 Hello everyone. Welcome to NewsClick. I'm Anushka and I'm here today with Parunjay Guha Thakurtha. Parunjay, welcome. We're here today to talk about the state of the media and to talk about how it was different in the past and what are the kind of trends that we're seeing in the media today. I'm talking specifically about the mainstream media. We're noticing that the kind of primetime coverage that certain kinds of stories get, like sporting events like the World Cup or IPL or other activities of the BJP ministers or other ministers seeming to occupy all of primetime with all kinds of debates and swing. But there are other real issues and real stories that sort of don't get enough time. There's disproportionate coverage of stories. So can you just maybe elaborate on that and tell us a little bit about why this kind of happens. Anushka, what's happening today is not new. It's been happening for the last several years. If today more of the mainstream media is focused on IPL and not on children dying in a hospital in Bihar, that's because the mainstream media, which is driven by profits, it wants to maximize its profits, believes that its viewers, its readers, want this kind of information. For them, the wardrobe malfunction of a model on a ramp is more quote-unquote newsworthy than a farmer committing suicide. How is it different today than what it was earlier? I think technology has changed the media in ways we could never imagine what has happened in the last decade or thereabouts. Today, there's technological convergence, but what has not changed or what is actually unique about the media today? In the emergency, during the emergency, the 19-month period between June 1975 and January 1977, Indira Gandhi put a number of journalists behind bars. And what happened was that the media was completely muzzled. It was really the print medium at that point of time, for the first time in the history of this country. Then she apologized later for what had happened. And when Muraji Desai's government came to Bihar in March 1977, the information and broadcasting minister was L.K. Advani. And Advani was once asked, why did such a large section of the media bend, became so subservient to Indira Gandhi, so uncritical of her, was willing to accept anything and just only sing pains of praise to her? And he famously remarked about the editors at that point of time. When they were asked to bend, they crawled. Why is it today that we see such a large section of the media crawling without being even asked to bend? It has a lot to do with the financing and the economics of the media today. The biggest advertisers in the country are, besides the government of India, the Bharti Janta Party. So if you depend on advertising and advertisers and sponsorships for the bulk of your income, you're going to tow the government line. You're not going to be critical of the government. So in that sense, the media then fails to fulfill its role as the fourth estate, as a watchdog, as an institution which will hold truth to power, which will play the role of the adversary and the antagonist to whoever's in positions of power and authority. This is the big difference that has happened in the first five years of the Narendra Modi government. The 10 years of the UPS saw the media taking a very, very critical, I mean it was very critical of the Manmohan Singh government. Why did it become so subservient to Mr. Modi? Mr. Modi hasn't had an unscripted press conference. His interviews have been given to loyal journalists who wouldn't ask him difficult questions. So in a sense the media has been managed very well by Mr. Modi, by Mr. Amit Shah, by the Bharti Janta Party, by the RSS. And that small section of the media which is independent is today also finding it difficult to survive. And it's got a lot to do with the way the tax department or the tax authorities work. There are two notable examples. The kind of tax actions that have been taken against the Quint group headed by Mr. Raghav Mahal and NDTV, the New Delhi television group headed by Dr. Pranoy Roy and Radhika Roy are examples of how the tax authorities, the Income Tax Department, the Enforcement Directorate can be used against media organizations which do not slavishly tow the official line, the government line. Now the point to note is that the government will never ever acknowledge this. They're saying, you know, these are financial misdemeanors. We have nothing to do with it. Let the tax authorities do with it. But I don't think they're fooling anybody. The point is the very, very substantial section of the mainstream media has, for these financial reasons, become so subservient. And let's also acknowledge in the last five years the corporatization of the media has intensified, has become a more apparent phenomenon. The richest men in India are the biggest media owners, notable among them being India's richest man, Mr. Mukesh Ambani, who controls the networking group. So as a result of a combination of all these factors, the change of technology, the convergence of technology, we see such a large section, such a huge section of the mainstream media. When I say mainstream media, I mean the print medium, the television medium, and of course, now even the social media. The social media is so, puts out one-sided news. So I've given you a long answer to your question, because there are two parts to that question. Why it focuses on certain kinds of news and not other kinds of news, IPL versus deaths of children in Bihar, and why it is so subservient to the ruling dispensation. Someone mentioned social media right in the end. So since you have a book published about Facebook and social media, could you also elaborate on how, apart from the TV channels or apart from certain kinds of newspapers and publications, the trolling or the way that these both sort of transmit single stories through WhatsApp, through Facebook, Facebook groups that are only uploading these kind of media channels. Apart from, because there's television, but there's also a smartphone in so many ads. You have GEO, which gave out 4G connections for free to people, a free connection. And so there were so many more people who actually had access to free internet. And so the internet has become this new platform where so many different people, television is not a family watching event anymore. It's a personally consumed, I can have a different opinion from somebody in my family. So maybe just tell us a little bit, since you've also worked on a book, about how does Facebook actually enable and promote this kind of a trend in the media. You absolutely corrected your analysis of what has happened. Today we have a very unusual situation, it's never happened before. In a country with 1.35 billion people, you have about 1.2 billion Sims, subscriber identity modules. You have somewhere in the region of about maybe 750 or 800 million phones, handsets, of which somewhere in the region of about 300 million or some would say more than 300 million, 350 million are smartphones, which are internet enabled, where people as you rightly pointed out are watching television programs on their handsets. This is an unusual, it's a remarkable change that has happened and it's happened very, very recently. It's happened really in the last few years, the last several years. Now when you look at the social media, when you look at Facebook, where the WhatsApp first, all the major mainstream media organizations, the newspapers, the television channels are all present on the social media. So they're all using whether it be Facebook, whether it be Twitter, whether it be WhatsApp, to put out, I mean, so the overlap is huge. So even the so-called traditional mainstream media has to necessarily not only be present, but to try and escalate its presence on the social media, put out little clips of the videos, use the WhatsApp groups to promote it, use Facebook pages to promote it, broadcast live, all these things have happened. Maybe in the near future we won't, I mean, we are certainly already on the way towards, television is not what it used to be, as you say, a family affair where people sit and watch and discuss over a meal or whatever. Now, when it comes to the social media, I think the Bhartya Janta Party has beaten everybody and this is what our book really is all about, talks about how it's weaponized WhatsApp. Now unlike Facebook, unlike Twitter, because of the end-to-end encryption, the sender and the receiver, it's all encrypted, you don't know. But the BJP has been amazing in using WhatsApp and to put out not just its messages, not just its political views, but weaponized it to purve and disseminate disinformation, fake news, hateful information, half-truths, information that is dividing our country on religious lines and it's truly amazing and I believe they've been successful to some extent. When you look at it, you have, say, about 900 million voters in this country. If you are in a situation where about one-third of these voters have access to WhatsApp, WhatsApp has become a potent weapon in the hands of the ruling dispensation to try and influence people politically. The book which we've written, Cyril Sam is the lead author, I'm the thing, it looks at how propaganda is being disseminated in India today and we bought the book out in both English and Hindi to try and highlight how this phenomenon, the book came out just before the elections. But after the elections, you know, we all become more intelligent by hindsight. It's very, very clear that the BJP is eminently successful in weaponizing WhatsApp to suit its larger goals and political purposes and gains and has gained accordingly. So I'm just going to ask you one last question and connect it with my first question where you talked about the business aspect of news and so how news becomes in some sense entertainment. So can you help us understand how, when does that happen to news? That's been happening for some time now. And maybe even sort of compare it to the U.S. because it seems like a lot of prime time has been modeled on mainstream media houses from the U.S. Yes and no. A larger section of the media in India has been criticality of Trump. I'm talking in terms of the style, in terms of the disproportionate attention that is... Yeah, sure. In that sense, you're right. The difference isn't the way politicians have been critiqued, criticized, you know? I mean, after all, Trump is the one who popularized everything that he didn't like as fake news. I mean, whether it's New York Times or CNN, anything that Mr. Trump doesn't like it becomes fake news. Mr. Modi has made television interviews events, whether it be Akshay Kumar or whatever, because you're after all giving interviews to journalists you've selected. People who are not going to ask you difficult questions. But to go back to what you were saying, in the United States, this business of outrage sells. And it sells very well for Mr. Arnab Goswami, for Mr. Rahul Shiv Shankar and Navika Kumar, for Mr. Rajat Sharma and Anjana Omkashyap and I'm naming them deliberately, because they are part of what Sandeep Bhushan in his recent book on the Indian newsroom described as the outrage industry. You know, you want to send, do a detailed documentary. You want people to travel all over, meet large numbers of people to do a field report, a ground report. That's expensive. That's time consuming. It's far easier to get half a dozen people or more people into your studio, put them in little boxes on the screen, on the screen, so they scream at one another and you can't hear what the others are saying and you've all paid them nicely to come to your studio. And that's what news has degenerated to, a slanging match, a business of outrage and akin to entertainment. So this again is a phenomenon that has been happening across the world and Rupert Murdoch's news corp specialized in it. It's now here in India and some people are trying to out Murdoch, Mr. Murdoch, in slanging, screaming matches and in this whole outrage business on the mainstream media and on television in particular. So what is the future of all of this? Are these string fests going to continue? See, the future of the Indian media and the independent media in India depends on A, whether people are willing to pay for quality, whether they're going to support independent media. A media that takes critical positions of whoever is in power and authority. People are they willing to spend on investigation, on detail reportage, on research? Will it be only philanthropies? Will it be only trusts and foundations? Will it be non-government organizations? Will it be completely providing free content like NewsClick does? Will it be crowdfunded? Will it be, you know, these are big questions. We are currently in a situation in India and in the world where nobody has the perfect answer. How do you monetize the content that you get on the net? This is the age of surveillance capitalism to use the title of a book recently written by a professor Shoshana. This is the age of an information overload. This is the age of news as entertainment. How, when things will change? How will you ensure greater quality of the content that you see on the internet, on YouTube? How do these digital monopolies, how will they react to them? How do they need to be fragmented? After all, you know, Google plus YouTube plus Android, Facebook plus WhatsApp plus Instagram. I mean, between these two giants alone, I mean, just exclude Apple and Amazon and Alibaba and Netflix. These two organizations alone account for a huge proportion of all the messaging that's happening on the internet. And today across the world, certainly in the US, there's talk that these digital monopolies are not good for what people read, what people hear, what people watch. So what's happening internationally to some extent is happening here. And it's a difficult question as to how the independent media in the age of the internet, how it will progress, how it will survive, how it can hope to play a meaningful role in Indian society. These are not easy questions. It reminds me of that film by Sidney Lume, Network, which was actually made in the 70s. Correct. In certain respects, things have worsened. It's worsened, perhaps. People making money of guerrilla fighters and anything to essentially get somebody to come watch it. I think it's also because don't you think that news then becomes, I mean, news was considered in some sense something boring or for a few people. No, no. In some ways what was happening in America in the 70s that you talk about. Today, we are in 2019 and certain ways things have become much worse. I mean, when you look at WhatsApp, the way it's been weaponized by the ruling dispensation, forget that. The way it's been used to spread hate news. The way lynchings, mob lynchings have been linked to WhatsApp. These are developments that we see. I mean, today the deep fakes that are happening where you can actually, anybody can be made to say anything. Artificial intelligence has made things so, you know, I mean, the possibilities are immense and also very, very dangerous, very, very dangerous. And that's the dark side of the internet. This is the age of surveillance capitalism. I return to the title of the book. That is, it's a thick book and anybody interested in the subject should read it. All right. Thank you so much, Parunjay. My pleasure. And keep watching NewsClick. Thank you for joining us today.