How Media Used SSR Case to Distract Viewers

A day after India registered the highest single-day rise of nearly 79,000 Covid-19 cases, in a week that saw an unprecedented spike in total cases, growth rate and spread to rural and semi-rural areas, days after data showed that a staggering 19 million salaried formal economy jobs had been gutted during the pandemic-induced lockdown and surveys showed that nearly half of rural Indians—many returned migrant workers—had to skip a meal a day, when the economic horizon was dark with signs of severe economic contraction, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to Indians about toys, desi gaming apps, dog breeds, and nutrition.

During his monthly Mann Ki Baat monologue last Sunday, Modi told Indians about how Onam was becoming an international festival, lauded dogs in armed forces and police, advised teachers on how to do their job, detailed the importance of toys urging indigenous toy-makers to remember Atmanirbhar Bharat, and in a cruel joke, held forth on September being a nutrition month calling for “people’s participation to make the month a people’s movement”.

What would the millions going hungry feel? This question most likely did not disturb him. There was not a word on Covid-19 or on the economic crisis. Modi painted a dystopian world and most of the mainstream media reported it with a straight face, without asking questions or raising red flags, as it took a tiny break from its current obsession with the Sushant Singh Rajput suicide case, itself an issue of peripheral relevance—if that—to millions of citizens.

The death by alleged suicide of the Bollywood actor on 14 June sparked off a season of voyeurism in the media that is anything but journalism. Led by television channels, the media has traversed into areas best left to pulp fiction or C-grade films—Rajput’s alleged mental illnesses, details of his medical prescriptions with daily dosages, his probable state of mind in the days leading to the suicide, the sustained campaign to divest Mumbai Police of the case and hand it to the Central Bureau of Investigation (whose track record on actor Jia Khan’s suicide is hardly comforting), interviews with his psychiatrists, alleged siphoning off of his money by friends, role of girlfriend or former girlfriend Rhea Chakraborty in his death, her alleged nexus with drug dealers and customers in Bollywood, her supposed takeover of his life and decisions, private texts between her and friends leading to vilification of a young woman in an extreme media trial.

In some of the most bizarre “reporting” done, media crews humiliated and harangued security guards in Chakraborty's apartment complex and put a food delivery man on the mat for bringing an order to her house. As if such hysteria was not enough, star anchors eschewed the fundamentals of journalism to raise irrelevant, scurrilous and defamatory questions on air in their relentless effort to build the narrative that she was responsible for the suicide, commissioning forensic auditors to “independently” examine evidence, organising 3D views of Rajput’s bedroom complete with height of bed from floor and height of ceiling fan from bed.

The bizarre quotient was turned up using a two-word chat of Chakraborty. “Imma bounce”, she apparently texted to her friend; a channel went “live” with the words splashed on its electronic wall with the highly-excited anchor “informing” us that it had to do with a bounced cheque linked to her. In millennial lingo, it only means “I’m leaving”. When an editor or two broke away from such hysteria to allow Chakraborty to tell her side of the story, they were slandered for letting a “murderer” on air. Along the way, the Enforcement Directorate and Narcotics Control Bureau too got involved in the case. The trail led to, among others, film-maker Sandeep Singh who had produced a film on Modi last year and was seen in multiple photos with BJP leaders including Home Minister Amit Shah.

That Rajput’s father filed a case in Bihar against Chakraborty for abetting the suicide may have triggered off a spate of stories on her, but no canon of journalism explains the utterly irresponsible, unethical and insensitive discourse around the suicide with Chakraborty as the main villain. She may or may not be guilty but it is not for a frenetic sensationalist media—or social media warriors and paid trolls—to decide. The media learned no lessons from the abominable coverage and faux trial it conducted in the Aarushi Talwar murder case more than a decade ago.

The relentless focus on Rajput’s alleged suicide was the noise; as always, it buried or dismissed the news that should have been foregrounded.

One, the pandemic and its furious march given the breath-taking rise in numbers infected and dead, and worse, its spread into rural India. As many as 584 districts classified as “entirely rural” or “mostly rural” had more than half the total number of cases in the country, according to numbers parsed by Hindustan Times last week. Who remembers that the Prime Minister had declared on 25 March that “this war the whole country is fighting against Corona will take 21 days”?

Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan has consistently denied community transmission which flies in the face of available data and anecdotal information. He still believes the country is “more than adequately prepared” for the crisis. He and Modi should have been put on the mat for mishandling India’s worst health crisis in a century and allowing it to turn into a livelihood and humanitarian crises. Not one of the channels quick to pillory Chakraborty dared to question, let alone criticise, the Modi government for its utter failure to manage the pandemic. It's not that the media does not know how to grill people; it's just that a moderately famous actor, her security guard and delivery man are far easier to grill than the PM.

Two, the economic impact of the pandemic-induced lockdown that has gone on for over five months means that 19 million formal economy jobs were lost in addition to millions of jobs in the informal economy which employs a majority of Indians, according to a Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) report. More than four million Indians below the age of 30 have lost their jobs or work during the lockdown, as per an Asian Development Bank estimate. This comes on the back of the job losses after the ill-advised demonetisation in 2016 November.

The sustained shrinking of jobs and falling labour force participation , exacerbated by a stringent lockdown which did not help control the pandemic, should have been the subject of heated panel discussions. But that would have meant training the spotlight on the villain or villains of this narrative, asking questions of those in high public office, making the buck stop at the very top. It must seem a daunting task for most media.

That more Indians have been going to bed hungry each night during the lockdown is a no-brainer. Statistics are hard to come by given the lack of a standard database of migrant workers. The Solicitor General of India told the Supreme Court that 97 lakh migrants had returned home from cities, migration scholars have put this figure at more than 2 crore. As many as 41% of the migrants who had returned home had to make do with only one meal a day or go hungry occasionally, showed a survey by Gaon Connection. More than 92% of rural poor households still face difficulty in accessing food, the same survey finds. Putting this on top of news lists or at the centre of news debates would again lead the media to question those in power— key role of journalism in a democracy that most media seem to have abdicated or forgotten.

Three, if suicides or mental health problems exercised the conscience of newsroom leaders and anchors, there should have been a stronger focus on both issues. A casual parsing of available data shows there were nearly 300 suicides during the lockdown primarily from financial distress and fear of Covid-19. The media reported these but their collective impact did not burn the screens as Rajput’s alleged suicide did. As many as 826 farmers battling bad crops and indebtedness committed suicide from January to May only in Maharashtra. Tens of students have died by suicide in these months. Both sets of suicides left the media cold.

A @mediacloud analysis of 130 news sources by Anushka Shah, researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), showed last week that farmers’ suicides merited less than 50 stories a day from January to July this year while Rajput’s case got more than 500 stories a day when he passed away. In July and most of August, these numbered between 500 and 750 a day. Anecdotal and sparse data on mental health shows that there has been an uptick—some estimate it at around 20%—in the number of Indians seeking professional help; there are likely many more that do not. The media did not worry.

Four, India’s border with China still has flare-ups. There were fresh skirmishes at Pangong Tso. Prime Minister Modi pretends it’s a video game that jugaadu Indians will somehow win. The media that once turned a humiliating search of an Indian diplomat at an international airport into an indictment of Dr Manmohan Singh’s government has happily played along with Modi in largely disregarding the Chinese aggression.

Five, a day after Modi’s Mann Ki Baat, its online version was heavily “disliked” to his party’s embarrassment, possibly by students enraged with the government’s reluctance to reschedule JEE-NEET exams. Then came news of the country’s GDP for the second quarter contracting by a shocking 23.9%. This is the measurable part of the economy; the unmeasured part will only make it worse. That night, except an editor-anchor or two, most still chose to focus on Rajput’s alleged suicide and Chakraborty’s alleged involvement in it.

As an issue to distract from real news, it has worked. The media that has perfected the art of distraction should recall legendary journalist-documentary maker John Pilger’s memorable words: “It’s not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it.”

The author is a senior Mumbai-based journalist and columnist and writes on politics, cities, media and gender. The views are personal.