Few scholars have studied the Indian communications and media landscape the way Robin Jeffrey has. His books, India’s Newspaper Revolution  (2000) and Cell Phone Nation (2013) present a lucid exploration of the subjects. Most recently, Jeffrey has edited, with Ronojoy Sen, Media at Work in China and India:Discovering and Dissecting (Sage India) , which scans the complexities of the mass media in the two uniquely different geographies. In an e-interview with BusinessLine , Jeffrey discusses the past, present and future of the media in India and China. Excerpts:

‘Freedom’ is a key word used to differentiate the media in India from that of China. How true is this?

The most striking feature is that a printed newspaper in China can be read by nearly every Chinese everywhere: nearly all of China is literate, and Chinese are literate in a single written language. In India, the last census showed a quarter of the country — 300 million people — could not read or write. And Indian print media are conducted in 11 different scripts and close to two dozen recognised languages.

As for ‘freedom’, there are members of the Chinese Communist Party in every media outlet in China. That does not rule out hot discussions in newsrooms about whether stories should be published or broadcast, but it does mean that The Party can send its messages into every media organisation, and most of the time they will be adhered to.

That doesn’t happen in India. But at the same time, proprietors make policy and ride hobby-horses. There was one newspaper owner who was said by one of his former employees to have “measured human progress in terms of... the column inches his flagship paper provided to the cow.”

How has economic liberalisation transformed the Indian media?

Freed-up capitalism financed a rapid acceleration of media expansion. In 1991, there were 24 million dailies on the street every morning throughout India; in 2001, 54 million; and by 2011, 160 million. Those are the figures of the Registrar of Newspapers, and one can quibble about them, but their trend is clear and dramatic. Television is similar: from about 30 million television households in 1991 to more than 160 million TV households today. Advertising revenues provided media proprietors with the incentives to expand, and a growing middle class devoured entertainment.

But there are concerns of advertising overriding journalism…

Advertising pays the bills, as it has for major media outlets since the 18th century. The most common name for a newspaper in 18th-century America had “advertiser” in the title. Advertisers want to believe that they are investing their money in places that will be widely seen. Media outlets try to show that they have viewers, readers, followers. The cliché has a lot going for it: media are mirrors, not windows. Today, with social media, everyone can mirror themselves to the world.

Media ownership in India is starting to show signs of concentration of late. How will this influence news?

India is insulated by the fact that it has so many languages. For newspapers, it has not been easy to break into a new language area, though now it is happening more frequently. Concentration of ownership is one thing. Convergence of technologies is another. Together, they make it possible in future for a few groups to control big news organisations and entertainment producers and the telecommunications networks that increasingly carry content to users (and allow users to disseminate their own content through things like Facebook, Twitter and basic SMS).

If one or two providers own the fibreoptic cable and great chunks of Radio Frequency bandwidth, plus production houses, they will have an overpowering interest in deciding who uses their pathways and for what purposes.

But as big a challenge to diversity, quality and intrepid news gathering is corporatisation, where news and production houses come to be owned by shareholders, often a few great institutional investors. Their goal is a high annual return to their shareholders and an increasing share price.

With family ownership, however eccentric, proprietors may be prepared to accept a small return on their investment if, for example, their media outfits give lots of column inches to, say, cows or other proprietorial hobby-horses.

Is the media losing its diversity today?

First, I’d say media “are”, not media “is.” It’s not such a pettifogging distinction as it might seem. Media are diverse. They come in different forms — our voices are a medium; printing provides a medium; so does Radio Frequency. So media in some form are available to vast numbers of people. You get a very mixed chorus of voices — and some crazy mixed-up kids, not to mention some pretty unattractive adults — using one medium or another. Today social media and the telecom revolution make it much easier for wackos from all over the world to do and say outrageous things in their struggle for notoriety.

In “old media,” there have always been people who peddled particular lines. Business journalists used to be among the most closely watched by conscientious editors, because a business story could make or lose people money.

Fifty years ago when I was a very young sports writer on a small daily in western Canada, the jocular advice in the newsroom was: “If you can eat it or drink it, it ain’t a bribe.” We shouldn’t be surprised if some people who use media use it to please the powerful and promote their prejudices.

How do vernacular media fare in this chaos?

In 2012, there were more than 800 television channels broadcasting in every major Indian language. Oriya newspapers were selling 600,000 copies a day; Punjabi, 800,000; Marathi 5.5 million; Telugu 3.9 million; Tamil 3.9 million. The expansion of the mobile internet and cheap smartphones is going to make Indian languages even more vigorous because oral and visual material are more attractive and accessible to large audiences that are not highly literate. India benefits from having English available as a readily available choice; but media in the major languages — the ones that give access to big markets — seem to me to be surviving pretty well.

Will more FDI help the media sector get better?

It’s disappointing that Indian media are not clamouring to become global — to want to buy into media businesses in, say, Australia or the UK or Canada or the US. There is no respected global Indian media voice. Why isn’t there an Indian equivalent of, say, the Guardian , New York Times , Economist or BBC or CCTV or Agence France-Presse?

In television, foreign ownership has already happened. Star India is a wholly owned subsidiary of 21st Century Fox. As media technologies converge, it will become more difficult to prevent “foreign media” from being present in India. The Guardian last month reported that mobile advertising expenditure in the UK would exceed print and television ad spend this year. When large numbers of Indian advertisers decide mobile advertising is the place to be, media producers outside India will produce content for India, and it will be difficult to keep them out.

Until then, “old media” will try to keep foreign “old media” out. They don’t want more competition in an already competitive market. And there are legitimate cultural fears. If Canadians agonise about what will happen to “Canadian identity” if US media have unrestricted entry to Canada, then it’s legitimate for Indians to worry too.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW