Mass media: Disconnected from mass reality

A high profile fashion week makes news, but starvation deaths do not. And, paradoxically, to make the headlines, the vulnerable sections of society have got to die.

Noted journalist P. SAINATH examines how the media swing like a pendulum in times of crisis.

MEDIA hearts bleed best in May. That is when the hard luck stories get done. Maybe because it is the month when editors and journalists feel uncomfortable. It is hot.

It is hotter still for landless labourers. But at least they can migrate to all sorts of places in search of work. (Sadly, their travel agents do not seem to be able to get them bookings for Kulu Manali.) "Sunlight-based industries" work in this season. Those in Kalahandi or Bolangir can go to Vizianagaram or Hyderabad to make bricks. Others can go to work in building construction or painting. You can earn money making ropes. The heat is miserable. It is far worse around the furnace of a brick kiln. But you can earn something.

Once the rains are in, much of the crisis in agriculture is assumed to be over. After all, was not scarcity of water the problem? (Except, of course, for the floods.) Hundreds of millions of Indians think "the problem" goes far beyond these issues. But their views do not count for much.

Right now, if all the agricultural labour unions in the country held a press conference in Delhi, they would be lucky if half a dozen journalists turn up. If they marched in lakhs down the streets of the capital, they might make a photograph and two columns. Never mind that agricultural labour is the most vulnerable section of the Indian poor. Or that they - meaning tens of millions of human beings - are at the receiving end of a man-made crisis. It does not make news. Not much.

Contrast that with the saturation coverage given to the Lakme Fashion Week in Mumbai early this month. According to the organisers, there were just 250 buyers at the grand show. But there was a large turnout of journalists. No less than 220 of them. Almost one for every buyer. In some major newspapers, they produced more copy in a week than the ongoing crisis in the countryside has in the past few months. On television, spin-off stories from the fashion week are still continuing, featured every night by many channels. Long after the 250-buyer event is over.

Anyone tried counting the number of journalists assigned to cover the mess in agriculture?

In the countryside, it is from August to mid-October, between sowing and harvest in many States, that the survival games for the poor enter their sharpest phase. This year, that season unfolds in the midst of a serious crisis. And it is anyway the period when landless labourers have nothing to do and nowhere to go. There is no construction work and you cannot make bricks either. It is raining, there is no work at home and little to be found elsewhere. No food-for-work or other employment programmes for the poor in this period. Those peak in May, when the media is still looking.

The moral outrage in the national media over the deaths in Orissa and elsewhere is good. It means the triumph of elite insensitivity has not been total. But it misses at least three things. One, the deaths are just a symptom of a much larger crisis. For every person who dies, there are millions of others who live on, but in acute hunger. It seems, though, that only deaths (in significant number) make a story. For every farmer committing suicide in Anantapur in Andhra Pradesh, there are thousands more who do not but whose conditions are as miserable. However, to make the headlines, they have got to die.

Meanwhile, there is something bizarre about watching a moving story on deaths in Chattisgarh while a corner of the TV screen offers solace in the Sensex being up by nine points. Maybe the peasants died cheering.

Sadly, the moving stories seem to trigger the "charity" mode in the media. Why cannot the Government distribute free grain to the poor? It would not have to if it did not destroy their livelihoods in the first place. And if it respected their rights and entitlements as citizens. And could see why the Public Distribution System (PDS) is important. Those mountains of grain are not huge "surpluses" but the result of destroying the purchasing power of the poor. People seek justice, not pity.

Second, the media miss, or do not want to see, the link between the distress in the countryside and the policies of the past decade. Policies so lustily applauded by the same media.

Sections of the regional press have done a better job than their "national" counterparts. Local Telugu journalists have looked at the distress in Anantapur more soberly. They have seen the policy roots of the tragedy there. The little newsletters of western Orissa have sharply portrayed the plight of returning migrants. Some migrants would not claim the bodies of family members who die on the train home for fear of railway police harassment. These fighting little papers showed how this year's extra heavy migrations led to crashing wages in the destination cities. They too could see the link between policy and consequence. Mostly, such journals are owned by maverick individuals, not by corporate chains.

In the national media, too, both print and television have seen a few exceptional and outstanding reports from individual journalists. But that is exactly what they were. Exceptions. The media as an institution cared little. And such reporters are often sneered at as being "activists".

It needed President K. R. Narayanan, yet again, to draw attention to a basic fact in his Independence Day speech. What is happening is more than an aberration. It calls for a big rethink on the country's present direction.

After months, the notion of mountains of grain versus oceans of hunger has finally begun to sink in. The idea of rotting grain going to the rats has now invited media criticism and rightly so. Better late than never. Few though, have commented on the Government's attempts to dump grain in the sea or export it to other nations, even as hunger rises at home. Fewer still mentioned that at least two countries rejected the first shipments of grain that India tried exporting to them. Both dismissed it as "substandard". Almost none make the link between policy and the disaster.

Both the press and television have reported the Supreme Court's scathing remarks on State Governments giving absurd and outrageous replies to a petition on the right to food. The Himachal Pradesh Government asserts there are no destitutes in that State. Some of the others deny a crisis. It is good the media reports this at all. But if the State Governments dared to be so brazen in denying a crisis, it is because they feel they can rely on the media's own blindness to it. They know they can mostly get away with it. How much better if those scathing remarks had come from the press before the Court made them. Unlike the courts, the media have the resources and the personnel to get out into the countryside and do their own investigations.

The important thing is not just starvation, but also more widespread hunger and distress. In the past three years, distress suicides have been reported from Punjab and Haryana. But they have not got even the kind of space or treatment they would have had they been in Kalahandi. That would break the stereotype.

In early 1997, the Wall Street Journal gave more space to the farmers' suicides in A.P. than any major newspaper did here. No Indian magazine placed those events on its cover. How could we? That would mean undermining Chandrababu Naidu. Darling of a media that views information technology with a lot of awe, but little understanding, Naidu has learned well the shibboleths he needs to mouth from time to time to the media cooing in line.

The third thing the national media misses is a scrutiny of its own priorities. Can the media help with solutions in this time of rising hunger and distress? Very little, so long as we peddle the illusion that it has nothing to do with the policies of the last 10 years. Beating up on "official callousness" and "administrative neglect" sounds radical but does not tell the story. "Poor implemention" is another herring that swims on and on. Quite a bit of the distress in recent times is the result of a rather aggressive implementation of policy. The destruction of the PDS. The conscious closure of rural credit. Putting health care even further out of the reach of the poor than it was before. The cutting of spending on the poor. These are policies. Not natural calamities.

Powerful sections of the media that once played cheerleaders to Enron and Associated Electronic Services (AES) speak mildly now about the havoc those deals have wreaked. But they are still all for ending imagined "subsidies" in power to poor farmers. There has been no look at the damage caused by corrupt and wrong-headed "reforms" in this sector to rural India.

It was around 1992 that hunger-related deaths began to resurface in independent India in a big way, Sure, there had been some incidents post-1947. But it was after 1991 that the crunch set in. It is in the last decade that these kinds of deaths have occurred with such frequency. And on such a scale. That too, in some of the richest States. In 1992, tens of thousands of poor peasants from Thane, mainly adivasis, marched into Mumbai in protest. The press mostly came up with the staple photograph and inevitable caption: "Farmers Demand Remunerative prices".

Actually, those farmers were saying something else. They were saying the devastation inflicted on the PDS was hurting them. That the collapsing health system was endangering their lives. That they could not afford the new costs being inflicted on them. That too, when spending on the poor was being slashed. Ironically, they ended their march close by to the Stock Exchange. But we were too busy looking up at the Sensex which had crossed 2,000 - a heady high in those primitive days - to notice the protesters on the ground.

Two weeks later, 29 children died of hunger-related problems in Thane. The press duly flayed the Government. A chief minister did the mandatory helicopter trip to the place. "Erring officials" were "dealt with" in the headlines and the show went on. With the press attacking "implementation" but cheering the very policies that had triggered the deaths. Then, too, our journalism came after deaths. Had we cared at all to listen to the protesters, some of those children - and many others who have died since - might have been alive.

We still have a chance to get out there and listen. And maybe save something more than a fashion week.

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