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The Changing Face of Indian Media
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The Changing Face of Indian MediaSummaryThe Changing Face of Indian Media - Implications for Development Organisations By Nirupama Sarma Email: nirusarma@yahoo.com Fall 1998 As India concluded its celebration of 50 years of independence this year, having initiated a process of economic reform in the early part of the decade, the forces of privatisation and globalisation have unleashed dramatic changes in the country's media. Amidst a deluge of film-based entertainment, news and current affairs provided by private channels, All India Radio and Doordarshan, once the country's officially anointed public service broadcasters, have become undecided incarnations of their former selves. This time in the history of Indian media is critical: it's overwhelming in the quick and dramatic changes over the last few years, and frustrating in the current impasse thanks to the imbroglio over the newly instituted Broadcasting Authority of India (for key features and landmarks in Indian media history refer Box 1) For those in the business of renting eyeballs, the delinking of radio and television from direct state control has given endless joy. But media analysts and NGOs have varied responses. Some see the deregulation of broadcast media as potentially aiding the emergence of community radio and other forms of more democratic, participatory communication. Others despair that Indian audiences have been, to borrow a phrase, amused to death. They observe that market imperatives have already forced the once state-owned AIR and Doordarshan to abdicate their responsibilities, ringing the death knell on the state's role in public service broadcasting. That role has been one of mixed successes. Over the last four decades, the state's forays into development communication, the ruling communication paradigm at that time, have been significant. But then the successes of SITE (Satellite Instructional Television Experiment) or the Kheda Communications Project are offset by the phenomenal failures of other projects such as PREAL, and in the long run, undermined by the vacillating fortunes and commitments of rapidly-changing governments. Today's vastly changed media scenario calls for a recasting of the role of media in promoting prosocial change. This paper discusses the prevailing media trends in India in a historical context, highlights the issues being debated and describes the responses of NGOs and development agencies to the changes and the new opportunities they present. An underlying premise is the need for some of the key stakeholders for social change communication – donor agencies and NGOs -- to strengthen the linkages between the discourse on media trends and their own investments in communication, whether to promote child rights, HIV/AIDS education, women's empowerment or the environment. Media Scenario An index for radio, TV, print media and telecommunications is presented in Box 2. A quick overview indicates:
Some key factors to bear in mind is that despite the leapfrogging in satellite television, and the significant trends in that brand of programming, the majority of the population has access only to All India Radio and Doordarshan, which are merely trying to catch up with the private channels. A second factor is that much of this analysis indicates trends mostly among English and Hindi programmes – the predominant languages of the media discussed – to the exclusion of 25-plus other languages and dialects in the country.
Broadcast Media Radio The number of radio stations has increased from about 100 in 1990 to 209 in 1997, and the land area covered from 84% to 91%. However, despite its tremendous reach and the fact that it presents the best option for low-cost programming, radio has been treated as a poor relative for over two decades. Listenership has either dropped or reached a plateau. In some cases listenership has risen, although very negligibly, in some urban areas, thanks to the recent time allotment to private companies on five FM stations. Film and other popular music constitute the main fare of such stations, contributing to an increase in commercial time and ad revenues from Rs. 527 million in 1991-2 to Rs. 809 million in 1995-96. Some efforts have been made to use radio for social change, as in the case of the state-supported radio rural forums for agricultural communication in the 1960s, or to promote adult literacy in the 1980s. More recently NGOs have helped broadcast programmes on women and legal rights, emergency contraception, and teleserials advocating girls' education. But it is clearly a medium waiting for a shot-in-the-arm. A key need in India is for local broadcasting that reflects issues of concern to the community. In this regard, some communication experts believe that an increased and accelerated commercialisation of radio will eventually drive down the costs of FM radio sets, thus facilitating local radio. The increasing devolution of political power initiated through the 73rd and 74th amendment to the constitution in 1988-89 has also set a climate conducive for the empowerment of communities and local governance. A key area requiring attention, therefore, is advocacy for community radio and the provision of training to NGOs and communities to use this medium for articulating their concerns, as one Bangalore-based NGO is currently doing. Television The number of private television channels has increased from none in 1990 to more than 50 this year. Entertainment constitutes about 51% of the total programme content, even though some channels such as Star Plus follow CNN's example in delivering "news on the hour, every hour." News and education constitute a mere 13.3% and 9.6% of programme content. However, in a bid to give themselves a halo of social responsibility, some channels broadcast programmes with a veneer of public interest: soaps that incorporate socially relevant themes such as women's education and empowerment, interactive talk shows on whether smoking should be banned, and open forums with government representatives responding to audience queries on human rights abuses or consumer rights. These programmes combine varying degrees of social value with commercial appeal in a competitive market. The open forums, in particular, have played an important role in familiarising the public to the political and legal system and in building a demand for political transparency and accountability. Another genre, that of the "edutainment" prosocial soap continues with serials such as Tara which dealt with the life of a strong-willed woman. However, while the first Indian edutainment soap Hum Log (1985) transfixed much of the nation (to a lesser degree in the southern non-Hindi speaking part of the country) the audiences for subsequent edutainment serials have been comparatively smaller. There is no longer the captive audience of the mid-80s, and there are several competing channels and soaps to choose from. These include reruns of long running teleserials of the late 1980s such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata which enjoy cult-like status. An emerging trend – and one that also reflects the current programme focus of development agencies – is the targeting of specific segments of the audience, in particular, young adults (children and youth in the age group of 10-29 years constitute about 40% of the population). Urban, middle to upper class youth, especially, constitute a key target group for private channels. Music channels such as MTV and Channel V, which rank among the top ten favorite channels, feature VJs who are popular role models for a young generation (One such popular VJ coos: "Being fit is cool; not smoking is cool"). Cashing in on this trend, UNAIDS, India initiated in 1996 a collaboration with Channel V for an on-air and on-ground campaign for HIV/AIDS awareness. The collaboration includes training and sensitisation of VJs on issues relating to HIV/AIDS. In another effort, the Ford Foundation, India funded a BBC training for radio and television producers on reproductive and sexual health. The six project proposals shortlisted for additional funding, all of which target children and youth, are in entertainment formats of musicals, talk shows and animation. Print Media Given national literacy rates as low as 51%, the very limited reach of newspapers and magazines, and the distinctly urban educated readership profile, the role of print media has been defined more in terms of information dissemination and advocacy. The picture is a lopsided one: circulation figures are rapidly increasing as are advertising revenues, but this is especially true of English publications (refer Media Index, Table 2), which account for 71% of the total ad revenue of members of the Indian Newspaper Society. A key feature of these publications, unfortunately, is the increasing preponderance of glossy, ad-friendly film and TV-based reporting. That the sole trendsetter in this increasing corporatisation of the fourth estate, the Times of India, also ranks 10th among the top-selling newspapers in the world, is no coincidence. Given the increasing costs of newsprint and production, and the pressure of market imperatives, newspaper houses have followed the piper in carrying ad -friendly fluff at the cost of more serious development and health reporting. Leading dailies have over the last few years dropped their special sections devoted to development and health. The low literacy rates and high production costs have also stymied the possibilities of smaller alternative publications that could potentially reflect the concerns of the development sector. The Internet Recognising that access to information and information technologies play a key role in development, especially given the constraints of the mass media, groups of non-profit documentation centers in the country have developed communications systems such as Indialink and Dianet that are focussed solely on development issues. By providing connectivity to grassroots NGOs and emphasising the documentation and information from within the country (refer case description Democratisation of Information), these efforts have facilitated greater grassroots involvement in development and South-South dialogue. However, the extremely low access to internet – there are a mere 90,000 internet subscribers in the country, bringing the density to below decimal points – is a key hindrant. A World Bank funded project for National Agricultural Technology envisages a similar democratisation through the establishment of "information kiosks" in rural areas (refer interview with Kiran Karnik). The proposed project sees the expansion of public pay-phone offices that have mushroomed all over the country, including rural areas, into centers with computers for the inputting and accessing of data relevant to rural populations. Traditional theater/media Traditional folk media forms, once a favorite for communication efforts, are today precariously placed. Some agencies and NGOs continue to use street theater, magic, puppetry, traditional folk dances and melas (fairs) especially in rural areas. Some of these efforts are hugely successful in awareness creation, social mobilisation and in facilitating interpersonal communication. However, the absence of funding and technical support, their inherent fluid structure and the difficulty in monitoring and evaluation have rendered them near-relics in today's environment. So much so that one Bangalore-based NGO, while using such traditional folk forms, also feels compelled to address the basic survival needs of folk artistes such as provision of basic wages, training, pensions and other schemes. Development Organisations: ResponsesThe current media trends indicate three broad areas of need in terms of social change communication:
The efforts of most development agencies and NGOs are focussed primarily on the first area, increasing media coverage on specific subject areas. Workshops and fellowships for information dissemination and upgrading of knowledge continue to be the stock-in-trade strategy, and have yielded positive results, especially with print media. But they do not address the need to institutionalise these efforts. How effectively stories and programmes on diarrhoeal control or microcredit will survive in the media marketplace continues to be a hazardous guess. But the marketplace is defined by demand – and it was precisely to increase the demand for quality, need-based programming that a Delhi based-NGO established media Viewership Forums. Through these forums audiences from both lower and middle classes are taught media literacy, recognise their rights as media "consumers" and are beginning to demand better, socially-relevant programming (refer case description Media Education and Literacy). In a country which has never really had exposure to, or experience with, public service broadcasting, such as effort is critical. A significant breakthrough was made in creating a public space for social communication in the mid- 1980s with the establishment of the Doordarshan-affiliated Lok Seva Sanchar Parishad (LSSP). The LSSP-Doordarshan mandate was to promote the production and airing of programmes and spots on social issues. Further, a Ford Foundation grant to Doordarshan promoted the production of programmes and spots on issues such as the status of women, legal rights, education, environment. The close LSSP-Doordarshan link ensured – for a while at least – that this worked. However now with the imbroglio over media deregulation, the status of the LSSP is in limbo. Recommendations Given the current media scenario, and the needs of the development sector, the following recommendations can be made:
In the absence of a concerted effort by media analysts, NGOs, donor agencies and the public to support need-based, socially relevant media, the current waves of, and I borrow a phrase here, the "LPG mantra"* will drown the impulse for a media with a conscience. The oft-cited cliché then, of the dichotomy between India and Bharat,** between the cyber-savvy Indian elite and the monsoon-dependent farmer, will unfortunately ring true. * LPG: liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation ** Bharat: vernacular for India
References and Sources The Asian Communication Handbook, 1998: Published by the Asian Media Information and Communication Center (AMIC) and the School of Communication Studies, Nanyang Technological University Seminar, October 1997, New Delhi Through the Magic Window: Television and Change in India, by Sevanti Ninan. 1995. Sage Publications Annual Report, Indian Newspaper Society, New Delhi Annual Report, 1997-98 GOI, Ministry of Telecommunications, Department of Telecommunications Annual Report, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, GOI Personal Discussions with:
The Role of Media in China During World War II World War II ushered in an age of mass media in China functioning as a potent instrument of war fighting. Total war in nature, the eight-year conflict in China created an outpouring of mass mobilization through media for the single purpose of defeating the enemies. It was also during World War II, media in China became a part of the military operations in the form of disinformation and black propaganda. Yet in the meantime, the war provided an excellent opportunity for various political and bureaucratic factions in China to publish partisan media outlets to engage in internecine in-fights within their own rank. In this talk, I will briefly discuss these various roles of media in China during World War II. I. Unity and Disunity-a Media Dilemma The outbreak of war in July 1937 tremendously boosted the national unity of China that had been greatly divided between the Nationalist Central Government (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This national spirit of unity was most pronounced in the sudden surge in numbers of the new publications, all of which carried the central theme of "Resisting Japan." This outpouring of new publications further diversified the formats of Chinese media as well, with a wide variety of dailies, weeklies, fortnightlies, or monthlies. In the Chinese northern city of Tianjin (天津), for example, before the war, there had been no more than half a dozen regular publications of all kinds. Within a year and a half, the publicly circulated new publications mushroomed to over 30. They include 実録，長城，灯塔，解放， 中山，吼声，抗戦， 火線， 大衆，犠牲報，抗日小報，討倭月刊，生存周刊， 紀事報 and so on. [1] However, this unity was also misleading. Under the facade of national united front against Japan, the Nationalist Central Government lost control over a significant part of the media publication, because now its rival, the CCP, had a legitimate reason to expand its control over new publications. In fact, it was during the war that the CCP was for the first time able to use such newspapers as New China Daily (xinhua ribao) to propagandize its party line and gained national recognition. In the case of Tianjin, more than half of the new publications, as listed above, were controlled by the CCP. Furthermore, the war stimulated the great need to set up radio stations to drum up war propaganda. This gave the CCP chances to penetrate into the KMT propaganda organizations. The KMT-run Central Broadcasting Radio Station (中央广播電台, established in 1928 with the call sign XGOA), for example, expanded its coverage to remote areas after 1937. Yet its key stations nationwide, including the Shanxi （陜西） Station and the more important Kunming Station, were virtually taken over by the CCP underground agents. [2] One could argue that part of the reason why the KMT lost to the CCP in 1949 was because the CCP was able to gain sizeable control over mass media as propaganda tools during WWII while the KMT's otherwise rigid press control eroded greatly during the war. In the stuggle between unity and disunity, the latter triumphed sub rosa, which laid the foundation for the demise of the KMT government in 1949. II. Media as an Instrument of War Never before in Chinese history did mass media become a potent method of war as it did during WWII. On the KMT government side, a vast newspaper enterprise was operated by the intelligence apparatus for the single purpose of gathering intelligence and spreading disinformation to destabilize enemy's will to fight. Both Wang Pengsheng's Institute of International Research and Dai Li 's (Tai Li, 戴笠) Bureau of Investigation and Statistics ran newspapers and other media outlets for intelligence purposes. After the Pearl Harbor attacks, the Americans entered the China theater. It was the Americans who used the media as a legitimate way of war on a massive scale. The first American organization that legitimized the use of media as war fighting was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) under Major General William J. Donovan, who argued, successfully, that during a war, it was absolutely justifiable to use the media to "fabricate propaganda, rumor and news, and to disseminate the same, whether true or false, to promote or incite resistance, revolution, and sabotage of all kinds." [3] As such, a wartime organizations was set up and became active in China during the war when the Americans were involved. It was called the Morale Operation (MO) branch of the OSS, whose function was purely to engage in "black propaganda," i.e., to make up rumors and other disinformation to confuse and impact the Japanese morale in China. Based in Chungking and Kunming, the MO branch employed mostly journalists and artists, including the long-time Wall Street Journal's Tokyo correspondent Raymond Cromley, the journalist Elizabeth McDonald, and the cartoonist William Smith. An OSS MO report to Washington in November 1944 lists many examples of the rumors made up by its China operatives and spread to the Japanese occupied areas. They include "parody of (Japanese) battlefield code-exact facsimile of captured (Japanese) code book, with text satirizing the foolishness of (Japanese) eithcs in demanding sacrifice for insincere and selfish leaders;" and "faked (Japanese) leaflet-purporting to come from (Japanese) Army, leaflet telling of coming of southern Burmese troops into Burma (distasteful to northern Burmese) distributed by OSS agents behind (Japanese) lines;" and "counterrumors at Kweilin-during early (Japanese) advance MO personnel launched rumors to staunch effective flow of (Japanese)-inspired fears, receiving back with exaggerations 8 out of 30 stories spread concerning growing Allied might." [4] The same report also states the establishment of MO bases in Kandy (in today's Sri Lanka), Delhi, Nazira, Kweilin and Chungking, and the fact that "Chinese agents (were) trained and organized into 2 MO teams sent to Canton and Macao to establish intelligence network and acquire printing facilities for creation and distribution of subversive propaganda." [5] The Japanese Communist Party chief Sanzo Nozaka, or as the Americans called him Okano Susumu, was staying with the Chinese Communist Party leadership in Yenan throughout most of the war. He became an advisor to the OSS MO operations and helped the Americans operate black propaganda radio stations beaming at the Japanese homeland as well as the Japanese occupation army in China. [6] For his help, Sanzo Nozaka demanded that the Americans pay him $400,000 in the Japanese Federal Reserve Currency for North China. [7] The most elaborate wartime newspaper enterprise used as a military operation was the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury (大美晩報). First established by American expatriates in Shanghai in 1929, the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury grew into a respectable and influential newspaper in China. Initially, it was published in English. In 1933, its Chinese edition began publishing with great success. In December 1937, the Japanese military authorities in Shanghai tried to close down the Chinese edition, but it was owned by the American interest. As a result, the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury was allowed to publish inside the Japanese occupied Shanghai until 8 December 1941 when the Japanese military moved into the foreign Settlements and closed down both the English and the Chinese editions of the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury, at a time when its Chinese edition alone enjoyed a circulation of 40,000. One year later, in December 1942, C.V. Starr, the principal owner of the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury, offered his newspaper to the OSS as a cover to gather intelligence and conduct MO operations against the Japanese. As a senior OSS Special Intelligence officer reasoned, "Newspapermen everywhere are expected to stick their noses into everybody's business. No suspicion attached to their curiosity. A newspaper is therefore automatically almost indestructible cover for the collection of information." [8] On 1 January 1943, the OSS took on Starr's offer and started the New York edition of the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury as an intelligence gathering operation. On 31 October 1943, the Chungking edition was also started. These two newspapers were to last until the end of the war as an OSS intelligence project. By July 1944, the OSS had spent $350,000 on these two publications. Veteran journalists were sent to Chungking to collect information for the OSS. By July 1944, 18 months after its function as an OSS project, the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury was able to boast great success: "Data on over 5,000 individuals has been assembled and carefully edited-covering Japanese, Koreans, European and American suspects, Chinese, Indo-Chinese, Thais, Malays, Burmese and Indian puppets and collaborators." Also accomplished were a huge body of intelligence reports and analysis-1,500 in all-on a variety of subjects ranging from "Japanese Americans in China," to "Japanese Gendarmerie," to "Currency Warfare in China," and to "Penetration of Christian Church by Japanese." [9] III. Media as Effective Weapons for Internecine In-fight In Wartime China World War II/China was remarkable for its fierce internal bickering among various factions. The CBI theater officially stands for China-Burma-India Theater, but instead was widely perceived as "Constant Bickering Inside." In order to advance partisan causes and bureaucratic turf claims, all sides used media as a weapon of self-promotion, and intentional leaking through newspapers aimed to denigrate others or sabotage other's policies. The top U.S. commanders in China, General Joseph Stilwell and General Claire Chennault were hostile toward each other on almost every issue and deeply despised each other personally. In order to enhance personal image, both Stilwell and Chennault used veteran correspondents to promote themselves in China and in the U.S. Surrounding Stilwell were partisan reporters such as Theodore White and Jack Beldon who wrote countless dispatches glowingly praising the very controversial general. Equally media conscious was Chennault whose primary image maker was the very powerful journalist Joseph Alsop working inside Chennault's Kunming Headquarters. In fact, the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury also became bitterly partisan in attacking the rival of the OSS, namely the Sino-American Cooperative Organization or SACO, a setup jointly run by the U.S. Navy and the Chinese Secret Service under Major General Dai Li. But the most partisan role the media played in wartime China involved the promotion of the Chinese Communists by foreign journalists. Contrary to popular perception, the wartime media control by the KMT government was quite ineffective for the most part. The press office in charge of media censorship and wartime reporting was under Chiang Kai-shek's confidante Hollington Tong. He was publicly resented by the foreign journalists that had flocked to China during the war. Many of them were pro-Communist and disliked the KMT ideologically regardless. Israel Epstein, Agnes Smedley, Anna Louise Strong, Ilona Ralf Suess, and Gunther Stein etc were vigorous promoters of the Chinese Communist Party in their partisan reporting for major newspapers in the Western democracies. Yet others not predisposed to be ideologically strident, such as Tilman Durdan, Harrison Foreman, James Young, Brooks Atkinson and Maurice Votaw were frequently unhappy about any wartime restrictions on news reporting. Such resentment against the Nationalist Central Government finally created a dramatic episode in June 1944 when a large delegation of journalists visited Yenan, the CCP stronghold in North China. This was a windfall for the CCP and it was thoroughly exploited as a propaganda event to champion the CCP's "democratic reforms" and the Communists' "love" of President Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms." [10] In addition to these visiting journalists praising the CCP, there were also a few permanent media personnel in Yenan promoting partisan causes. The Soviet TASS news agency had its permanent reporter in Yenan, which is not surprising. But the more interesting case is Michael Lindsay, who had been the Press Officer in the British Embassy in China previously but went to Yenan in early 1942 and stayed there until the war's end. Lindsay, a British aristocrat soaked with blue blood, vociferously championed Mao's guerilla war against the Japanese. [11] In fact, a senior KMT press officer admits that the wartime management of foreign reporting in China had been mostly a failure and was by no means effective. [12] The partisan nature of wartime media in China can also be seen through the countless incidents of intentional press leaking designed to influence policy-making process. Much top secret information was given to influential newspaper men for publication. Drew Pearson, the most powerful gossip and political columnist in the U.S. during World War II, often dished out astonishingly embarrassing details of bureaucratic in-fights related to the China theater. [13] Perhaps the ultimate climax of this pernicious partisan manipulation of media in order to influence government policy is the "Amerasia" case in which many top secret U.S. government documents were illegally provided to the procommunist magazine for publication. But the occurrence of this case serves a good point for me to stop here because the war was essentially over by this time, but it ushered in a new war, i.e. Cold War, both in China and the in the United States. NOTES:
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