 You're watching News Made Easy, I'm Anindu Chakravarty and today I'm going to ask the question, why have journalists become cheerleaders of power? Why have they become cheerleaders of the government? The reason is the biggest reason, not the only reason, the biggest reason is because they want to protect their jobs. And why am I saying that? Because when you look at the data about jobs in India, what has happened to media and publishing jobs, then I'm going to start by looking at September 2016 which is almost 5 years ago and all the data that you see is CMI. So September 2016, there were about 10.3 lakh people working in the media and publishing industry. I can't get news media data separately but remember whatever trend that you see in media and publishing, it's much worse in news media, that trend. By August 2021, which is the latest data that we have, that number has dropped to just 2.3 lakhs. So 78% of people who were working in media and publishing in September 2016 had either lost their jobs or left the profession. Now you can say that, well, you know, when you look at one month, you might end up comparing a very good month versus a very bad month and that's a fair criticism. So let's look at one year, 12 month period. So I'm going to take the September to August period because August 2021 is our latest data. So if I look at September 2016 to August 2017, that's a one year comparison, there were about 8.3 lakh people working in media and publishing. Between September 2020 to August 2021, the average number of people working in the media industry had dropped to 3.7 lakh people. So again, there's a decline of 56%. This is a one year period. All right, again, one can argue that one year is a very blunt and large number. Let's look at a smaller, not just one month, but let's take a three month moving average. This will give us a better idea of the trend and what is happening. Okay, let's look at this, the three month average and here's the graph and you can see the decline and the interesting thing here is a look at this from March 2018 to December 2018. That is the biggest decline, a decline of 54%. Why did that happen? Because at this point, most media companies had decided to enter into cost cutting. They were rationalizing, downsizing, sacking people because they were making losses. Their stock prices had dropped. They weren't being able to raise money. So they had to do this to go back into the black to be able to make sure some profit. So there was huge amount of downsizing in this period. And after that, there's this period of stability that you see stabilization that takes place. And there were ups and downs. Of course, there's a minor drop in the COVID period as well. But the second decline actually takes place from January 2021 to August 2021. This is the second wave decline. And that's another 34 odd percent drop that we see here. That's taking place. Now, why is that happening? As I told you, the reason was media companies weren't making money. They had to sack people. And I'm going to give you some data. You do understand that for most media companies, the news media and entertainment media advertising is the biggest source of revenue. So let's just compare what is happening to television between 2015 to 2019. The source for this is Group M, one of the biggest media buying companies globally. And between 2015 to 2019, the average annual growth in television of ad spend was 11%. Remember, this includes entertainment companies. This includes sports channels, which get the bulk of advertising, not news media. News media, the growth would be much, much lower, not this 11% that you're seeing. More likely, it's going to be closer to what happened to print. Between print grew by just 1%. 1% growth for print in these four years, between 2015 to 2019. That's how badly print did. 1% annual growth. You understand that inflation is rising. And that means that this is a negative growth. That means real revenues were dropping. They had no option but to cut costs. And sacking is one of the things that they could have done. What happened last year, compared to 2019, if we look at what had happened in 2020, then television lost about 14% ad spend. 14% less ad spend for television in print. It is a 43% decline compared to 2019. 43% decline. Of course, some of those revenues will have come back by now, but that is what is happening. The reason why companies are still making some money is because they have cut costs completely. They're not growing. They're contracting. And that is the reason that people are desperate to hold on to their jobs. And now the most important point here is that one of the reasons companies have had to sack lower level people, young journalists, because editors and anchors get paid huge salaries. And these huge salaries are comparable to the biggest corporate haunches. These huge salaries make up the biggest chunk of a news media, of a news company's costs. And let me tell you one thing, that is the big reason why editors and anchors are desperate to toe the line, because if they don't, what will happen to these huge salaries they've got used to? That is also the reason they're hiring people who will listen to them and say whatever the people in power, those in authority, whether it's business, whether it's government, whether it's politicians, whatever they say, that is what the journalists will regurgitate. That is what is happening to India right now and that is the key reason why journalists have turned into cheerleaders. That's the show today. Keep watching NewsClick. Like us. Subscribe to us.