Election Beat – Indian Media and the 2024 General Election

In this episode, former Chief Election Commissioner, S. Y. Quraishi, says that transparency is the key to public trust for an institution like the Election Commission of India. Even though he refused to comment on the conduct of the Election Commission now, he says he would never have kept political parties waiting for a meeting. He would have held as many press conferences as required to clarify any issues. “Transparency is the key”, he says, adding that he would be available 24x7 for anyone who wanted to meet him. He talks about how the media was once both a watchdog over the ECI as well as “an ally — our eyes and our ears”. He says it was a “complicated” relationship but it worked well. Quraishi also speaks in detail about his certainty that Electronic Voting Machines could not be tampered with, but noted that suspicion has persisted in the public mind because of the absence of communication and transparency.

In this episode, Pratik Sinha, founder of AltNews, the fact-checking and media watchdog website, says the amount of misinformation spread directly by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections is much more than in 2019 or 2014.  He also says that misinformation peaks during periods when “narratives have to be managed”, giving the example of how blaming the Tablighi Jamaat for spreading COVID was a way to deflect attention from people walking thousands of kilometres during the lockdown to return to their villages. However, now the spread of misinformation seems to be at a constant high, instead of the coming in waves, he adds. Pratik Sinha says while AltNews may not have succeeded in reaching as large an audience as possible due to financial challenges and the restrictions placed by social media companies, their real success lies in making fact-checks a part of popular and media vocabulary. He describes AltNews as a journalistic organisation, and says he does not see a conflict between journalism and activism. When media organisations do not fact check fake speeches by the Prime Minister, and report them verbatim, they are not doing their job, he says.

In this episode of Election Beat, senior broadcaster Pervaiz Alam, who began his career at All India Radio and worked at BBC World Service for several years, says the coverage of the 2024 elections by YouTubers is a point of interest in the western media's coverage of the elections. Pervaiz Alam also speaks about the restructuring of the BBC after the “tax survey” carried out by Indian Income Tax authorities soon after it released the two-part documentary India: The Modi Question, which was eventually banned from screening in the country by the BJP. He says that since that incident, the British public broadcaster is no longer as harsh in its criticism of Prime MInister Narendra Modi or the government. He also recalls a time when the Indian state broadcaster All India Radio and the BBC collaborated to cover the 1993 assembly elections in five states — something that he cannot fathom happening now given the political atmosphere.

In this episode, K G Suresh, Vice-Chancellor of the National University of Journalism and Communication in Bhopal, and formerly PTI's chief political correspondent who’s also worked at Asian News Network, says television journalism in India has been a "big disappointment". He asks what credibility can studio analyses of the ground situation have without reportage from the ground. TV audiences, he says, are now choosing channels according to their ideology, and TV journalists are choosing sides to keep their audiences. Meanwhile, serious audiences are moving to online media, to You Tubers and to some extent, even newspapers.  K G Suresh says for most students who wish to take up journalism, it is just a source of livelihood, with issues of media freedom not being of priority for them. But he also speaks of students who are passionate enough to travel on their own to Punjab or Manipur to find out why people are protesting.

In this episode, Umesh Upadhyay, a former head of TV18 and author of Western Media Narratives On India: From Gandhi to Modi, claims that international coverage of India is biased and is used by western governments to further their own foreign policy goals in the country. He says foreign media’s coverage of India’s situation and circumstances during COVID was “very biased”, even to the extent of being “racist”. He also speaks about how the merging of the dual roles of anchor and editor in one person has been responsible for the downfall of television news. He says that it has resulted in all resources of the channel being focussed on primetime half-hour shows hosted by this anchor-cum-editor, and there’s no one to question them.