#
There was a time when we all agreed on what the facts were.
#
We all got our news of the world from certain trusted sources.
#
We may have considered some of them biased but they were part of a broad consensus on
#
They all said the earth was round and we had no reason to believe otherwise.
#
Today though the media is fragmented and there is no consensus on the truth anymore.
#
The earth is round and it's also flat, cubical, rectangular and shaped like a lotus.
#
News today has become a game of supplying what people want to believe and we all live
#
in our own alternate realities.
#
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
#
Please welcome your host Amit Bhatma.
#
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
#
In today's episode I want to discuss the state of the media and my guest today is a man I
#
consider the sharpest media commentator in India, a veteran editor, legendary journalist
#
and my close friend Prem Panikkar.
#
I recorded this conversation with Prem on the sidelines of the Bangalore Literature
#
Festival a few weeks ago.
#
So without much further ado, here we go.
#
Hi Prem, welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
#
Thanks for having me on Amit.
#
You know I'm not being paid to say this.
#
Seen and the Unseen is my favorite podcast because there's a lot of issues that should
#
be looked at in depth and detail, particularly crucial now when the media has time for neither
#
depth nor detail and this is just about the only place you get it.
#
So thank you very much.
#
That's very kind of you to say that and you know I give the credit to all the guests I
#
get on the show who are usually people who are deep inside of the subjects and I can't
#
think of a better example of that than you.
#
Like today what I really want to talk about and something I've been both concerned deeply
#
about and saddened deeply by is the state of the media in India.
#
You know we've both been a part of media for a long time.
#
You've been a journalist since the early 90s and you've written a lot of piercing essays
#
about what is going wrong with us today.
#
So you know starting from what the media was like back when you started and what it has
#
What's your journey been like?
#
Well the thing is that back when I started which was 89 actually with the Indian Post
#
you had a very clear idea of what any and the caveat here is we're talking of the English
#
language media because the language media is a whole other animal altogether and probably
#
outside the scope of the time that we have.
#
You had a very clear sense of direction simply because you didn't have too many disruptors
#
that were constantly shifting the goalposts on you without your even knowing it.
#
I think the seminal moment in this entire thing was when the internet happened and even
#
back in the early days you were a part of this you know this when the internet first
#
came to India you basically had media organizations shoveling their stuff onto the net as almost
#
a hygiene element and you had very few standalone media houses that did not have a print or
#
television equivalent that you were part of was a highly niche product with a very loyal
#
The reader was a generalist and even then things were very clear.
#
You knew who you were speaking to.
#
You knew what your core competence was and you knew who your audience was.
#
What has happened now is that this explosion in multiple directions has diffused the landscape
#
to such an extent that the goalposts are no longer visible.
#
It's not even a question of shifting goalposts.
#
I think of the media and you know what the first thing that it feels like to me right
#
now is the climax of Ridley Scott's Thelma and Lewis.
#
You've got two people who for you know prompted by internal fault lines and external stresses
#
drive up a road knowing that it leads to a dead end to a cliff top and having got there
#
there's no place else to go you just put pedal to the metal and drive straight off the cliff
#
knowing what the ending is but you do it anyway.
#
So I'll ask you to then elaborate that when you say shifting goalposts can you specify
#
what you mean by that what were the goalposts back then and in what way have they been shifting
#
So think about the early days of the internet.
#
Think about Krikkenfor's core belief or one-line mission statement or think about Rediff which
#
The idea was very simply this that there is an entire audience connected audience outside
#
of India who have very little access to information on India and who want that information.
#
It is not just the Indians living abroad but also people in the US and elsewhere across
#
Europe and stuff like who were curious about the so-called new India that was emerging
#
and who had I mean the only option was you wait for the newspapers to be airlifted and
#
So your one-line mission statement was what is happening in India right here right now
#
It was a fact-based storytelling.
#
It looked at the major stories of the day.
#
It looked at why it was important and you just had to worry about informing people.
#
Even when the paradigm changed and the Indian audience started growing in numbers there
#
was still that comfort zone of all you told yourself was for the Indian audience you need
#
to take them beyond the papers that they read with their morning coffee and you need to
#
bring them up to speed on all that has happened so far and also look at yesterday's news and
#
elaborate give them context give them nuance and stuff like that.
#
These are goalposts that as journalists we are trained to identify and to meet.
#
What happened subsequently is as there was this initial efflorescence of sites coming
#
on to the web and it has a very low entry threshold.
#
At some point the excel jockeys came into the picture and what they started focusing
#
on was page views and unique users and you know all of that if you remember that sequence
#
initially we were all told to chase page views and we started gaming the system.
#
We both know how especially with the disgusting pagination that a lot of the sites had.
#
We took a PTI report which was about 300 words and split it into 10 slides.
#
We architected our pages in such a way that one page view was actually 10 different page
#
views because we loaded various elements separately.
#
That was another way that we game the system.
#
We started this whole slideshow business simply in order to garner page views and so we started
#
At no point did we step back and say wait why are we chasing these page views?
#
How is this going to translate either into journalistic sense or even into economic sense?
#
What are we going to do with the page views?
#
And if you're not improving the user experience but making it worse in the long run that cannot
#
So at some point we actually discovered that it wasn't working.
#
The readers were unhappy over the fact that they can see gaming when they you know experience
#
it and the advertisers said look I mean you guys are just generating page views.
#
It means nothing to us.
#
So then it became unique users.
#
How do we find audiences?
#
Now it's become time spent and every time we find that a metric that has been identified
#
by the number crunchers we chase it for an endless period of time and then we find that
#
it makes no sense whatsoever and then somebody comes up with this bright idea of chasing
#
And ultimately we have moved from being journalists to being Excel jockeys who our first job in
#
the morning literally and I know this from both the last days that I was in Rediff and
#
also after working in Yahoo.
#
The first thing I had to do was look at the numbers of the previous 24 hours and see did
#
Journalism is not about meeting targets it's about informing people and somehow we have
#
shifted from our core purpose the purpose for which we got into this profession the
#
purpose for which we are trained and we've gotten into something that A we don't know
#
how to do B we don't know why we're doing it and C we don't know what their end goal
#
Isn't that you know back in the day it was sort of different because the way the broadsheet
#
economy worked was that like if you got the Times of India every morning at home it just
#
came by itself it isn't that you had to attract the reader every day it was going to him you
#
had the reader he was a captive audience and equally everything was bundled together so
#
even if you read only the sports pages you're still getting the whole paper while today
#
what has happened is that you know a guy is not going to a website necessarily by default
#
often a lot of people consume news only through social media and following Facebook links
#
and Twitter links which therefore gain that much in importance and clickbait becomes important
#
how do you make someone click there and also you've sort of compartmentalized everything
#
down to the level of the individual article and that whole concept of a bundled offering
#
is really not there to that extent and I wouldn't even argue that's a bad thing in some ways
#
it's a good thing because it empowers readers it empowers producers of news but it also
#
changes the way journalism is done because it shifts the focus of the journalist from
#
just doing a consistent good job in creating a quality journalism to actually just trying
#
to get clicks which can result in going for the lowest common denominator correct but
#
to slightly disagree with your point about it's not necessarily a bad thing that the
#
bundling of news is no longer exists consider what is happening today somebody either because
#
he saw a link on social media or whatever clicks on a story which could be carried by
#
the Hindustan Times or Times of India or whatever it is he sees that story in isolation and
#
he promptly reacts to that story we get the usual stuff about this is biased this is slanted
#
this is done by a prostitute but we both worked in newspapers we know how we put a newspaper
#
together there is a cohesion from the news that we carry top of the page on the first
#
page all the way through to the op-ed pages there is a sequential thinking that goes into
#
the choices that we make about what we are carrying and stuff like so there is a context
#
to why we think this news is important there is an explanation of why this is important
#
here we're seeing as you as you pointed out we're seeing bits of news in isolation from
#
multiple sources there is no overall context you know I mean I've never worked in a broadsheet
#
newspaper and column so many of them but one of the things I've noted and correct me if
#
I'm wrong is that they work in silos anyways so yeah just don't communicate with each other
#
but what I also do remember from working in broadsheets and I did was that there was always
#
the editor and the managing editor who had the spreadsheet of the 26 I mean 24 or 28
#
or whatever number of pages it was and there was a constant filling in of these things
#
and a shuffling around of things as and you know how news happens as the day progresses
#
things the priorities change and there was constantly a track on how these shifting priorities
#
were impacting other sections of the paper there was a uniformity of thought now what
#
you have is an editorial newsroom where the emphasis is simply on we live in the age of
#
the internet we cannot afford to be to be seen as dated therefore something has to keep
#
going up every couple of minutes otherwise we look stagnant and we'll drive away the
#
audience and that is where you get the kind of batshit stuff like breaking news Rajnath
#
Singh to hold a press conference I mean the press conference may or may not lead to news
#
but the fact that he's going to address the media is hardly news forget about breaking
#
news and in a sense I'm just you know just thinking aloud here it's led from one kind
#
of tyranny to another earlier you had the tyranny of the news cycle where you know if
#
something broke today people would know about it only the next day and an opinion piece
#
would probably happen the day after that and so on and you were dependent on the news cycle
#
and internet publishing and especially putting the tools of publishing in the hands of anybody
#
which was a great thing in many ways enabled you to break past the tyranny of the news
#
cycle in the sense that you know when after the 2003 tsunami when I was going down the
#
coast of Tamil Nadu you know I was practically live blogging from there I didn't have to
#
wait to submit something to a paper I didn't have to write something which fit a particular
#
format of a 700 word piece or whatever but we move from that tyranny the tyranny of
#
the news cycle to the tyranny of the immediate where there is this hunger like you just said
#
of just getting things out there to just keep getting clips keep getting clicks you know
#
just yeah it's true and it has its good side which is that like you pointed out with your
#
blog during the tsunami or the kind of work that was done online and on social media during
#
the Chennai floods of a couple of years back or 26 11 if you want to go even further back
#
in time or even the Bombay cloud burst you know the kind of work that Peter Griffin did
#
for example our friend exactly what that permitted us to do is information that needed to get
#
to people got to them in time not the next day nobody had to wait for the next day to
#
find out which areas were stressed and what the problem was and stuff like but the problem
#
is that these kind of events that require immediacy and both detail and you know to
#
use say the favorite phrase of Gideon a mile wide and in steep coverage it was logical
#
that is what is required but here the tyranny really is that it is expected on a daily hourly
#
basis and there is nothing happening that demands it so you manufacture stuff just to
#
fill that need or that you know to feed the beast of immediacy boy falls into a well yeah
#
boy falls into a well boy fell into a well it's okay I mean Radnath Singh leaves home
#
to reach the press conferences a bit of a reach you know like I mean let's not and in
#
the process what we have done is we've undercut ourselves because we have trivialized news
#
to such an extent that the audience is pissed off and that is in turn translating or reflecting
#
back on us credibility is short to bits I mean if I were to write a piece saying that
#
Radnath Singh is going to hold a press conferences afternoon I wouldn't expect anybody to read
#
me much after that and also what happens is that when you sensationalize the trivial nothing
#
can be sensational anymore yeah you know we become numb and inured you see something someone
#
shouting on TV you don't pay attention because people are shouting on TV all the time correct
#
and also I mean a book that I know that you've read Boorstin talked about this in 1961 when
#
he talked in the book the image he talked about the fact that the media which desperately
#
needs events to play up has started being complicit in and now actively engaged in creating
#
pseudo events which was the phrase that he used for it simply in order to find stuff
#
to fill up its pages he was talking at a time when there was just cable television and print
#
and now you have the internet which is a far hungrier and far more gigantic beast so this
#
entire thing has escalated to a process where nobody in a media house starting with the
#
CEO all the way down to the trainee journalists who joined yesterday has any idea why we're
#
doing the things we're doing and what the end goal is and the economy of the media is
#
stressed we all know that we know we're heading for a disaster we don't know how to how to
#
just reverse the car and drive back down the cliff and would it then be fair to say that
#
mainstream journalism has moved from newsgathering and putting together opinion to event management
#
and by event I don't merely mean that you manufacture a fake event and report it but
#
that you build a narrative around every damn thing because and you build as sensational
#
a narrative as you can and that is an event per se and your whole time goes into sort
#
of building those pseudo events those those pseudo narratives so to say so you can just
#
keep pumping the sensation absolutely because I mean to cite a recent instance when you
#
were there the Bangalore Lit Fest so was I right I was doing a panel that had Rahul Dravid
#
on it Rahul Dravid as you know rarely speaks in public he's he's gun shy of you know conversation
#
but he agreed to come for this and he was brilliantly articulate he spoke with a lot
#
of nuance and a lot of depth and detail and stuff like that and then next day I was looking
#
at the coverage in the newspapers and they picked out this one sentence that Rahul said
#
in a wider context and that became 800 word stories because it gave the headline and the
#
headline gave you an opportunity to rant and all even the context that Rahul meticulously
#
supplied because it did not fit into the narrative because it would have desensationalized what
#
he had said in the first place was conveniently ignored the people who wrote about it in some
#
veteran writers just decided that that was not relevant so yeah you're right we today
#
if we are putting up something we first think of the headline and we think of whether this
#
headline is going to attract people to click on this thing and will it play on social media
#
and how can we sharpen it and stuff like that instead of thinking of is this first question
#
that we used to ask ourselves in a newsroom is this even worth writing about that question
#
has been forgotten so is this partly like the journalist there is a good friend of mine
#
and a veteran reporter and and I admire his work and I think some of the blame here might
#
also then have to go to audiences which have a short attention span and they're craving
#
the sensationalism and they don't have the appetite for nuance and detail and therefore
#
reporters who are catering to that marketplace therefore find themselves forced to go down
#
those same roads where they'll watch an event and they they don't really care what the broader
#
points being made are or they don't want to go too deep their brain is just on the lookout
#
for headline so two things to that one is I might be catering to a particularly to a
#
perceived need but at what point do I as a sentient human being ask myself am I committing
#
suicide at some point I would assume that either as an individual or as an organization
#
you really need to think about that thing the larger point is again to refer to that
#
that particular episode the work something like five hundred to six hundred people attending
#
that particular session and sitting on stage what struck me was the the kind of applause
#
that Raoul was getting when he actually provided nuance and context for instance he was asked
#
I asked him why don't you write a book and he said look if I'm writing something it has
#
to be honest there are some things that I cannot talk about and therefore I'd far rather
#
not write it got applause it is not a headline but it was exactly the kind of thing we could
#
argue it's there's a bit of a selection bias there because a sort of audience which would
#
turn up to a lit fest would obviously be a little more demanding but then are we chasing
#
the wrong audience look I can understand this entire clickbait headlining and all the rest
#
of it if it was translating into at least an economic goal let's face it I mean the
#
days of the philanthropic publisher no longer exist media is a business it has to be it
#
has to survive on its own ability to make money now if you're saying that all of this
#
work that you're doing is resulting in a good bottom line in a healthy bottom line then
#
I can swallow my reservations and say okay fine you know at least for the sake of survival
#
and for thriving you need to do and maybe we'll subsidize some good exactly precisely
#
yeah but what is actually happening no media houses making money every single one is stressed
#
they're trying all sorts of things including now for instance your money making opportunities
#
have become to cite one example external event management you have the conclaves and the
#
and the thing you know that and that in turn puts you at the mercy of the headliners you
#
need one instance if you remember the Times of India was about to do a major headline
#
event which had both Narendra Modi and Amit Shah headlining it two days before that Vineet
#
Jain post something that is vaguely disrespectful let's say of demonetization or one of those
#
things and the next thing you know both the headliners wait till the last minute and then
#
pull out and put the event at risk what happens and and imagine now the pressure on the Times
#
of India management they know that their bottom line is their bottom line is at risk right
#
so the more you chase after something that you cannot monetize the more you are at the
#
mercy of people who will then come and bail you out and so now you've added an external
#
stress point to this entire thing and you have not gained anything which is what I keep
#
going back to I'll I'll swallow my objections about clickbait I'll swallow my reservations
#
about some of this sensational journalism and frankly I mean we've all been guilty of
#
it at some point or the other we've hyped things and we've you know exaggerated all
#
my posts about cows your post about cows my post about maybe some fairly ordinary tests
#
in retrospect which at that time for me I mean I was right in the middle of it and I
#
thought it was the greatest thing that ever been seen all of that would at least be palatable
#
if at the end of the day like you said there was some money coming into the equation and
#
that money could then fund some good journalism but look at the cycle that we are on a website
#
is started there is a flurry of excitement they say that they have backers and they have
#
this that and the other they hire a lot of journalists the journalists are put on the
#
job of churning out content at incredible rapidity a good writer who takes time to marinate
#
and to come up with a thoughtful take on something is actually told no we need five posts from
#
you plus we need ten social media interventions plus we need ten other things the guy has
#
no time to think he writes the most obvious which is by definition what is most obvious
#
to the audience either you're not giving them anything new you chase this metric end of
#
the day you find you're not making money two years down the line the next wave starts which
#
is layoffs all the journalists are back out in the field looking for jobs which don't
#
exist by the way and lesser stuff doing more work so your quality deteriorates and you
#
see that playing out in website after website after website today so there's my question
#
if no one in the media is making money is it possible for the media to be making money
#
do people really care about it I mean you know let me again draw a contrast between
#
how we consume news in the 80s and 90s and how we do it today then you were a captive
#
audience you got whatever newspapers you got you had whatever channels you had and so on
#
and so forth and also and I'll come back to this later it's a separate thread but there
#
was a broad consensus on the facts you might say that papers had this bias or that bias
#
or whatever but broadly more or less every everybody agreed what the world was like and
#
there were no deep disagreements with that which is a separate point I want to come back
#
to later but what we sort of have today is that not only our media sources and the way
#
people get their information and entertainment and knowledge of which media is only a small
#
part are very fragmented so our people's attention spans there is a sort of a lot fighting for
#
your attention and are we at a transitional phase where the media as it is does not resemble
#
the media which would optimally exist if it were catering to people's preferences so here's
#
the thing every single time this conversation comes up we treat it as a binary we say then
#
people read today people don't read right but then you are the editor of a site that
#
concentrates on depth and detail and nuance and you know that it's not that you don't
#
have an audience it is that your audience cannot be measured in the hundreds of millions
#
it can be measured in the hundreds of thousands but that is equally important these hundreds
#
of thousands of people who want nuance and it's a long tail and in India every niche
#
is a big niche so not to be scoffed at exactly so if the focus was on that and if the awareness
#
was that look there is an audience that does clickbait and there is an audience that wants
#
depth and detail then you can find that sweet spot that you're referring to and it need
#
not necessarily be one at the expense of the other but my point is that no one's making
#
money so aren't we all getting it wrong yeah so the money making part of it is the other
#
part if your focus is entirely on page views and audience acquisition you haven't found
#
a way of monetizing that audience for one fundamental reason the audience is shifting
#
from print to online there is almost zero you know disagreement about that fact print
#
at least in the English thing is stagnant or slipping the audience increasing online
#
however has not been matched by a corresponding movement of your advertising dollars right
#
and on the internet additional tripwire is that of the advertising dollars that are flowing
#
to the internet your lunch is basically being eaten by Google and Facebook which in the
#
advanced markets account for seventy percent of all the advertising dollars that are being
#
spent that is true of the UK that is true of the US so your big source of your big platforms
#
are basically not merely your platforms they are cannibals that are taking away your revenue
#
so increasingly more and more sites are fighting for less and less share of a very small pie
#
to begin with can you make money yes because one of the things that the media has forgotten
#
or the media probably never knew in the first place because there used to be this Chinese
#
wall between those who wanted to sponsor content and the creators of that content and there
#
was a reason for that wall to be in existence but my argument is that it's probably time
#
to break through that wall if you're not going to find philanthropic supporters of the media
#
people who have money and say look it is in my interest and in the country's interest
#
for there to be a good independent media source and I will back it which animal clearly does
#
not exist today then you need to start thinking elsewhere and you need to start saying look
#
there are brands that are happy to spend money on creating content now if I create content
#
that is very obviously advertorial content it's not going to work but if I create if
#
I use the brand's money to create content that will be that will be enriching for the
#
audience then there's no reason why this won't work I mean look but that's sort of another
#
name for sponsorship in a sense or advertising news has always been sponsored so I'm saying
#
it's that's not really a new concept per se it isn't but it's a concept that hasn't been
#
explored is my point it has not been explored to the extent that it is possible to explore
#
look I mean your ideas are your IPR and and I keep getting accused of giving them away
#
so I'll do that one more time we keep talking of this new India what do we know of this
#
new India I mean you you drove through the tsunami affected areas you must have realized
#
and one of the big learnings for you at that time and and from what I remember of your
#
blog you were constantly struck by the things you were seeing that you didn't know even
#
even the things that should have been obvious things that were unknown unknowns for me really
#
I had no idea they could exist precisely and imagine that on an all India scale right so
#
why don't we have something called let's say the rediscovery of India where what we're
#
doing is putting four cars in the four corners of the country we're staffing them with with
#
people who can who can see and who can absorb and who can listen and let them meander through
#
the country let them blog as they go let there be a photographer slash videographer who's
#
also telling visual stories taking you they're showing you what's going on and let them take
#
six months exploring this India and and creating an online archive of what this new India is
#
like I'm not saying just look at the look at the you know major tourist attractions
#
I'm saying look at what is happening on the ground good bad and indifferent record that
#
now you have a project that you can take to an automotive manufacturer for sponsorship
#
you can take it to a smartphone manufacturer because nowadays nobody bothers about whether
#
the phone can make and receive calls and messages it's always about the the visual ability photographs
#
and the videos and stuff you can go to the tourism ministry because you're covering the
#
whole of the country you can go to the hospitality industry because these guys are occasionally
#
going to be thing and you have natural sponsors multiple sponsors for something like this
#
and it is compelling content it is sticky content and it enhances any media house in
#
this country that you can think about but here's the irony I first proposed this to
#
Yahoo on January 10 2010 I've since talked about it to at least three other editors and
#
to two major branding houses nobody has even touched us and I can sort of imagine why because
#
while this is something that I would follow avidly and read avidly it still seems somewhat
#
niche to me to begin with and especially in these days where you know you look at the
#
kind of content people are consuming and there's nothing sensational about this this is something
#
that as a reader or a consumer you have to immerse yourself in but going back to your
#
earlier point about you know where is the money it it seems to me that the industry
#
is ripe for disruption and I don't know where it's going to come from for the simple reason
#
that everyone who spends time reading a news article online is actually spending money
#
because time is money there is an opportunity cost to that and they are spending that time
#
voluntarily and willingly and they would probably not mind even paying but where is
#
a mechanism to capture that is a question and advertising therefore seems to me to be
#
a really clumsy tool to transfer some of the money that the reader is willing to pay for
#
a piece that he values reading and I mean I know that Ken is doing a very interesting
#
subscription kind of effort which you know and they're a good magazine and I hope it
#
works out but there is something missing here in the marketplace which some genius really
#
needs to come out and yeah and what is missing is the last mile thinking earlier we talked
#
about how the chase for page views became the chase for unique users and all of these
#
come from from the brands they come from the sponsors the sponsors are the ones who said
#
at some point we're no longer interested in pages we want to know how many readers you
#
have how many unique users you have the same sponsors then came back and said we're not
#
even interested in the number of users we want to know how much time an individual user
#
spends on your site because like you said time is money somebody is investing his time
#
on the site the longer he spends there the more of an opportunity I have to sell him
#
something was the thinking but they haven't figured out how to convert my ability to attract
#
a reader and hold a reader to his ability to sell him something when when that's going
#
on and that is because the even the sponsors are still thinking in terms of conventional
#
branding put a logo and a short message at best get a click through to some fulfillment
#
site and stuff like which might work for an Amazon because it is about fulfillment it's
#
immediate it's instinctive so you can have those kind of sites doing that but for the
#
broad mass of advertisers the last mile thinking still remains missing I think this economic
#
puzzle is something that you and I are probably too old to figure out it'll need some real
#
in a way to think it to come out and disrupt that I want to you know shift the subject
#
to the nature of media itself like you know like I mentioned earlier back in the day every
#
the mainstream media was a gatekeeper of information and news that's where you got it all the
#
call from and maybe they were biased once in a while and all of that but broadly there
#
was a consensus on what the facts are and there was a consensus on what the world is
#
like now I want to refer back to another book which I know is a favorite of yours and has
#
made a deep influence on me Walter Lipman's public opinion which was published in 1922
#
and I'd really urge all the listeners of the show if they care about the subject to
#
read that book and it's published in 1922 the first chapter of the book is called if
#
I remember correctly the world as it is in the world inside our heads yes and it makes
#
a very valuable point that the world as it is is a beast that no one really knows but
#
all of us carry a world inside our heads and because of media the world inside our heads
#
because you know when you had all your information filtered through mainstream media you went
#
through the same education system the world inside everyone's head was very very similar
#
and what has happened now with the internet and which I think is a huge net positive and
#
a great empowering effect so I'm not criticizing it and don't get me wrong but what has happened
#
now is that on the internet discourse has become very polarized and it's become possible
#
to find all kinds of people you could not have for geographical reasons who might share
#
your world views or your fetishes or your love for conspiracy theories or your proclivities
#
or inclinations and therefore then form echo chambers where people share broadly the same
#
worldview but they're impervious to anything that challenges that and as this course gets
#
more and more polarized you have an ecosystem of these echo chambers and it's incredibly
#
hard to break through them and there's a confirmation bias in play they will believe what they're
#
they want to believe they will consume what feeds into their existing preferences and
#
what that's done is that it's dispersed the number of sources of news and information
#
like I would argue that whatsapp today with this million dispersed content creators is
#
way more influential than any broadsheet could possibly be and then the question then comes
#
is that in this environment what is journalism so you're totally bang on about calling whatsapp
#
the strongest possible vector for the spread of information which also includes misinformation
#
deliberate disinformation the whole lot which then puts an added burden on journalism because
#
how the hell do you combat that there is no intersect between the media I mean you or
#
I could start a whatsapp group but then again fairly soon what will happen is it will fill
#
with like-minded people it will be a bubble of our own what purpose precisely it doesn't
#
serve a purpose but here's the deal though if you look at the last three and a half years
#
and I refer to this because I recently wrote a piece arguing this precise case we now are
#
talking about how is the narrative changing look whatsapp groups have only grown in size
#
the the groups that are fanboys for instance of the present regime have proliferated all
#
of that is moving in one direction and yet people have started even within those groups
#
started perceiving a certain dissonance a certain criticism of the government that they're
#
no longer able to refute you can see signs of that for instance and they decrease in
#
actual trolling because somebody or the others figured out at the establishment level that
#
this is actually now proving counterproductive you can see that in people who earlier just
#
dismissed you now reaching out and saying can you talk about that a little bit more
#
because that doesn't compute with what I have in my head the thing that that has happened
#
is because of one or two important events that have led to pointed nuanced criticism
#
a little bit of this bubble is breaking or at least there is a slight drip-drip of fact
#
and information into these little bubbles our problem is that if we are looking for
#
an instant solution it's not going to happen all that has happened is that it has put journalism
#
in this place where against the odds against the run of both economics and and what is
#
called media management good sense we are having to fight harder and harder to create
#
the sort of impact we could create much more easily a decade ago a couple of decades ago
#
so the point is not that we cannot break through the point is that it has become an incredibly
#
arduous process and that has put an additional stress on newsrooms which neither have the
#
ability the resources or the appetite for that kind of ongoing struggle I mean I'll
#
turn the question right back to you why would you do a prakriti it is basically an attempt
#
if it is to create a bubble I'm sure that you know none of the people none of you guys
#
who are involved in it and I know you all would would even be attempting this because
#
how easy is it for us to create a bubble if you want why take all this trouble what we
#
are doing now is trying to get across trying to break past the binaries that that now govern
#
our thinking and try and find a middle ground of just get back to fact get back to proper
#
analysis and hopefully the trickle down effect will I mean we will attract the fence sitters
#
and and and it's constantly forgotten in this media binary that ultimately the largest audience
#
is those guys in the middle who are neither this way nor that these two bubbles are fine
#
they're going to exist and they've existed pretty much as long as there has been a media
#
I think there are multiple bubbles not just two and I think you know prakriti of course
#
to briefly address that was set up because the discourse was so polarized and we thought
#
we should create a bipartisan site which does this passionate analysis of public policy
#
without either attacking or supporting parties or people correct my my impassioned editorials
#
are a different matter but broadly all our other content is looks at policy dispassionately
#
and tries to speak to everyone without compromising anywhere but you know to get back to the kind
#
of positive feedback where you now say the tide might be turning I'd say that one I mean
#
I hate to be cynical about this but I'd say that one the people we know it's a very self
#
selected kind of group and you know in purely economic terms I'd look more at revealed preferences
#
how do people actually act and the UP election was actually an eye opener for me because
#
demonetization was devastated the economy we know that there is no disputing that now
#
despite the efforts of useful idiots in various places it devastated the economy and yet many
#
people in UP itself many people who lost jobs whose businesses shut down who were deeply
#
hurt by it nevertheless voted for Modi ji and and therefore there was a disconnect between
#
to use Lipman's phrases the world as it is in the world in our heads where what happens
#
in the real world may not really matter you may be one of those one million people who
#
is coming into the workforce and there's no job for you because the economy has been
#
mishandled so badly and yet you become a Hindu warrior fighting against love jihad because
#
that's the narrative that is inside your head and that narrative cannot be fought through
#
facts so the problem isn't that there is fake news and we need to fight it with facts the
#
problem is that facts are incapable of fighting those kinds of narratives and you know which
#
i don't have any answers to but how do you respond to that one of the things is and i
#
know you've read the book as well and so have i prashan's wonderful book on how the bjp's
#
election machinery it's a it's a must read for political analysis in general and and
#
to understand the bjp's worldview in particular you use the word narrative and for me all
#
the post up narrative talked about this miracle of look at more devastated everybody's lives
#
in practice but he was still able to sell this whole thing of i am a poor man doing
#
it on behalf of the poor man and against the rich man he he sold that whole story and it
#
worked wonderfully well along with all the other sub stories of love jihad and you know
#
the muslim oppression and all of that my point is even at that point for the people who are
#
actually affected and ultimately look the water is going to make up his mind on the
#
basis of whether his life has gotten better or worse he doesn't give a damn for all the
#
macro stuff that we keep talking about and obsessing over his thing is am i living better
#
today than i was i actually disagree even if they're living worse you know it's almost
#
political ideology has almost become like a religion even if the circumstances get worse
#
they will still vote in the same right but my argument is you need to allow some time
#
between a policy and its results percolating before you interpret a particular election
#
as being influenced for or against by that particular policy and up happened too close
#
to demonetization for there to be an alternate narrative what i am looking forward to is
#
the five or probably six elections that have to happen between say december of this year
#
and december of next year because now you've had time for demonetization to actually play
#
out on the ground you've had time for the buzz around this being an anti-rich move i
#
mean it if it is an anti-rich move where is all the wealth that's come back from black
#
money it clearly hasn't and therefore the civil society which should have benefited
#
from that because you have excess money you can pump it back into your uh you know societal
#
interventions none of those things are materializing now i want to see and which is why i said
#
yeah i will agree with the basic premise that demonetization and the up election played
#
out exactly the opposite of what pretty much all the punditry thought it would you thought
#
it would have a major impact it did but it had the impact in the opposite direction to
#
what we if at all there is that causation i mean exactly the causation correlation is
#
not in the first place 100 clear but as these serial elections play off that would probably
#
be a better time to step back and analyze whether a narrative that is sold in the heat
#
of the moment survives contact with reality and which is why i think it is still important
#
despite the feeling that you're sisyphus rolling this rock constantly up the hill you still
#
need to keep doing this because what is your alternative are you going to seed the ground
#
entirely because you're saying look i mean i work from morning eight o'clock till midnight
#
twelve and and and nobody listens they live in their own bubbles i agree with the concept
#
that lipton wrote about and and and that you're talking even in the halcyon days of the media
#
we still lived inside our own worlds right i mean that that's that's human nature yeah
#
exactly our words were very similar though i'm mostly yeah and and and as you pointed
#
out this was written in 1922 and it was relevant then but you also pointed out that at that
#
point at least the world inside our head was based on a similar set of facts to the world
#
externally because the media pretty much like you said there is a consensus on what factors
#
that consensus breaking down today is what is causing a lot of the dissonance but then
#
i would think it is doubly imperative for the media to go right back to first principles
#
and say uh important news will be fact the rest of it the noise the opinion yeah uh rant
#
away for all you want and it's great fun and sometimes a well-argued rant from the left
#
or the right actually shapes your own thinking but that is for or that is not for the vast
#
majority of people who just want to consume some news some fact and move on i think the
#
other and again thinking aloud the other interesting thing that strikes me here is that the people
#
have their own hierarchies of facts there are different kinds of facts which are in
#
conflict with each other right so you might for example there might be the fact that okay
#
gst is hard to comply with but there is also a fact competing with attention that oh there
#
are very few jobs and uh you know the othering of the muslims for example you're competing
#
with people who are not like you for the same sort of resources and in a very poor country
#
where so many things including jobs are so scarce and there is a whole universe of facts
#
in different uh coming from different directions and the common guy will therefore have his
#
hierarchy of what facts matter to him and what facts don't and uh and in a sense does
#
that make every journalist who claims allegiance to facts also an activist and a crusader of
#
sorts because he is necessarily uh propagating a foregrounding of facts according to his
#
hierarchy of facts it does but it always has i think that's that's pretty much been how
#
the media has always functioned yeah so nothing much has changed over there and i i still
#
would argue that it is easier to account for bias if as you say the individual reporter
#
the individual media house looked at facts and yeah it'll look at it from its filters
#
uh we know for instance that the indian express will always almost invariably look at something
#
from an anti-establishment uh filter and the times of india will look at it from a pro-establishment
#
filter and stuff all my columns against demonetization are many of them came in the time so i wouldn't
#
so there are counter-intuitive uh arguments on both sides there are some uh stories in
#
the indian express that could have been written by a pr consultant for instance but broadly
#
speaking or at least put it this way that we as readers assume certain stances and certain
#
biases in the media houses and we then look for the commonalities and we say okay these
#
seem to be facts that pretty much everybody is agreed on and stuff like which still brings
#
me back to the thing that i keep talking over and over again in j school talks and and and
#
when i meet friends from the media and all that isn't that doubly important then to get
#
back to facts and cut this crap out that is not at least i can understand if it's putting
#
money on your thing and good luck to you it is not so what are you doing this for and
#
to your point about people who have a predefined set of facts in their head and who are unwilling
#
to break past i wouldn't say predefined set of sex i'd say a hierarchy of facts for some
#
facts matter more than others right so to someone it may matter more that you know that
#
muslims in his neighborhood are marrying hindu girls and that may and you know that may matter
#
more to him than for example how the economy is doing and i'm simplifying massively because
#
it's it's like far more complex than that but people live within their own social realities
#
and some facts may matter more than other facts so it's not so in a sense sometimes
#
i worry that when you know we talk we talk against coercion and imposition for example
#
i mean you're not a libertarian like me but those things we can agree on that both of
#
us are against coercion and imposition but at the same time we try to impose these values
#
of you know imposition being a bad thing on society at large which is you know almost
#
like a paradox but anyway that's leaving that aside no i just uh the point that you started
#
this i i i was thinking of a personal anecdote uh when i got back to writing about politics
#
and that pretty much was after gauri lankesh when i realized that not enough people were
#
openly speaking out i'm not saying you should take a take up a sword and start you know
#
chopping up the right wing but at least address the issues of the day and stuff like which
#
is when i started writing again on politics particularly on my blog and then i would probably
#
put a link on my twitter stream and by the way a few of those links are beneath the page
#
of this podcast episode so please do follow them and check them out thank you and uh one
#
of the funny things that happened was i had this constant pushback both on twitter and
#
on my blog in a couple of comments saying yeah yeah you talk about all this but let's
#
see you talk about you know how your home state of kerala has become a killing ground
#
and hindus are being massacred in large numbers and stuff now like any other consumer of news
#
i had seen these headlines stories of bjp worker hacked to death and narun jaitley is
#
visiting uh this that and the other and it occurred to me that i hadn't tried to see
#
what the dots were forget about connecting them all i did was a basic google search for
#
the last 10 years and i just listed all the incidents that were recorded both in the malayalam
#
press and in the english press of killings and then i found an india spend article which
#
showed that the the killings matched each other there is one dead cpm worker for every
#
dead bjp worker so it is not a case of one party doing the killing and the other party
#
just being the killed all i did was just list this particular thing saying look enough people
#
are talking about the bjp being the ones killed here is a list of all the violence that happened
#
in the last two years again cpm members the same guy who accused me of completely ignoring
#
the kerala thing he the first comment that he posted on that blog and later on twitter
#
because i didn't respond to the blog comment i didn't see it was can you tell me how you
#
found these facts because i didn't think of it this way it took a hell of a long time
#
to put that together but one mind changed somewhere i'll take and that's kind of the
#
job of the media yeah exactly and and if one mind is it's not even that the mind has changed
#
but at least he's not thinking in that one second fashion anymore i would take that as
#
a win i would take that as worth the three or four hours i just ignore all what about
#
erie because my sense is that you know focus on the argument don't shift the attention
#
to the person yeah but in this case i mean the reason why i followed it is because it
#
raised the question in my own head not about whether i was ignoring things that related
#
to me is he right does he have a point yeah what was exactly happening yeah and and that
#
worked so somewhere along the way i think if we say that there is a dissonance in the
#
audience about what is fact anymore then i think it is doubly important for us to then
#
identify that yeah to identify that fact and and put it up in a way that you can't dispute
#
and just do the best we can i mean i always worry about this sense of you know journalism
#
as a calling with its own values and so on that both of us have and journalism as a profession
#
and it's part of a business and it needs to make a profit and uh you know and and that
#
conflict is always something we try to navigate in our own ways actually i've never felt that
#
conflict for me i mean journalism is something that i want to do because i love meeting people
#
i love understanding what's going on and i love writing about it yeah but it's also a
#
profession i'm in because i know that i've made a good living out of it right if it wasn't
#
if i was still being paid the 250 bucks that i got in the beginning i would have been out
#
of here ages ago because at end of the day you have to pay your rent exactly and i don't
#
see what is wrong with getting a proper wage for a proper job and when they go together
#
that's great when you know the calling and the profession go together and there's no
#
conflict and that's great but it is and it's like you could flip the argument to any other
#
profession i mean medical uh profession is supposed to be a calling it's supposed to
#
be about saving lives but we try walking out of a doctor's uh thing without paying for
#
it and see how far you get yeah so you know the incentives have to be right they have
#
to be properly that's that's the way human nature is i want to end with in my usual systematic
#
way four questions which i i won't i won't ask all of them at the same time i'll go one
#
by one when you join journalism or when you first wanted to join journalism when you got
#
that spark as a young person why did you have that spark what did you expect from it there
#
was an internal and an external uh thing the external uh drive was that uh you know moore
#
market which used to be famed for second hand books in in Tamil Nadu used to be a haunt
#
for first my father and then i i developed the habit as well dad used to buy books i
#
was intrigued by some of these magazines that you could find ancient copies of esquire and
#
so i had never heard of these and we unlike today we don't have a reference point so it
#
was a random copy of the new yorker random copy of esquire uh in fact random copies of
#
newspapers sometimes and this was my first exposure to something that was not called
#
the hindu which is the paper that for some ubiquitous yeah chennai paper because your
#
parents tell you that you read the hindu in order to improve your english which is probably
#
the worst advice that they can could have given at that time but all that apart and
#
when i read it i looked at things that i vaguely heard about here and there and the way it
#
was read out and all that it fascinated me and then i compared it with what i was getting
#
in the domestic press and i was like look there is so much more that can be done and
#
coincidentally around the same time i found myself at a party where there was this editor
#
aditi day uh who was then with the indian express back in chennai and she saw some uh
#
i mean we were arguing about something or the other and my usual passionate mid-20s
#
uh explosive sort of language and all that and she suddenly tapped me on the shoulder
#
and said listen why don't you write this as an essay for me i tried doing that i love
#
the process of thinking through something and testing it for stresses at various points
#
in the argument and finding some kind of answer somebody once said that i write to figure
#
out what i'm thinking i found that process then and uh this kind of hooked me into it
#
and i i pretty much i think at that point uh you know when when in in 70s india if you're
#
a college dropout with no marketable skills you did i realized this is what i wanted to
#
do and you know what after all this i don't look back at those 29 years as a journalist
#
another three years as a freelancer occasionally getting gigs uh with even the slightest inch
#
of regret it's been worth it because of you know the kind of things that you're exposed
#
to and the kind of and it was as much personal self-discovery as you know exactly right yeah
#
uh my second question then is that if you were 18 years old today would you want to
#
be a journalist and if so why yes and i keep getting this question in the colleges that
#
i speak in one of the thing is you know today when you speak in a college the questions
#
are all pessimistic uh the last time i spoke at a journalism college for instance the first
#
question that i got was in this era of declining media credibility how do i ensure that at
#
least my personal credibility is is built and and protected it's it's a startling question
#
to get from a 19 or 20 year old kid but that's that's who by the way are way smarter than
#
we were when we were 18 or 19 so you know that alone should give you some hope yeah
#
but the answer i constantly make is yeah if i was in your uh position right now and i
#
had to make this choice all over again i would still choose journalism because everything
#
that you're seeing and and hearing and every development that you see around you it reinforces
#
the thought that nothing can be more important in a democracy than the the job of providing
#
accurate information it is dichotomous for us to constantly talk up this as the age of
#
information the era of data the era of information and all of that and say look is there any
#
value to providing information in the first place we have not been able to monetize this
#
thing that's a whole other argument and like you said hopefully there's some 20 year old
#
somewhere uh who's who's working on that and will crack it who will get his idea at the
#
end of this but i cannot think in fact if i thought of whether it was more important
#
for me to be a journalist in the same 90s as opposed to today i would say today it's
#
it's so you'd say that then you were driven by the need for personal self-discovery and
#
what it did to you and today you'd be driven more by that this is required this is an awareness
#
of what happens if this didn't happen what happens if we didn't do what we do or or the
#
larger media universe didn't do what it ideally should uh the dangers are far more obvious
#
now than they they were to me at least at that point in time so i'll ask you my last
#
two questions together and you're probably expecting it one what makes you hopeful about
#
the future of media and the future of india and two uh what worries you what worries me
#
i'll take that first is the is the general if it's still talking about the media what
#
worries me is the general it's not cluelessness i speak to editors and i realize they know
#
precisely what the flash points are precisely what the fault lines are precisely what they
#
need to do to address it precisely what they need to do for their own and organizational
#
credibility and then they rationalize not doing it very systematically and i listen
#
to them talk and i and i i'm thinking to myself you know what you're saying is wrong and in
#
a private off-record conversation is still trying to justify the indefensible and that
#
worries the hell out of me because if this these are the people who are the thought leaders
#
and these are the people who are shaping this industry and if they have gotten to a point
#
where they've just given up and now are looking only for self-justification then we have a
#
major problem if there is at least the internal awareness and the willingness to recognize
#
that something is going wrong and we need to think of solutions like you said earlier
#
we the two of us in this podcast are not going to solve the media's economic problems but
#
we at least need to understand that the economic problem is fundamental to the larger problem
#
if that is not happening yeah that that makes me despair what makes me hopeful for this
#
business or this industry in particular is again to go back to the fact that i've lately
#
spent a lot of time either teaching or lecturing at colleges and stuff like that and i would
#
think this is the last possible or the worst possible moment in time for a young hopeful
#
smart graduate to get into a postgraduate course on journalism but the numbers keep growing
#
i'm astonished when i go for instance to an acj and find that there are 300 students in
#
the digital media stream wow and uh they they are young they're enthusiastic they're not
#
saying you know let's just get in there and be razif sardesai or arnav goswami the questions
#
they ask and the kind of things that they want to know they really want to figure it
#
out yeah they want to figure it out they want to say how do we tell good stories is one
#
of the most common questions we get and and if this generation is still thinking that
#
way at least not all the 300 may make it to a position of influence but enough of them
#
will actually be doing the kind of work they want to do and hopefully they will break through
#
some of the stuff and i'll also point you at this other phenomenon which doesn't get
#
noticed enough that a lot of the bright young journalists who came after us the next generation
#
journalists take the priyanka dubais or the snigda punams and people like that they seem
#
completely comfortable moving out of the mainstream media space going and doing the kind of stories
#
they want and then going to the media and saying look i'm doing the story do you want
#
it or no and they're getting published and they're doing brilliant work so on the one
#
hand in the existing system there are enough people saying look i mean i don't want to
#
be part of this mass marketing of bullshit i want to do the stories that matter or the
#
stories that should matter and then there is the next generation saying i want to be
#
part of this business and i want to know how to do it right and i want to know how to do
#
it with credibility and and uh quality and and that for me makes me slightly hopeful
#
okay again it's so optimist in me speaking but it's it's a great note of hope to end
#
on you know old fogies like us have more questions than answers and here's hoping that the young
#
people studying journalism today in more than just a formal sense come up with some of those
#
answers which we desperately need prem it's been an honor to have you on the show thank
#
you so much thank you so much if you enjoyed listening to the show do follow prem on twitter
#
at prem panicker you can follow me at amit varma a m i t v a r m a and to browse past
#
episodes of the scene and the unseen head on over to scene unseen dot i n
#
if you're in the mood for more podcasting fun check out this new show presented by spartan
#
poker called mera kam poker which is hosted by azim banatwala and peter abraham the show
#
captures the fun side of poker and is a must listen for everyone and hey it's not only
#
the fun side i used to be a poker professional and i've been on a past episode of mera kam
#
poker talking strategy you want to kill the game and make a lot of money listen to that
#
episode at least episodes are out on the ivy m podcast website the ivy m podcast app or
#
wherever you listen to podcasts excuse me bhaiya excuse me
