News channels have become ‘Altertainment’ channels: Madhavan Narayanan

During the lockdown period, News channels grew by leaps and bounds, registering huge spike in viewership as the nation stayed glued or news and developments in the COVID-19 situation. Today, News channels no longer convey just news. Are the days of unbiased and impartial media are over? What should one make out of the Government’s decision to regulate digital news media and OTT? In this podcast with Mrigashira, Madhavan Narayanan, Senior Editor, Writer, Mentor, Consultant, and Commentator speaks to Radha Radhakrishnan on these issues. Excerpts from the interview.

Listen to the podcast here: https://www.digitales.co.in/industry-insights/mrigashira-podcast/madhavan-narayanan-on-how-digitalization-has-revolutionized-mediacontent-creation-consumption-and-dissemination

News channels no longer convey just news and don’t stay away from taking chances. What has changed in the last 5 years?

Let’s go back 40 years to understand why and how things changed. There was a time in the 1980s when you had newspapers giving you the news, from news agencies and their own reporters. In the 90s, TV news channels started breaking news and you could see before you waited for the newspaper the next day.

But the Internet changed all that. First, there was a website, and then there was social media. Now it has come to a point where it is not just social media, there are also notifications. Somebody very wisely put it at a conference I had attended, that you no longer find news. News finds you. Okay, so when news finds you, what does this do to people? We also have this saying that formerly people were known as audience. Today, they are a participative crowd. Therefore, the perishability of even the most important news is so high that good old newspapers and television must reinvent completely. So, the news channels have in effect become event channels and opinion channels. And if I may say so, ‘altertainment channels’ or alternative entertainment channels.

It is like WWF wrestling, which is called entertainment wrestling. It’s not counted as a sport. But people love it. There is some psychological element to it. From a media point of view, it is entertainment and agenda setting events. Especially with the Twitter hashtags being available, you can set the agenda and get aligned with political ideology.

In effect, TV channels have moved from being watchdogs to being a backing show…

Let me bring in a technology and economic angle to this. Mass media becomes a mass media when it acquires the mass. Due to prohibitive cost of technology, big capital, prime real estate, need for education to read a paper, etc., print media was not necessarily mass. All that is gone. Now, you can now sit in a corner of Amravati and run a TV channel. Digital technologies have dramatically lowered the cost of entry. I have 200,000 plus followers on Twitter and my follower count is more than the circulation of some of the newspapers in this country!

The other thing is that affordability has also gone down. India now has 750 million Internet connections and it is about two-third of this country’s population. This means that the technology has become pervasive and the mindset for intellectual quality, or lack of it, is going down. A quote from Richard Feynman says, ‘Be careful when you follow the masses. Sometimes the M is silent.’ I call it the ‘mediocr-ization’ of the news discourse.

Fake News and the propagandists who were earlier forced to use advertising and to some extent PR now have a direct access to people through social media and it sells. Propagandists, PR people, mainstream journalists, political parties, spokespersons and general activists, all are coming together on the same social media platform to shout whatever they want to. So, news as we knew it has been decimated. It is just a mimicry now. Readers and consumers want this. One market research showed us that right wing audiences want affirmation and the liberals want information. If you belong to a certain political dispensation, you’re not really looking for news. I use the analogy of wrestling. People don’t want inflammation. They want a catharsis.

There is a recent move by the government to regulate digital news media platforms and OTTs. How do you see this panning out?

In a democracy, which promises free speech and freedom of the media, the Government is part of the problem and it cannot govern the problem. So, if the media is close to the ruling party, and if the ruling party is promoting fake news, it begs the question as to how can you trust the government? And the other thing is that media is an independent institution and supposed to be equidistant from everybody. As a watchdog, it is supposed to speak truth to power. How can you speak truth to power when power tries to regulate you? Then it is not regulation. It is control.

Having said, is there a case for regulation? I would say, yes. The media discourse needs to be in some way, controlled, managed or eliminated. And, and the best way to do that is to regulate it in some manner. But who’s going to regulate it is the question. Today, we do have fact checking websites. Government’s decision to keep it under the ministry’s control is not the right thing. Maybe they should talk to the judiciary. We know that self-regulation either has its limits or has already failed.

One needs to consider what are the laws that will govern fake news? How will you distinguish between an independent media that is essentially digital? If we regulate new media into the realm of regulation, we run into another problem? YouTube is one of the biggest sources of fake news, if you ask me. It is born on YouTube and travels on WhatsApp. So, how do control these? If there is regulation, it should be based on guidelines which have a clear purpose, it should have a clear understanding of what are the laws that it is trying to implement. And it should have a structure that is trustworthy and truly independent.

(Mirgashira is a podcast for Indian PR and Communication professionals anchored by Radha Radhakrishnan. To listen to all episodes visit https://www.digitales.co.in/industry-insights/mrigashira-podcast/)