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The Ad Mask
Sach Kanwal Singh
 In the last few
elections in Punjab, be it Assembly or Lok Sabha polls, a new
phenomenon had come up that showed to what extent the media has
abdicated not just its role and authority, responsibility and
privileges but even its ethics and shame. A large number of
newspapers simply sold their pages to political parties and
candidates. For a few days, the fig leaf of shame was in the shape
of “ADVT” written in extra-fine print at the bottom of such pages,
but gradually that too was dropped.
It was routine
for readers to be perplexed by news of candidate A on the left hand
side page, each item predicting that he is going to win with
thumping majority, while the opposite page would feature pictures
and news items about his opponent candidate B, proving beyond doubt
that he was a winner with miles of head start.
Soon, the cat
was out of the bag. The Akali Dal and the Congress both raced to buy
pages. That left reporters with hardly any chance to exploit any
politician, and even lesser chance to get an objective, independent
news report into the newspaper.
There simply was
no space. “Sold Out,” the news editors would yell out routinely in
news rooms.
Now, the
perfidious practice has spread all over the country.
As more and
more, and heavier, moneybags enter the political arena, the
electoral politics in India has become a financial orgy where media
plays not footsie but Monopoly with the moneybags. Powerful
newspapers and television channels are falling for it too, as the
amounts being quoted are astronomical. And TRPs are not even asked
for.
In Punjab, some
candidates had started complaining of “extortion” not by reporters,
not by editors but by the proprietors. Senior journalists and
editors seemed embarrassed at what the managements were doing, but
soon they adjusted to the new reality. Media escaped recession thus.
Their poll-period take is estimated to be in hundreds of millions of
rupees. They sold not advertising space but guaranteed packaging
where candidate’s propaganda was published as “news.”
Now, the term
“coverage package” has entered media lexicon. Issues be damned. No
money, no news. The Hindu newspaper, one of the few honorable
exceptions, reported on this (April 7, 2009) during the Lok Sabha
elections, where sections of the media were offering low-end
“coverage packages” for Rs.15 lakh to Rs.20 lakh.
P. Sainath,
perhaps one of the last voices of sanity left in the media in India,
wrote that none of this is new but what was new was the scale and
the brazenness.
“The game has
moved from the petty personal corruption of a handful of journalists
to the structured extraction of huge sums of money by media
outfits.” He narrated how a rebel candidate in western Maharashtra
calculated that an editor from that region spent Rs.1 crore on just
local media alone and won, defeating the official candidate of his
party.
In Punjab, Ajit,
Punjabi Tribune, Jagbani and gradually even the English language
newspapers have been making oodles of money through the instrument
of “Special Supplements”. Since the newspaper goes to every single
reader, there is tangible proof of what is passing for journalism in
the form of supplements.
For the
newspaper, these are acting like vitamin supplements. All that these
“Special Supplements” contain are advertisements, advertisements and
some more advertisements, and usually a mugshot picture of a
journalist who has gathered these advertisements and has become
richer by more than his half yearly salary as commission.
Paid for news.
You write about yourself, we publish. Better still, let our people
write it for you even better than what you would write about
yourself. It also lends at times a curious appearance to some
newspaper pages. For instance, you could find several “news items”
of exactly the same size in the same newspaper on the same day,
saying very different things. Because they were really paid-for
propaganda or disguised advertisements.
But then, the
editors and the proprietors can join hands to defeat anyone
preaching ethics. A few days ago, in the presence of Prakash Singh
Badal at a book release ceremony at Chandigarh’s Tagore Theatre,
BJP’s L K Advani brought up the subject. It was a serious issue, and
the media was supposed to be embarrassed.
You know what
happened? Newspapers published from Jalandhar which had sold pages
wholesale gave ample space to Advani’s diatribe in the media and
then wrote editorials hailing his courage in raising the all
important issue of ethics in media. One was left wondering if the
BJP had paid for the news space.
4
November 2009
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