 Hello and let's talk about the media and the Sushant Singh Rajput case. Now this is something we haven't talked much about on this show, while so much of the media has been focusing on it. It's been strange to see the issues that have been raised by many TV channels while covering the tragic death of this young actor. This has become more about the death of just one man. It's become about the fear and the anger and the resentment in Indian society, the hatred for a particular kind of woman. It's become some kind of melting pot of our collective insecurities and hatreds. The TV channels have done a great job of tapping into this, of building those fires, and there are a number of people, actors, those in power, who benefit from this coverage. After all, when day after day this demand for justice is screamed out from studios, what happens to justice for those who have died from the epidemic? What happens to justice for those who have lost their jobs, who have been reduced to starvation due to lack of any action by the government? But there is another reason the TV channels and media in general is covering this issue at this pace and tone. It has to do with the economy of the media itself. We often talk about TV channels being obsessed with ratings, but what exactly does that mean? How do ratings influence coverage? And how did we end up where we are today? We talked to journalists Anandio Chakravarty on some of these issues. Thank you Anandio for joining us. So we've talked about the issue of the media and the economics of the media before, but this discussion now has a completely new dynamic, especially considering the developments of the past month, the past couple of weeks. And there is obviously some amount of shock among a lot of Indians there. Of course, you've seen massive media campaigns of this sort before, sometimes during elections, obviously Pakistan comes into the picture, there's a huge hue and cry. But this seems to be something fairly unique. It's almost one of those defining moments, so to speak. So do you see it as an inevitable, you've written about this as well, but there is also an inevitable reason according to you why this happened. So could you talk a bit about this? So I would say that the point is that somewhere down the line, essentially over the last at least 15 years from 2005, it started with Hindi channels. There's been a sensationalization, tabloidization of television news. And this is largely because across the world, entertainment is watched more than news. People spend more time watching entertainment. Even you and I probably, if we sit down to watch a detective movie, we'll end up watching it for two hours without knowing. So even without knowing, people watch entertainment much more than they watch news. So the point is that when you think of ratings, what are ratings? People think ratings means that the number of people watching. So they say that 20% of India is watching, let's say one channel like Republic or Archduck or whatever. Now that is actually not true at all because first of all, ratings is essentially not the number of people watching, but it is number of people into the time they're spending. So let's say in one hour, one day, you can have 1440 minutes of television if you don't sleep at all. People across India, the world can watch 1440 minutes of television. So that is the maximum that any single person can watch. So if we have 10 people in one market for a television channel, that means about 14,400 minutes of television can be watched by those 10 people if they don't sleep at all. Ratings is actually not the number of people watching, but out of that 14,400, 10 into 1440, how much was taken by any individual channel? So if out of those 10 people, two watched for 10 hours non-stop, that is 600 minutes into two, 1200 minutes, just one channel, and 10 people watched 10 minutes of another channel, one has got 1200 minutes, the other has had 100 minutes. You get it? So if you look at market share, the channel watched by two people as 12 times the market share, then the channel watched by the entire lot of people. So news, typically people come in and watch for a certain amount. Earlier they used to watch the headlines, maybe one bulletin a day, and then people started switching to entertainment. So news channels started pushing most of their content between 856 to 905 because that was the time they would get their viewers and people would then move to the entertainment channel. The answer to that, of course, news channels found was that you basically make your channel news entertaining. You cover entertainment, you sensationalize, you raise passions, you trigger people's opinions and biases and they'll watch you. And people discovered that if you get people to shout at each other, if you get an anchor who will be very opinionated, they either hate it or they love that content. And this was discovered actually in the US by Fox News. Fox News made this system across and that was important to them. Now this is the kind of, and these are the channels which got ratings. People who were showing news did not get ratings. It's very simple. So even if 110 out of 10 people are watching news for 10 minutes and saying, I go to this channel for news, without knowing two out of them were spending much more time watching passionate debates about nothing. People shouting at each other. And in fact, if you look at it, most people tend to watch that kind of stuff and not news. They find news boring nowadays. Now this is the point. This was inevitably coming. But what has happened is that there was still what one can call Lakshman Rekha within which people work, within which news channels work. That was constantly being tested. So if you look at a Z news or any of these channels, they were always bordering on making comment, bordering on things which were alleged with others, accused it of concocting, of fake news. So there was always this thing that was happening. Now what we see is that when the lockdown came, people were at home. They were worried about COVID-19. So news channel viewership actually shot up. It went up by two to three times. So Hindi news went up by 300%. And English news went up by 250%. Not went up by, but two. So if it was 100 at one point, right after the first four weeks of the lockdown, it went to 250. Hindi news, if it was 100 before the lockdown, it went to 300 right after the lockdown. After that, things started settling down. Since people were at home, they were watching more television. And of course, television news was still getting about 25 to 50% more viewership than it had earlier. This is by the time, you know, after about two odd months of lockdown had happened. This is when, around the same time, because we have a recession going on in the economy, channel revenues completely dried out, right? So estimates suggest that English channels lost about 50 to 60% of their revenues. Hindi channels lost 25 to 30% of their revenues. This is stemming from the fact that advertisers were not giving advertisers. Yes, as simple as that. They had no reason to advertise. Like what's the point of advertising a car when no one's going to go out and buy a car? What's the point of advertising a fridge? So the only people who were making money, we know at this time were FMCG companies, fast-moving consumer goods, biscuits, you know, stuff like that, which people were buying to stock up. Now, traditionally these, all let's say soap and detergent and stuff, which people were buying and people were stocking up. Now, traditionally what happens is that these channels, these companies do not advertise on news channels generally, because they go to the wider market channels, which are general entertainment channels, like Star Plus, Star Utsav, Colors and all these things. That is where they advertise. And news channels have a heavy male skew. So even if you look at the ratings itself, you'll find that the universe, let's say the overall universe of viewers is 50% men, 50% women. When it comes to news channels, it will move to about 60% men, 40% women. And as industry watches say, that even there, the decision to change the channel is actually the main man. So advertisers tend to put, tend to look for male consumers, right? On news channels, men. Which is why many news channels, if you look at it, I don't know if our viewers have anything, have ever noticed ratings. They might have looked at it and now this channel has the maximum ratings. They'll see there's a, the fine print says, often says in 22 plus AB male. Now normally people wouldn't even understand what that means. That means it is only in the universe of men above the age of 22, who are in the top two socioeconomic categories, which is A and B. Then comes CDE. Most channels don't care about CDE because no one advertises for CDE, right? Only the bulk channels, these are the ones which look at everything. Most news channels actually only look at the 15 plus age category. Often do not look at the DE category at all, at best ABC. Usually in the Hindi space, it's what is called HSMR, Hindi speaking market. So news content is so clearly defined towards ratings and the people it's targeting. And when we say why are they not raising these issues? Why are they not talking about the poor? They're not going to make money by talking about the poor, right? So what's the point of our talking about the poor? Because their revenues are directed by advertisers. Now there is a say rule in marketing and sales that you have to put a message across, I mean, they say seven times, six to seven times to a person before they make a decision to buy it, right? And I mean, our own experience might tell us that that we see an ad and say, oh, this is an interesting thing. I should probably buy it and then we forget about it. We see it again and they say, oh, I forgot, I want to buy this. And then a phone call comes and we don't order it on Amazon. And then the third or fourth time when we see it, and it's automatic garlic peeler, which I would like to buy, but it's not available. Something like that. And then we say, oh, now I am going to buy this before I move on to doing something else. So you need to constantly put that message out, which is why advertisers don't only care about the number of viewers. They also care about how long a channel can hold someone. So if you have a lot of viewers, but you're only holding them on for 10 minutes, that means that you don't go into the second ad break. You don't go into the third ad break. The advertiser needs that third, fourth ad break over a period of time to be able to put that message into the consumers. The longer the average time being spent by a viewer, the more they're likely to want to advertise on your channel. Of course, they want a certain amount of base. Which explains the 20 talking heads in talk shows as well. Yeah, exactly. Which is why talk shows don't take their first break early, because they want to expand their time span. Sometimes they take a quick break and they charge premium for that one minute break because viewers might stay on in that one minute. I'm told that some top editors of news channels, the news channel I worked for, NDTV and News Network, there was a strict Chinese wall. We hardly ever spoke to the sales people. As an editor, I spoke to them once in a while. They could never tell us that this is what you should show. And we could never tell them, why don't you get this kind of money from this ad or something like that. But I've heard of editors actually going in meeting advertisers with ratings for their breaks and saying, I have higher ratings than that channel during my breaks. Because that is what matters to you. Who cares about what I was showing you anywhere else? So what I'm saying is that that is what the television news market always was. But now COVID-19 increased ratings but reduced revenues. There's a dramatic situation. You should be able to charge more because your revenues have gone up. That's what usually happens like in events which push up viewership, like elections. News channels make a lot of money during elections because that is when viewership goes up. They charge premium during counting day. If you want to appear in the first hour, you'll have to pay this much. So these are the ways in which they make money at high peaks. Now this is a time when people are watching more and there's no one to advertise. So how do you do it? So essentially there's something called a spot rate, a number of eyeballs you're reaching per spot. So let's say that a channel is getting 1,000 rupees for 10 seconds. But it reaches 1,000 people. So how much is it? It is 1 rupee per person that it's charging. Another channel which reaches 2,000 people would essentially be able to charge 1,800 rupees. Because even then it's actually giving a discount per person. Because it is essentially now charging you only 90% per person. Here is the situation where you are providing many, many more viewers to the advertiser. But effectively they're not willing to pay you more for your adage. They're saying reduce your spot rate. So we have a situation where top channels are giving a discount on their ad rates and delivering more on the number of viewers. So that is the situation. Now suddenly by April-May the volumes began dropping. So as I said the volumes had gone up to 250-300% by May-June, those volumes started dropping. Which is why you'll see that despite, I mean there's no COVID coverage. I mean not the negative coverage of COVID but there's not even any praises of the government which you would normally expect from the news media. Saying that we are doing extremely well. The opposition is lying. Raul Gandhi is a liar. Party politics being paid back. You would have expected that. You would have expected a lot of propaganda about China, about the border tensions. You would have expected daily debates on how India has taught China a lesson which Nehru could not teach. Nehru got defeated. Modi is one. You would have expected this to go on every day. It did not happen. It is interesting. Bangalore riots, two days, I think India Today group tried to, one of these channels, I read a piece in News Minute, which said that one of the channels moved away from Sushant Singh Rajput coverage to the riots because they would love to cover the Bangalore riots. Because that is perfectly up their alley. But then you should drop. They didn't see any response, so they quietly dropped it. So these were all sitting duck stories. Now you picked up a perfect story which you've turned into a who done it, into a murder supposedly. Somehow you've turned it into a murder and you have seen very good ratings response. So what do you do? You keep pushing it. You keep pushing it. You keep pushing the envelope till you actually increase the viewership to people who have never in their lives watched news. So if you ask them who is the minister for anything, they'll probably not be able to tell you. They'll not have any idea about any other news, but they are interested in news which is not only related to Bollywood. It's a who done it. Is it a suicide? Is it a murder? It is also a great place for grievous politics to play out where you think that here is this child. Frankly, I didn't know about Sushant Singh Rajput till he killed before he died. I vaguely knew his face, but suddenly he has become after death one of the greatest talents maybe he was and I'm not a aficionado. So I don't know. People I know are Gobindar and Salman Khan. The great South Indian cinema, but I didn't know much about Sushant Singh Rajput, but people seem to have attached their own sense of being not being treated to know their merit, not being seen how there is an elite which is not allowing the merit, the meritorious to rise, how good people are being forced. And because of this, he had to kill himself initially. That was the story. Then it was transferred on to this modern woman who goes to bars and stuff like that. And she has kind of done jadu-tona and take it. So all these things have coalesced and come into this grievance chip on the shoulder of politics which has been played beautifully by certain channels. Republic TV, for instance, has gone, I think, from number five probably, or it was not in the number five star, probably just number five to number one last week in the Hindi news space Republic Bharat. In English it was always number one. And this week, the ratings which have come out yesterday, it has actually beaten Ajatak, the market leader for the last 20 years, by a massive margin. The margin is huge. It's not a small thing. I think I saw the ratings numbers yesterday. I think Ajatak has dropped by about 18% compared to last week when it had already dropped compared to Republic Bharat. So you can see, and I was watching, I was looking at, I think, a story or something, a tweet on one of the Manisha Pandey of New Zealand where she said that it did, Republic Bharat debates, I think in the last month or something like that. All its debates were essentially on Sushant Singh Rajput's about how Rhea needs to be arrested and, you know, I don't watch Republic Bharat. I've watched these clips, funny clips on social media. But it's a skill which it's kind of pushing the envelope and it is understanding what will sell. And, you know, unfortunately, maybe if the COVID recession hadn't happened, we wouldn't have seen this job. But we know where in national media had already gone. We call it Godi media. We call it, my friend Ravish coined the term Godi media. We have called it, you know, media which is only supports the government, media which speaks truth to opposition, not to power. So our speaks lies to opposition. I mean, one can see whatever. So it was bound to happen. It was moving that side and COVID-19 has only made, I don't think there's any space for recovery from it. I do not think that there is any way to recover from it. Because the entire model has now been finally reached its nadir or its zenith, whichever you want to say, of converting something into entertainment. And the state is essentially blessing you to do that. No one is going to stop you. And this is a perfect model for the next time. So whether it's zenith or the nadir is a question because there's always a next time where the envelope keeps getting pushed in terms of intrusion, in terms of the language reporting everything. Exactly. I don't think it can come back. It is not possible. I mean, I think that the point is that there were all these mainstream channels who were, who had moved completely away from news. They were doing ridiculous stuff, but still it looked like news. It looked like journalism to you from outside. I think they have met their match. So effectively, they were pushing the envelope and moving as far as they could. You know, like the live telecast of the microchip in the 2000 rupee note. I don't know if you've seen that about how after demonetization. Yeah. I think the viewers should go to YouTube and see how our reporters were standing there and talking about an embedded chip, which can be a satellite kit catch, even if it is, I think, dug and hidden. I mean, they were doing all this kind of stuff. Right? So you might have found it funny or ridiculous or sad, whatever, but those people stand beaten. They stand defeated today. They don't know because, you know, in a sense, Republic TV, Anand Goswami has no skin in the game when it comes to Hindi. No one cares about his being in Hindi. So he has no Hindi identity outside being Anand Goswami of English news. He can do anything he wants in the Hindi space. And the people who have developed a Hindi identity, they are today on the back. They have no idea how to deal with this. And I mean, someone else will come to do something even worse. Right? And that will sell. And that is when we'll see. And we can blame channels, but ultimately, you know, the idea of news is essentially a bourgeois idea. Right? It's something that has emerged with capitalism to believe that news is important. In a society which still has large non-capitalist spaces, non-market spaces, to imagine that people want news and know what news should be other than that they don't think that this is news is, I think, fooling ourselves because they believe this is news. They don't really differentiate necessarily between different kinds of news. So that's what it is. I'm probably painting a very pessimistic picture and I hope I'm wrong. But sadly, I know I'm not. Thank you so much, Arundhya, for talking to us. Thanks a lot. That's all we have time for today. We'll be back on Monday with more news from the country and the world. Until then, keep watching NewsClick.