Medium rare: The changing face of election coverage in India

In a spacious office at the Press Trust of India in New Delhi, editor-in-chief Vijay Joshi stands over his desk, phone in hand. “Just check if there is anybody who will be able to explain how the Creed machine works,” he asks, brows furrowed.

He distractedly watches the news from a TV mounted on the wall. The screen is cluttered with the frenetic visuals of poll metrics, and it cuts to a reporter travelling alongside a political candidate on a campaign truck. Even as the camera shakily focuses on the reporter, he turns away from the frame to film his surroundings with a phone, talking animatedly and occasionally addressing the camera.

“The Creed machine,” Joshi repeats. “ Yaar , Creed machine — jo teleprinter ke saath aate thhe (which used to come with the teleprinter). Is there anybody on the [editorial] desk who remembers operating this? No? All right then.” He hangs up with a sigh and stares at two mechanical contraptions placed in a wooden frame next to his desk.

A year ago, Joshi had pulled out the machines from a pile of trash in the PTI building basement. It was a reperforator and a tape printer — manufactured by British company Creed & Company — which together made up the teleprinter, a device that was once the cutting-edge of telecommunication technology.

Old hand: The teleprinter at the PTI office

It was a sobering sight — the teleprinter suspended in time and memory like a museum curiosity, in a modern newsroom full of computers and smartphones. For reporters of an older generation, to “go to the post office and cut a tape on the teleprinter” was the equivalent of “hey, just mailed you the copy”.

Technology rarely escapes its own obsolescence.

Joshi describes what he can recall about the working of the reperforator and the tape printer, the “ungodly racket” the teleprinter made as it spewed the incoming stories filed by reporters from around the country. The TV screen now shows a reporter engaged in a debate with a studio audience, who appear to be shouting in unison at the camera. It’s hard not to see how some things — few though they may be — remain the same and, yet, how far the process of news-gathering has advanced over the last four decades.

This is especially stark during elections, when political parties are relying on media outlets to reach an increasingly participative public through effective signalling and perception management. Campaigning and road shows play second fiddle to a media blitzkrieg.

The fourth phase of polling for the 16th Lok Sabha elections is around the corner, and with three more rounds to go, speculation is rife about the impending results. Reporters rush to file election copies from their phones, send story updates over WhatsApp, and break stories on Twitter.

As another World Press Freedom Day — May 3 — approaches us, it begs the thought — if the medium has changed, what happened to the message? And what about the messenger?

Remembering the rush

At the crowded, noisy dining area of the Indian Women’s Press Corps (IWPC) in Delhi, journalist John Dayal speaks to BL ink in low, strained tones, occasionally wincing in pain — he has three broken ribs from a recent fall. But as he recalls his days of covering elections, his face lights up.

“I’m well past 70 but you can see how excited I am to talk about the mad rush of those days,” he says. “It wasn’t just about going out to cover an electoral constituency — it was about everything around it as well, the day of voting, the day of counting, the pregnant pause in between.”

Referring to reporters of his vintage as “word artists”, he discusses the challenges of conveying the complexities of Indian elections solely through words: “You couldn’t just say ‘Watch’ the way it is done now”. That necessitated a dexterity with language, an increasingly uncommon virtue in contemporary newsrooms, he feels. “A friend of mine was covering the former UP chief minister HN Bahuguna’s election campaign in (what is now) Uttarakhand, and the first line of his copy is still stuck in my head for the sheer poetry of it: ‘Bahuguna walks tall among the Deodars’,” Dayal recalls.

Writing for various publications, including The Patriot , it is Dayal’s 50th year in journalism. The first election he covered was at the municipal level in 1973-74. Since then, he maintains, the way people vote has not changed. “Local, personal issues about identity, education and water supply will still take precedence over macro issues such as terrorism and national security,” he says.

What about the way reporters approach elections? “So much has changed,” he replies with a sigh.

A different time

Media observer Geeta Seshu, who began her journalism career in the ’80s and covered elections in the Konkan region, vividly recalls the brief she would receive before setting out to cover an election. “You were assigned a constituency and you studied it in as minute detail as possible. You had to know it like the back of your hand,” she says. “We had to make three or four trips to visit all the main candidates, find out the entire electoral history of the region, know the socio-economic background of the population. It was very systematic.”

Editors would instruct reporters to write their stories with rich descriptive detail, to make readers feel as though they were travelling with the reporter. “Nothing was instant, nothing would happen till the results were released. And there were only so many times you could cover a politician’s speech, so we focused on how people were reacting to the candidate,” says a retired editor who wishes not to be named.

What mattered were the details and context to give the reader a reasonably whole picture of an ongoing election. Such detailed reporting was possible despite, or perhaps because of, the lack of technological accoutrements. But then again, it was a different time in journalism.

Timing is everything

In the preface to her bookThe Marigold Story: Indira Gandhi & Others , journalist Kumkum Chadha describes how journalists would account for “post office time” when reporting from remote areas: “Without a post office, even a scoop was meaningless because that was the only way to get the stories across.”

Dayal agrees. Getting the story was not a problem, getting it out was.

Back then: A 1969 photo showing how election news was received in the Telephone Exchange from Delhi every half-an-hour by teleprinter

Until the ’80s, teleprinters were available only in post offices of bigger districts, which made it difficult for reporters covering rural areas. “You had to keep three cards with you — the press card, the telegraph card and your telephone card,” he recalls. “You would go to the post office with your story and a quarter of rum. There you would type out your story on the teleprinter, or an operator would do it for you.” But then there were invariably other reporters, too, anxiously waiting their turn. “That is where the rum came in,” he explains.

Editors were focused on the full context of the story — not its immediacy. Vipul Mudgal, the director of Common Cause, a Delhi-based NGO, recalls that as a reporter for India Today in Chandigarh in the ’80s, he often sent a copy of his article and the accompanying photo roll to the head office through the pilot of a Delhi-bound flight. “Journalists were respected those days,” Mudgal says with a laugh. “So they’d be willing to take it with them when told I was an India Today correspondent.”

When Mudgal was covering Amritsar, he would send his copy to Delhi through the TTE (travelling ticket examiner) of a night train. The TTE would drop off the package at a bookshop in Delhi railway station, and someone from the magazine would pick it up. “This was actually one of the faster ways you could send out your story,” he says.“You could use telephones, as well — book a trunk call or ‘lightning call’, as we called them — and dictate your stories to the sub-editor in the office, but these calls were frightfully expensive,” he says. This meant that the queue for the teleprinter grew longer, especially for certain operators known for their competence.

Mudgal remembers one of them — Paijwant Singh in Amritsar. “He was a strapping, good-natured Sardar. We used to call him ‘Page-One’ Singh, because he would type out our copies on the teleprinter with minimal mistakes,” Mudgal says. “I would go to the post office well in advance just to find out when Paijwant would be on duty. I’d land up exactly then. You had to make your friends in the business.” Many erstwhile teleprinter operators are still friends with him on Facebook, he says.

Fax machines came in towards the late ’80s, along with early versions of laptops — clunky machines that threatened to break down ever so often in the middle of transmitting a copy. There were also the pagers, which “you could strap on to your belt and give a huge inferiority complex to anyone who didn’t have one,” Mudgal says.

Despite the galloping advancements in technology, the greatest asset for a reporter still remains “the power of observation and memory,” says Dayal. “Technology was meant to refresh the reporter’s memory, not replace it.”

New entrants, new disruptions

At the Nizamuddin residence of BBC’s former Delhi bureau chief Mark Tully, ornate paintings adorn the walls. An affectionate Labrador insists on being a part of the conversation but promptly falls asleep. Tully, now retired, narrates his memories of seeing The Times and The Guardian foreign correspondents get into a fight over a teleprinter. Yet it wasn’t a time of intense competition as it is now.

“We were a select company because there were far fewer of us,” says Tully. “Now I feel that most reporters have to act like news agency reporters, in the sense that they have to get the story out first. This increases competition between journalists tremendously.” Such competition is largely attributed to TV news, rather than print, since a significant chunk of advertising revenue is directed to television outlets.

After a modest entry in September 1959, television in India under the monopoly of the state-owned Doordarshan channel remained a staid, bureaucratic affair till the ’90s. Post liberalisation, foreign players such as media baron Rupert Murdoch’s Star Network entered the fray, followed by domestic players such as Zee and Sun. The number of privately owned channels exploded, currently pegged at 904, of which over 350 are news channels.

Prime mover: Prannoy Roy, co-founder of NDTV, set the stage for the contemporary Indian TV newsroom

When Prannoy and Radhika Roy set up NDTV in 1988 and, a year later, tracked former PM Rajiv Gandhi’s defeat in the general elections, the stage was set for the contemporary Indian TV newsroom. This new face of election coverage was a marked, and lasting, departure from the mere announcement of results that formed election reporting on TV until then.

The nosedive

Not all the changes were for the good, though. In journalist Sandeep Bhushan’s recently released bookThe Indian Newsroom: Studio, Stars and the Unmaking of Reporters , there is a telling remark that captures today’s changed face of TV news coverage from what it was in its heyday. “Even as the clout and reach of the media has increased over the years, it has become more susceptible to the government of the day,” he writes. The imperative in contemporary newsrooms is not to inform, but to incite viewers to participate in a cycle of escalating outrage.

In an earlier interview to this reporter, Prannoy Roy noted the partisan nature of media today and how it was a “disturbing trend” for democracy.

Seshu says, “Where are the reporters on the ground? If they do exist, they don’t get the resources to cover the field in detail. The picture that the public gets is really about the big trends, as opposed to the local issues that ordinary people face. This is affecting the way elections are perceived.”

This, she adds, has led to giving priority to flashpoint situations — where the impetus is to be the first one to break a story, or comment on an ongoing debate. “This leads to marginal voices getting further marginalised.”

Moreover, social media outlets such as Twitter and WhatsApp have increased the speed and reach of information dissemination, often bypassing traditional media outlets. “The entire narrative is being dictated on social media,” PTI’s Joshi says. Seshu agrees that elections yield a lot of stories from social media reports from citizens and a veritable army of freelancers. “But I’m not sure if we have only generated noise or actually made an impact on the minds of the voters,” she says.

Discussing the drop in quality in much of the reporting today, Tully recalls how when he filed a story, it didn’t go on air immediately. “It would be passed on to many competent sub-editors, who would then check the copy for errors and improve it. I see much less sub-editing today. Perhaps it’s because reporters are under pressure to get the story out as quickly as possible.”

Looking back at his three-decade-long career with the BBC, he remarks that journalists are far more insecure now. He touches on the extensive retrenchments in both print and digital newsrooms across the country. This, in turn, has undermined the confidence of journalists, many believe.

Election coverage, in particular, has been impacted by a few other factors too. “There always has been a certain amount of corruption in the media. Journalists have been paid to write along particular lines, to praise a party or trash a party or write against a candidate. This is as old as journalism itself,” says journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta. “The large-scale expenditure under the table — what we call paid news, wherein what appears to be a news item is actually a paid-for advertisement — has picked up from the ’90s. It’s become an epidemic especially over the last three general elections.”

In 2009-10, Guha Thakurta was part of a sub-committee of the Press Council of India that investigated the rampant instances of paid news in Indian journalism. He cites the example of a regional publication that carried on the same page two reports, with one predicting a landslide win for one candidate and the other projecting the opponent as the likely winner. “It’s alarming how money has corrupted the way elections are covered,” Guha Thakurta says.

Misinformation is power

NDTV’s senior executive editor Ravish Kumar, who helms the popular segments Prime Time and Ravish Ki Report , is categorical about the steep decline in the quality of election coverage. “There is no reporting in television now... very few reporters are even sent out into the field,” he says. “Debates and talk shows have taken over the space of field reporting.”

He compares the current coverage of constituencies by TV crews to a circus going from town to town. “Just look at the camera movement — they move in such a way as to indicate some great earthquake is happening. Then the anchor adds to the chaos by mouthing the same propaganda that he would say in the studio. He won’t let anyone finish their sentence, and then he’ll snatch their mic away because he presumes he already knows what they’re going to say. The anchor is always snatching the mic.”

He rues the lack of independence in media outlets and their reliance on the powers-that-be for survival. “Television can’t afford to be anti-establishment. So it survives by manufacturing biases, influencing perception and reproducing this cycle ad nauseam. Reporting has been replaced by debate, so that media outlets can play it safe.”

Looking back

Back at the IWPC, Dayal flips through a small notebook — his “trusty companion of many years”. Scribbles and notations surround dates, names and phone numbers. What was the best part about those days when there was no email and when teleprinters were in post offices and not in showcases?

“We were paid peanuts, but we worked with giants,” he says.

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