 Hello and let's talk about our media. It does not take an expert to know that there's something very seriously wrong with our media. There's fake news, loudness, venom and anger, and often a complete unwillingness to challenge a question the government. There are many exceptions, of course, in the form of journalists who speak truth to power, often at a great cost to themselves. But as an ordinary Indian, you wouldn't be faulted if you said that the media ecosystem in the country, especially the TV media ecosystem, has been compromised. Now, this is an extremely dangerous impact on democracy and our lives. What happens when the media does not question the government enough on, say, COVID-19, which is a life and death issue? What happens when the media fans the flames of Communalism and Jingoism, even urging war? These are all questions we need to live with as Indians. But why is the media like this? We talked to journalists on India Chakravarthy on the economics of the Indian media. Thank you, Anindu, for joining us. So we've had a couple of interesting weeks over the past interesting weeks and interesting months as far as the media is concerned. People, of course, in a time of crisis, looking to the media for answers, looking to the media for questions, in fact. But we do seem to have a media, especially a television media, but also in print, which has not perhaps been as critical of the government as you would expect on multiple issues, although the volume has actually remained the same. So to maybe strike a different note this week, would you talk a bit about what exactly makes the Indian media of today what they are right now, especially in relation to the government? So I think nowadays a lot of people use the term Godi media, which I think was popularized by my friend Ravish Kumar that they're sitting on the Godi, a lap of the government or corporates. They're very scared. Or I mean, when you look at being critical or being aggressive, the Indian news media is pretty critical and very aggressive when it comes to the opposition. Opposition says anything they go hammer and tongs against. They're very critical of minorities. They're very critical of alternate politics, of alternate economics, and anyone who criticizes those in power. Indian media is almost like a watchdog against democracy, not for democracy. So the question is what makes Indian media what it is? And I would say there are broadly two things. One is, and they both stem from the same thing, which is the first is government, and the second is ratings, right? They're scared of the government, and number two, they're scared of losing ratings. And this is where, or readership, right? And this is where I think more, increasingly the television media has become more and more visible. More shared, videos are shared, small clips are shared, and although I would still believe that the influential news is still pushed by some newspapers and newspaper opinion is still more, still has more space amongst those with influence, those with power, newsmakers, but television makes a huge difference to mass opinion, to mass public discourse in general. And if one looks at it, one wonders why is this television media, which was so aggressive towards the end of UPA, right? Appeared to be robust, attacking the UP on every scam, commonwealth, 2G, coal, taking up the issue of, you know, pushing Anna Hazare, the anti-corruption movement. How did it overnight become a complete, you know, extension of the government's PR machinery? And I would say, as I said, two things, it all stands for one thing, lack of money, lack of revenue. Now, if I take a regular news channel, Prashant, a basic small Hindi news channel, it costs at least about 80 to 100 crore rupees to run that channel. Out of that, 30 to 50 crore, depending on how much a channel is willing to spend, and this annually, has to be spent on distribution, which is just to be able to reach a household, to be able to be seen on the TV set. Among them, cable networks have to be paid, carriage fees, you have to pay Durdarshan. The government of India has something called Freedish, which is very popular in rural India and small towns, and you have to pay a huge amount of money to renew a contract every year, to be put on the Freedish. DTH operators ask for money, so if you look at it, you need 30 to 50 crore. Until before you've shot a single frame of any news, then you have salaries, you have production costs, you have establishment costs, you have Surya... I mean, you know what the costs are, because you yourself are part of a news organization, like that, but here's the issue. Most news organizations spend very little on news gathering. If they're spending 100 crore every year, I don't think they spend more than 2 to 3 crore on actual news production, actual news gathering itself. And you would say that what is news gathering cost? Well, news gathering cost is sending reporters out to remote places to collect information, and that involves travel, that involves paying for a hotel closest to that village or small town, paying DA. You know, these are expenses, one has to cover. If you have to send a reporter now to the US to cover US elections, it's a huge expense. Many channels avoid it, right? And you want to send someone to Ladakh, it's a huge expense. You want to post someone in a small town for a long time, it's a huge expense, no one wants to carry it. So therefore it is amazing that if we even look at it as a product, as a business, the product itself, right, which is news, real expenditure or recurring strategies, excluding salaries is 2 to 3% of the total cost. So now if we look at it as to how much is being paid by viewers, right? If I take a newspaper, Times of India or in a Bharat Times or anything like that, anything or an Indian Express or Hindu, anywhere between three to eight rupees, you have to pay per day per copy, right? That works out to between 90 to 220, 240 odd rupees per month, per newspaper. But each newspaper costs to produce about 15, 16 rupees, each copy, right? So on each newspaper, between 50 to 80% discount is being given by the producer of that newspaper. So obviously they have to depend entirely for the revenues on advertisers because readers are not paying even 30, 40% of the total cost of that newspaper. So compare that to a news channel. Let's take something like an NDTV247, which is a paid channel. I think on an average per month, you have to pay three and a half rupees for it, right? And three and a half rupees is virtually nothing. If I take another channel where I used to work, NDTV India, right? The Hindi channel. On Tata Sky, you'll have to pay about one rupee 18 paisa per month for it, right? So imagine that even if you go and have in a sweet shop, Chole Bhature and a Lassi, you'll probably spend 100 bucks. But to get your news, you're not even willing to pay one rupee 18 paisa, which is why people often take what free channels and don't pay for a news channel, even one rupee 20 paisa in a month. So this is the first part. Subscribers do not pay when they probably can pay. They don't pay because they actually not privileging news. It's easy to say that all these news channels are terrible and look what they're showing. But if you're not willing to pay even 100 rupees for it, then what do you expect? Now let's come to the question of ratings, right? Obviously, ratings is important. Why is it important? Because as I said that 95 to 96% of our news channels revenues actually come from ratings. And without that, they will not stay afloat. Now look at what the problem is with ratings. If you look at it across the world, both in newspaper readership and in news channels, in newspaper readership tabloid press has many times the circulation of readership than serious newspapers. So things would say UFO landed on this man's garden, right? It's going to be read 10, 20 times more than a hard news story in a newspaper. That is across the world. This is not new. If we look at entertainment channels, let's just compare ratings of entertainment channels here Prashant. Look at Hindi entertainment. The number one channel last week was Star Utsav. And if I compare the number one Hindi news channel, which is Archda, which has a pan India reach. And I'm just going to look at what is called impressions, which is one part of the ratings process. Star Utsav has four and a half times the impressions in BAK, which is the Ratings Calculating Organization. Then Archda, the number four and a half times. If I compare English news channels to English movies, English movies have more viewership than English entertainment channels. Republic TV, which is the number one English news channel, I mean, it depends obviously if you want to call it news, but it's technically categorized as news. So Republic TV's impressions is one fifth of that of Star movies, one fifth. So an English news channel gets one fifth or 20% of the impressions that a movie channel gets. So what is the temptation? The temptation is going to be how do I get ratings? The best way to get ratings is to essentially make it entertainment, to make it sensational, salacious, things that people will watch. And again, I don't blame viewers because you know what happens is that you come home, you worked hard and someone tells you that farmers are dying, you're going to feel bad, you're going to watch it for 30 seconds and then you're going to switch to a channel which is like Sushant Singh Rajput was killed, right? We want an answer. Pakistan needs to be bombed, we have shown China and two people are shouting at each other, abusing each other. That is entertaining, that is entertaining to a lot of people. It is part of the overall system of gossip and chat that you would have after dinner. So that is the temptation, that is the extension of, and that is why the media is where it is in terms of ratings. Of course, then there comes to the question why is it so pro-government? Because without doubt, governments have huge power. It depends on whether they can exercise it. If it's a powerful government like we have right now, then it can very easily get advertisers to stop advertising on a channel. It can stop your distribution, it can tell cable operators to switch off your channel every now and then. It can put on fake IT rates, it can put false cases on you. It can threaten, advertisers start feeling that should we advertise on this channel which questions the government on server because we might get in trouble. So these are very easy ways to actually control, control the media if the government wants to because our laws actually enable the government. The cable and satellite laws enable the government to do that. Therefore, if there's a strong government, media channels, media networks are always going to be scared. Finally, there is of course the issue of who owns these networks. Given that networks are increasingly being owned by big business or entities which have other businesses as well, then you understand that their main aim is to make money. And to make money, they don't want to be on the wrong side. If you run a big news channel but you also are a telecom and a petrochemical giant, you're gonna think twice about taking on the government. If you own several newspapers but you also sell cement or you have a power company and media is only one part of your business, what are you gonna use it for? Big business or business actually wants the media to be used as a lobbying agency. So they're not going to really spend money on the news or journalists. So it is not really a question of the government controlling media and media doing this. It is essentially a catch-22 situation where lack of money forces media companies to do it and then they sell out to big business. Right, absolutely. And would you differentiate particularly between say the media in India and those in other countries? Of course, we have the Fox News Network of course in the US, we've had the Murdoch Empire, which is what do you call it, specialized in some of the trends you were talking about. Not only are there any characteristics that will be in their specifics so to speak because it does also look like the sheer number of channels moving rightwards is quite unprecedented. I think it's the difference essentially probably is in the checks and balances available. Now, Fox News of course tapped again, ultimately it's an issue of ratings across the world. If you do not get viewers, you're not going to follow a trend. So Fox News very clearly wanted to get into that Bible belt, a bit of redneck, the angst against the liberals and the Wall Street against big government and it tapped into that and the entire Fox News experiment was based on that. Of course, it's very clever now how the entire thing is now blamed on the president of Fox News and Murdoch claims that he was running, you know, they couldn't control him. But there's a new mythology being made because he's dead but that was part of the process of tapping into system. And of course, there was a captive right wing viewership which Fox tapped into CNN could not do that. And Fox also invented these things by which you could, so therefore I think Indian channels are essentially modeled on Fox. It is most Indian channels are modeled on Fox. Fox brought in the idea of chat of, so the US has something called talk radio which is extremely opinionated, often right wing and a lot of Fox anchors like Sean Hannity actually come from the talk radio space. They got Rush Limbaugh in, who was an advisor to I think Reagan, Nixon, various Republicans. And so the entire system actually is modeled on Fox across the world. In Europe on the other hand, especially in England where there is a significant amount of public funded television, there is some kind of a central centrist position. I know the BBC did take a very objectionable, I would say stance vis-a-vis the Labour Party. And when it push comes to shove, they do move to the right, but there is a bit of a, they stay right off center rather than being this extreme right. And that is because it is publicly funded and it does not have to really worry about ratings. The moment you have to worry about ratings, then news cannot be news. It's very simple because, as one says that, I think I was reading somewhere, pornographic websites has much more traffic than any other website put together. So people watch it, they don't admit they watch it. So I'm saying that this, the question is often important things, and news is one of the things that important things don't have that many takers, but it has to be funded. And the public needs to fund it in some way or the other. Otherwise it's not going to exist. And otherwise you cannot expect media to be in any way working as a bulwark of even Bush or democracy. By that I mean even representing different interests within the frame of a capitalist system. Because if capitalists completely take it over, it is almost as if they are manning the system directly. So that is, it's an extreme form where we exist right now. Of course, I don't believe that the media is ever democratic in that sense. After all, if you look at it, Norm Chomsky, I think wrote manufacturing of consent, sometimes in the 80s, early 80s. So it's now what, almost 40 years since then. So this is nothing new. And finally if you, I would suggest that our viewers go to a website called fair.org. I'm sure Prashant you're aware of it. Fairness in, I think I've forgotten what I stands for, fairness in something and reporting. I think it's fair.org. It documents all the way in which consent was created by the American media. It's worth going to and seeing and it's an eye-opener of sorts. In the way in which media across the way world has batted for the powerful across the years. But in India, it's an extreme situation right now. Absolutely extreme. And only viewers can stop it from happening. Thank you so much Arindy for talking to us. Thank you Prashant. That's all we have time for today. We'll be back on Monday with major news developments from the country. Until then, keep watching NewsClick.