governing alliance of the BJP and JD(U) won 18 seats. The story also shows through its data that women have been particularly disadvantaged. 

These stories graphically illustrate a very real problem we are facing, one that cannot be obfuscated the way the CEC attempted to do in his press conference. And as I have argued earlier, it is a legitimate story that the media, in a democracy, must pursue. 

Another development that has drawn attention to the importance of independent media is the series of cases filed against three prominent independent journalists, Siddharth Varadarajan of The Wire, Karan Thapar, whose weekly interview programme is widely watched, and Abhisar Sarma, a former mainstream TV anchor who now runs his own YouTube news channel. 

All three have had cases filed against them in Assam, a state governed by the BJP. And at least two of the people filing these cases are affiliated to the BJP or ABVP (read here).

This development tells us two things. One, that even if the government might dismiss these independent news platforms as being limited in their reach, it apparently is concerned about their reporting. Otherwise why bother to charge them. 

The second point this development illustrates is the strategy this government is following with impunity: label journalists who question as “anti-national”, or “urban Naxals” or “terrorists sympathiser” and then file cases against them, or even jail them as in Kashmir. 

Incidentally, Israel follows a part of the same strategy. It also labels Palestinian journalists as Hamas operatives. It’s another thing that it even proceeds to eliminate them in targeted attacks. Most recently, five Palestinian journalists were killed even as they were reporting. 

There will be long-term consequences for freedom of speech, and the media, in India if this strategy being used by the government is not challenged and checked. The most persuasive argument on this has been made by retired Supreme Court judge, Justice Madan Lokur in an op-ed in The Hindu.

Justice Lokur points out that this government has weaponised a provision in the law that was supposed to have replaced the previous colonial sedition law. He suggests that Section 152 in the BNS is nothing more than sedition in “sheep’s clothing”, and that while the earlier law had a chilling effect on freedom of speech, the new provision has a “freezing effect”. 

Going further, he spells out what the deliberate misuse of this provision means for the future of freedom of speech in India: 

“Try and imagine any journalist or anybody in a panel discussion on television or otherwise having the courage to be critical of anything to do with any policy of the Government of India. Somebody can misinterpret it and bring national security into play, and the police can take cognisance and summon the alleged offender. Freedom of speech can be bulldozed or demolished because one individual out of a billion anywhere in the country believes (without evidence) that national security is in danger or that the armed forces are demoralised or that dissent is ‘strategic subversion’ undermining the sovereignty and the integrity of India.” (Emphasis added)

This then is the future we are looking at in India as far as freedom of the press is concerned.