Media & the construction of reality

Written By Unknown on Minggu, 11 Mei 2014 | 21.16

Santosh Desai
11 May 2014, 07:40 PM IST

The most exhausting campaign In India's history has ended and it is difficult not to feel grateful. If being a spectator to the elections was so tiring, one can only imagine how the political parties involved must be feeling.  And yet, for all the volume of coverage that we have seen, the overwhelming focus has been somewhat narrow. It is not that no attempt has been made to try and represent the vast and complex electoral reality that surrounds us, indeed most media outlets have sent out reporters across the country in an attempt to gauge the mood of the people. And yet, even those forays into the hinterland have been interested in the issues that are driven strongly by what the media has chosen to focus on. In many ways, the election narrative we see before us is less a case of a complex, diverse and highly layered reality gradually resolving itself into a recognizable pattern under the careful scrutiny of a discerning media and more a case of an imagined pattern gradually becoming or appearing to take the form of a compliant reality.

Structurally, as this column has argued in the past, media tends to centralize issues for it needs a common national currency of protagonists and references to deal in. It looks to convert complexity into binaries , issues into people and perspectives into disagreements. It narrativises reality by threading together discrete events into a coherent storyline. It favours developments that can create a compelling narrative regardless of how important those might be. It hunts for symbols and metaphors, preferring those over more substantive dialogue. It frames reality by amplifying the exceptional rather than the normal, looking for words and actions that disrupt rather than confirm. And underlying all of this was a tonality of relentless aggression, with the media placing itself in a role of the prime inquisitor, and in turn begetting practised defenders from each party, skilled at the art of blanket stonewalling.

In doing all of these, it has in these elections, manoeuvred the debate into a certain direction of its choosing. That is not to suggest that all of media is a monolithic and coherent whole acting in concert to a pre-determined script but merely that in the way the media business is constructed and even without the deployment of any conscious ideological  vested interest, media tries to construct a convenient and productive reality for itself. Even when it overtly supports no party or individual, in the manner in which it conducts itself, it ends up playing a significant role in that very process. in some ways, this has always been the case, but this time around it appears that the media construction of reality, which in the past has been very fallible indeed, might actually play a role in what happens on May16.

All of these characteristics have been visible during this campaign. The early focus on Narendra Modi, Arvind Kejriwal and Rahul Gandhi, well before the latter even signalled his interest in being a protagonist, pushed the campaign into its current Presidential format, something that is not a true representation of the fragmented nature of India's electoral reality. The extreme close-up focus on key anointed individuals has continued throughout the campaign. If in the early days it was Kejriwal who received coverage disproportionate to the electoral significance of his venture, more recently it was Priyanka Gandhi who became the frenzied cynosure of the media eye. Given the fact that she campaigned only in the two 'family' constituencies, the amount of attention she garnered made little sense. In Kejriwal's case at least, his attempt was a brave act of trying to create a new kind of political grammar, but in Priyanka's Gandhi's case, it was a return to the infatuation that the media has had with the pseudo-royalty aura exuded by the family. Then we had the relentless focus on Varanasi. Granted, the Varanasi story had an irresistible mix of real life consequences and metaphoric allusions that made for compelling storytelling, but for all its philosophical and poetic heft,  it wasn't really a symbol that compressed a larger truth about the current elections.

But as audiences get unified in their aspirations, and as traditional considerations governing voting giving way to more pressing pre-occupations about progress and growth, the reality as presented by media starts taking on a life of its own. In some way, everything on media becomes a form of advertising; media reality begins to impose itself on the real thing. the responsibility of media to be subservient to ground reality reduces as media becomes a form of reality rather than a way to represent it. it is possible that these elections will mark a moment when the role of media changed fundamentally in character to being a shaper of reality rather than a mere observer.

A testimony to the more active participant's role played by media is the fact it receives so much attention from its audiences. The roles are partially reversed; it is now media that comes under greater scrutiny than the politicians. It a recognition of the power of media that so many snide references are made to it. All major leaders in their interviews to media have spent some time decrying the role played by it.

The more fragmented and diffused the Indian political reality, the more difficult it is for media to succeed in its attempt to centralise the debate. As it turns out, these elections have lent themselves to the kind of framing that is suited to media representations. Media's probable success in helping shape the electoral narrative this time might turn out to be its greatest challenges as the need to control its output will become even more critical.


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