Trump’s return: The threat to US press freedom runs parallel to India’s media crisis

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on November 8, 2024

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/11/08/trumps-return-the-threat-to-us-press-freedom-runs-parallel-to-indias-media-crisis 

The US presidential elections are done and dusted. We in India can now go back to our own election season, with the impending elections in Maharashtra and Jharkhand at the end of this month.

Yet, one must admit that the world’s attention, including that of many in India, was drawn to the US elections. Not just because, as Americans love to remind us, it is the oldest democracy in the world, but because of the nature of the contest and the contestants. One has a controversial and colourful personality who has drawn attention to himself even when he was out of office for the last four years, and the other is a woman of colour, who had to step in at short notice and literally introduce herself to the American electorate.

In the end, the majority of Americans decided to go with the candidate they knew, Donald Trump. And they rejected the chance of making history by electing a woman, and that too a woman of colour, to the highest office. 

Entertaining and distressing as was the high-octane election campaign leading up to November 5, in the end it is not just the defeated Democrats who are introspecting about the reasons for their loss. The media too is beginning to ask how they missed the shift in American politics, where groups who were expected to vote one way voted another.

In India, we are familiar with this debate after the general elections this year, when the results threw up surprises, especially in states like Uttar Pradesh, where it was assumed that the BJP would do well, if not better than in 2019. That did not happen. And one reason was the underreporting of the extent of disillusionment amongst the large number of unemployed in a state where the government boasted about economic progress. 

In the US too, early analysis indicates that inflation and rising costs played a big part in voter choice and that even people who had earlier voted for Democrats switched this time.

Another interesting observation by commentators on various US television channels, relevant for us in India, is that the assumption that the “Latino vote” or the “Black vote” are monoliths and these communities vote in a particular way was wrong. It is evident that within these constituencies there is considerable layering and that voters make choices that are not necessarily based on their ethnicities. And the proof of that is the broad spectrum of support that Trump got in these elections, defying the usual calculations.

The Indian media too has been realising, especially in the last decade, that generalisations like the “Dalit vote” or the “Muslim vote” are irrelevant now. Caste, religion, gender, ethnicity, region – all these categories are now layered with many other factors, such as economic distress, for instance. 

The discussion in the US has now moved to how Trump will deal with his political opponents, having spoken openly of retribution during the campaign, whether his foreign policy will reflect his first term, and if his administration will deport illegal immigrants within his first 100 days in office, as he promised. Also, will his attitude towards mainstream media, which he has disparaged in no uncertain terms, be the same as in his first term. 

About the media, many dire predictions have already been made. Jon Allsop of the Columbia Journalism Review suggests that “Trump’s impending second term poses a credible and unprecedented threat to press freedom as America has known it”. Is this an exaggeration, an overreading of the president elect’s attitude toward the media? A day before the elections, in his last election rally, Trump referred to the media as the “enemy camp”. 

Most people in India might have forgotten Trump’s approach to the mainstream US media when he was elected in 2016. 

This paragraph, from an article by Kyle Paoletta in CJR sums it up: 

“Since he entered politics, a decade ago, Donald Trump has castigated journalists for their skepticism and independence, calling the media ‘the enemy of the people,’ a ‘threat to democracy,’ ‘fake,’ and ‘crooked bastards’ whom he vows to prosecute. Now that he has secured a second term, he will be free to make good on his promises. Already, during his first term, the Department of Justice conducted surveillance of reporters and charged Julian Assange with espionage; regulators seemingly sought to block a merger of AT&T and Time Warner as retribution for critical coverage by CNN; the White House arbitrarily denied access to veteran journalists. All of that fostered an environment of media suppression, leading to more than six hundred physical attacks on journalists nationwide in 2020 alone. Trump has welcomed the violence. ‘To get to me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news,’ he told a crowd in Pennsylvania this week. ‘I don’t mind that so much’.”

Some of this will sound familiar to those of us in the media in India – who have faced similar hostility, even if not openly articulated, for being critical of the BJP and especially Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

But what Paoletta goes on to write about the US media during Trump’s first term is even more reflective of what we have seen here. He writes:

“Perhaps the least palpable consequence of Trump’s return to the White House will be the most widespread: journalists self-censoring or otherwise altering their coverage. That phenomenon, which Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale, has called ‘anticipatory obedience,’ is a feature of societies with repressive governments. With Trump returning to office, it is hard not to count ours among them.”

“Anticipatory obedience.” Such an appropriate phrase for what we have witnessed in the mainstream Indian media in the last decade. Although here we also have “voluntary obsequiousness” in our media, especially in television channels.

There is another aspect of Trump’s attitude towards the US media that has some parallels here. In his first term, Trump was willing to engage with the mainstream media and appeared on various talk shows, although his preferred choice was always Fox News, the Murdoch-owned cable channel that was openly supportive.  During this election campaign, barring the two debates, one with President Biden and the other with Vice President Kamala Harris, he has kept away from mainstream TV.  

Instead, one gathers that on the advice of people like his 18-year-old son, he chose to appear on popular podcasts, such as the one by Joe Rogan, which was viewed by millions of people. An article in the New York Times on Trump and the media points out that this strategy gave Trump a way to “sidestep more confrontational interviews with professional journalists, where he might face tough questions, fact-checks and detailed policy debates. The influencers he met with rarely challenged Mr Trump, and often lavished him with praise.” 

This sounds familiar if you look at Modi’s record with the Indian media. To date, he has not held a single press conference or given an unscripted interview to any mainstream media, television channel, or newspaper. Instead, his preferred channel of communication to the electorate was radio, through the monthly broadcast “Mann ki Baat” and his party’s deft use of social media to spread his message. Mainstream media played its role by accepting scripted interviews and reporting without fact-checks and uncritically, anything Modi said publicly. Not a single other politician has managed to get that spread and reach through the media.  

If there is one aspect that stands out as different between the mainstream US media and India, it is the issue of official endorsement. In the US, major newspapers have historically endorsed one or the other presidential candidate. Such endorsement appears in the form of an editorial. It is argued that the editorial stance of a newspaper does not reflect or affect its news coverage. That is debatable, but this is how leading newspapers like the New York Times justify endorsing a candidate.

In India, there is no such tradition. Yet, even if our most widely read newspapers play a balancing game, the bias comes through. Perhaps not openly, but anyone who understands how the print media works would know that the importance given to some news, the placement of news, or the absence of some news indicates a newspaper’s political leanings without stating it in so many words.  

To argue that the Indian press does not lean one way or another when it comes to political parties is nothing short of hypocritical. When the Washington Post decided this year not to endorse either of the presidential candidates, there was a considerable stir in the US and some minor ripples here. The only Indian newspaper to respond was the Times of India in an op-ed written by the “Editorial Team”. 

I quote below one of the more extraordinary paragraphs from the piece:

“TOl’s principle of neutrality is rooted in a long tradition of Indian philosophical thought – be cognizant of all ideas and perspectives, don’t tie your identity to any one of them. To hold on to, to endorse, an ideology championed by anyone is the equivalent of intellectual baggage. In Indian philosophy, the same holds, even more so, when it comes to heroes. Picking and sticking to a hero or a role model is essentially an act of intellectual self-harm. It closes your mind.”

How wonderful it would be if the Indian media followed this! 

Why the media has a duty to separate truth from untruth

Broken News

Published on November 19, 2020

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2020/11/19/why-the-media-has-a-duty-to-separate-truth-from-untruth

 

Srinath Yadav sells bananas on a pavement in Mumbai. Originally from Allahabad district in Uttar Pradesh, Yadav has lived on the same patch of pavement where he has had his stall for 20 years. He had no desire to return to Uttar Pradesh during the lockdown like others from his state, he told me.

"What would I do there?" he asked. Instead, he waited and then went back to selling bananas.

I asked him what he thought about the lockdown and the pandemic. His response was instant: "It's a conspiracy to kill off the poor.”

Yet, I countered, the poor still vote for the same people you’re now accusing. "They win only because the machines are fixed in advance," he stated with unflinching confidence. By "machines", he meant the electronic voting machines, or EVMs

So, where do people like Yadav get information that results in such opinions? He does not possess a smartphone, nor does he access social media. Perhaps he reads a Hindi newspaper, although I doubt it. In all probability, his information comes from fellow migrants, like the taxi drivers who mill around his stall.

This deep-seated suspicion about EVMs is nothing new. It came up again during the Bihar election with Tejashwi Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal suggesting that there was something wrong because a large number of his party's candidates lost by narrow margins.

The EVM story echoes a similar distrust of mail-in ballots during the recent US presidential election. President Donald Trump claims he has not lost — though he has — and that there has been election fraud. And it’s not just him: millions of his followers believe the same.

How did this suspicion about mail-in ballots spread and become so entrenched as to virtually divide an entire nation and keep it in thrall while it waits to see whether the incumbent will concede defeat and make way for the new president?

That is a question that the US media is asking even as the Trump presidency limps to an end. And about how the US media has covered his four years in office. By focusing so closely on him, both by way of critical comment and praise, some are now wondering whether the mainstream media gave him what he wanted above all: more publicity and to remain the centre of attention.

Margaret Sullivan, the media critic at the Washington Post argued that the mainstream media "never quite figured out how to cover President Trump, the master of distraction and insult who craved media attention and knew exactly how to get it, regardless of what it meant for the good of the nation."

She wrote of how television gave live coverage to all his speeches and rallies, much as our media does here when it comes to the prime minister. But as a result, even the "misinformation", as she called it, in his speeches was able to "pollute the ecosystem". And, she added, "we took far too long to call his falsehoods what they often were: lies".

Sullivan also questioned the way the media treated both sides of a controversy as equal, even though one side indulged in lies. In an earlier era, she said, this might have been acceptable, but not in the Trump era.

Sullivan's analysis has more than a little relevance for our media even though the media in the US and here are different in many ways. The American media has the protection of the First Amendment that the Indian media does not. It is able to criticise and even lampoon the head of state, or any public figure, without fear of being charged with criminal defamation or sedition as happens here.

Yet, according to a detailed study of the US media by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, the mainstream media actually played a key role in amplifying the half-truths and lies that were made by the president either in his speeches or in his tweets.

The centre analysed 55,000 media stories that appeared online, five million tweets, and 75,000 posts on Facebook that referred to mail-in voting between March and August. This is the period when Trump had already begun to cast doubts on this type of voting, suggesting that it facilitated widespread voter fraud that has never been proven. But because the president said it, this was reported all across the country through various forms of media.

The conclusion, according to an article by Yochai Benkler in the Columbia Journalism Review in October, is:

"Contrary to most contemporary analyses of disinformation efforts in the American political-media ecosystem, our findings suggest that the disinformation campaign that has shaped the views of tens of millions of American voters did not originate in social media or via a Russian attack. Instead, it was led by Donald Trump and the Republican Party and amplified by some of the biggest media outlets in the country; social media played only a secondary, supportive role."

In the Indian context, there has been considerable discussion about the role of social media in spreading misinformation, or shaping public discourse on issues such as the elections, or the opposition parties, or civil society dissenters.

Is it possible that here too, the mainstream media — knowingly, as in the case of media houses that make no bones about being supporters of the BJP and Narendra Modi, or unwittingly, by those not beholden to any political group — has helped build Modi's profile and amplify the messages of the BJP?

Take, for instance, the latest ploy of the BJP to delegitimise its political opposition. Home minister Amit Shah has been widely quoted calling the People's Alliance for Gupkar Declaration in Jammu and Kashmir, or the Gupkar Alliance, as the "Gupkar gang" in the run-up to the District Development Council election that the PAGD has decided to contest. The very use of the term "gang" suggests notoriety and illegality.

While most of the English language press has been restrained in its headlines, the coinage is likely to find ready acceptance on television channels that have proven to be more propagandist than journalistic. In time, it could get the same currency as the "tukde tukde gang", coined to criticise student activists of the Jawaharlal Nehru University. Or, for that matter, "love jihad", which has surfaced once again as BJP-run states formulate laws that will restrict the constitutional right of men and women in this country to choose who they marry and what religion they practise.

There is a choice that media outlets can make, especially in the headline, as in the case of print. The Hindu headlined its report on Shah's speech: "Gupkar alliance an unholy global gathbandhan: Shah"; the Telegraph: "Amit Shah brands Kashmir alliance a ‘gang’"; Hindustan Times: "Shah aims at Gupkar Group on ‘foreign link’"; and Indian Express: "Calling Gupkar alliance a gang, Amit Shah says it and Congress will bring terror back". None of them used "Gupkar gang" in the headline, although it is mentioned in the copy.

A study of mainstream media in India is needed to understand, as in the US, the role it has played in perpetuating the narratives of the BJP. Another example is the way the media reports on the prime minister. His Diwali visit to the troops in Jaisalmer, for instance, would have been the subject of some mirth, as indeed it was on social media, given Modi's attire, and the fact that he was waving to no one in particular while riding on a tank in the desert. Instead, we heard poker-faced live reports on some television channels while pro-BJP channels had predictably glowing and adulatory reports.

Irrespective of the difference in tone or headline, the message that got through was precisely what was intended: the image of a leader who will fight off any invader on Indian territory. Forget minor details such as what really happened in Galwan during the recent incursion by Chinese troops. It is the image that is important. And it continues to work, as was evident in the recent elections in Bihar.

Just as the American media is questioning its reporting during the Trump era, the Indian media too must reconsider how it reports on political leaders.

A report that sets a standard for how to integrate reporting with fact-checking is this one by Scroll’s Rohan Venkataramakrishnan. He interrogated the widely reported statement made by Narendra Modi after the Bihar election, where he claimed that the BJP was the only party that increased its seats even after staying in power "for three terms". There's an obvious inaccuracy there, that Venkataramakrishnan called "plainly wrong", as the BJP was not in power for three consecutive terms in Bihar. The report also contested the assumption that the BJP's vote share has grown since 2015, because it has not.

Perhaps people do not read the fine print in newspaper reports. But it is worth doing it for the record rather than leaving it to specialised fact-check sites like AltNews to point them out.

If those in power go unchallenged when they publicly state half-truths, or untruths, they will continue to do so with impunity. And the result will be the acceptance by many millions of people that these untruths are indeed proven facts, as we are currently witnessing in the US.

 

 

Media isn’t in the 'positivity' business. Its job is to show the ugly truth

Broken News

https://www.newslaundry.com/amp/story/2020%2F06%2F04%2Fmedia-isnt-in-the-positivity-business-its-job-is-to-show-the-ugly-truth?__twitter_impression=true

 

“Negativity, negativity, negativity,” intoned India's solicitor general, Tushar Mehta, in the Supreme Court on May 28. He was referring to the media and others critical of the government during hearings on the notice that the apex court had taken up suo motu on the worker exodus. 

"Positivity, positivity, positivity," was the advice Narendra Modi's government gave to media owners before the first national lockdown to contain the spread of Covid-19 was announced on March 24.

Between these two dates, and the expression of these two sentiments lies the chasm between the government’s understanding of the role of the media in a democracy, and what the media understands as its role in a functioning democracy.

This negative-positive binary that this government in particular seems determined to pursue, not just in relation to the media but also to any opposition to its ideas and plans, is something that all of us need to be worried about. For civil society critics, there is the real and present danger of being arrested on all manner of charges ranging from sedition to terrorism.

As for the media, for the six years that the Modi government has held office, much of mainstream media has chosen the "positivity" message, finding no contradiction in openly cheerleading for the government.  Fortunately, a few continue to cling on to what they perceive as their role of holding the government to account. But their numbers are dwindling as economic and political pressures chip away at their resilience.

Coming back to the solicitor general’s “negativity” rant, should the media be considered “negative” because it has persisted with the story of the exodus of workers from our cities? This story has refused to disappear for over two months after the first batch of workers began to find ways to return to their homes. It is a story that could not be avoided, need alone be faked as the government suggested at one point. In its sheer magnitude and its many tragic outcomes, no journalist or media house worth their salt could have turned their gaze away.

In fact, because the stories continue to pour in, the visuals are still printed on a daily basis and the moving images are shared on social media, India's highest court was compelled to wake up and take suo motu cognisance of the unprecedented tragedy unfolding in this country.

Why has the media persisted with the story?

Even if one goes by the cynical criteria of what mainstream media chooses to cover, this is one story that fits the bill. In its size – literally thousands of people on the move; its pathos – the way they chose to travel; and the tragedy – of the people who died enroute or just after they got to their destination. Also proximity – the fact that the workers left from large metropolitan centres where the media is based. This ensured that the story could not be missed.

Imagine if the situation was in the reverse. That because of hunger, starvation and lack of work, thousands of people had set off on foot from their villages to the cities. They would still be deemed “migrants” because they were migrating to another place in search of sustenance. But it would have taken a while longer for the media to wake up to what was happening because it was not in their backyard.

Yet, I would argue, even in this reverse hypothetical scenario, the story would have had to be covered. And even if this imagined exodus had been triggered by callous government policy, as it has been in the present instance, it would not matter. The politics of individual media houses would not be able to obscure this "event", given its size and spread.

Something similar is happening in the United States in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd by a policeman in Minneapolis. Even media houses that are generally supportive of President Donald Trump, such as Fox News, have covered the protests extensively.

In both India and the US, although the stories are very different, the government, or its agents, is choosing to literally shoot the messenger instead of paying heed to the substance of the stories.

In India, journalists have not been attacked by the police for covering the worker exodus story. But the solicitor general compared journalists to “vultures” in his intervention in the Supreme Court. This is an old and tired trope based on the iconic image of a starving child and a vulture in famine-gripped South Sudan shot in 1993 by the late Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Kevin Carter.

That Mehta brought this up is not surprising, but it is more than a little amusing that he got his facts wrong because they were based on a WhatsApp message that was being circulated, as this story in AltNews points out.

The comparison between vultures and news gatherers has persisted through decades. It is not always a simple choice for a journalist on the beat to decide whether to intervene in a humanitarian crisis or during conflict before filing the story, or to wait until the story is out and then see how to help.

Dar Yasin, one of the three Associated Press photographers from Jammu and Kashmir who recently won a Pulitzer, chose to intervene in 2017 when he put aside his camera and carried an injured girl to safety during a violent incident in Kashmir. 

On the other hand, if the information does not get out at that instance, there is also a possibility of many more lives lost, or greater tragedies unfolding. So it is a tough choice that journalists make and live with. Furthermore, the mental stress that they encounter is not fully recognised or addressed. And there are those who cannot live with it, as in Carter's case who took his own life within months of winning the Pulitzer.

In the case of the worker exodus story in India, the image that lingers is that of the child pulling at the blanket that covered his dead mother at the Muzaffarpur station. The video was seen widely, it was not shot by a journalist, but its authenticity was not in doubt. Journalists spoke to the woman's brother-in-law with whom she was travelling and followed up with the family after they managed to return to their village. 

Often, a few such images memorialise an entire story.  What is “negative” about them, in the government's language? I would argue that telling such a story is the “positive” of a free press in a democracy. This story, amongst many others, has shaken even the most indifferent into "seeing" the invisible millions that are also citizens of this country.

Similarly, if ordinary people had not filmed George Floyd's killing in Minneapolis, and the media had not taken it on, we would not have witnessed the outpouring on the streets across the US as people demand an end to the brutality of the police and the entrenched racism in the law-enforcing machinery.

The media that set out to cover these demonstrations has also been targeted by the police, but selectively. This report in the Washington Post states: "For black journalists, the civil unrest in cities across America isn’t just a big story. It’s personal." The story recounts the number of incidents where black reporters were specifically targeted by the police, including the now famous incident of CNN reporter Omar Jiminez being arrested even as he was politely negotiating with the police about where he and his crew should stand to report.

In the US, these incidents have yet again exposed the persistence of racial bias in all spheres, including in the media. In fact, as the Post story points out, despite the 1968 Kerner Commission that exposed the problems with a white-dominated media, and the efforts since then to make newsrooms more diverse, an analysis of newsroom composition in 2018 showed that 77 percent of employees are white. An analysis of newsrooms in India throws up similar statistics of the domination of upper caste Hindus.

It is not entirely paradoxical that the media in the US and India face similar challenges. In the US, the media has to contend with a president who is constantly deriding it and dismissing anything critical as fake. In India, we have a government that is not averse to using its powers to enforce "positivity" and patriotism in the media, and insisting that anything else is untrue and unpatriotic.