Let us acknowledge inherent media bias

How media can channel bias and still uphold values

Gurmeet Singh Ram Rahim was so popular that one of the top news channels invited him to a paid annual conclave, interviewed him, and even asked him to sing. The arrest of the baba on account of rape charges is hardly an endorsement of rationality. The exposure of this cult, with its mammoth following among all classes of people, merely endorses what we believe in, and what we accept as knowledge. Once he was convicted, media channels went out of their way to berate him and condemn babas in general.

The conviction of Gurmeet Singh aka Baba Ram Rahim of the MSG cult is a victory of rationality and reason. The self-styled baba reportedly had anywhere between two and seven crore followers, depending on which side of political spin you listen to. Yet this so-called affliction they speak of is too widespread to be dismissed as mere madness, as most of our media now claim. Con artists don’t survive without gullibility and trust, self-serving spin and selective silence. They are a metaphor for our social structures.

An unresolved dichotomy between established structures defining our values and democratic right to form our own is the happy hunting ground for our media systems. So irrationality has become a wonderful tool for the media to exploit. This is coupled with a legal framework that technically allows the media to define values, regulate itself, and sell any product. This mix includes the freedom to cherry-pick the stories to tell, a process called gatekeeping. Add to that the concept of "social media management," and you have a potent recipe for mass galvanization of seemingly irrational concepts. There is a lot of emotion being spilled on user-generated platforms, often manipulated by communication managers to provoke more display of emotional and irrational opinion.

When psychology seized the imagination of the public, we realized we are human, after all. As this side of thinking postulated, we should acknowledge that as human beings, we are irrational by nature. And it is this side of us that political leaders, babas and social media managers are exploiting. With newfound amplifications of public voices and reverberations of our own, this exploitation is at never-before proportions, and is set to peak before it declines.

Now for how the media is legitimizing those values. Development communication emerged in the so-called third world as a somewhat necessary alternative to make the fourth estate help a nation in catching up with its western counterparts. In India, funded by the government, radio and television were envisaged to play this role, tying it to an invisible government string. A big ideological dilemma loomed before both the government and the media in 1982, when television went colour and added commercials as an additional revenue source. It was a “mixed model”, loosely combining developmental and commercial goals. By 1991 when media economy was (one of the first industries to be) liberalized, programming also reflected the emerging consumerist society. A study that compared the pre-liberalization Hum Log with the post-liberalization Swabhimaan found a stark contrast in the reflected social values. News channels on television, however, have floundered or basked (depending on which side of the debate you’re on) in the absence of any visible structures governing them.

Let me provide a wider perspective to these structures. In 1947, the so-called Hutchins Commission, assigned by the U.S. media to research and recommend media’s functions in society, recognized social responsibility as its primary and overarching function. The Fairness Doctrine was introduced in the same year, placing equitable content regulation on television coverage to ensure the “free marketplace of ideas.” Pro-government scholars somewhat uncritically observed how the social responsibility function legitimized the institutionalization of the media in a political and social structure. On the other hand, the skeptics lamented that public opinion lost out to organized media, and that the media turned opinion makers of an undesirable kind.

Yet today, we find ourselves at the cusp of the re-emergence of development communication in a very different format. The strings defining the values are development are not constitutional, but ensconced in political power corridors. There is every opportunity for dissent and debate, but our news media has increasingly caricatured that value, creating a format of debate but snuffing out its essence by letting the agendas be dictated by extra-democratic values. For example, a popular business channel claims that its goal is “not only about news, but about a rising India”. To develop this agenda, channels is often seen to create a semblance of debate but maintain a pro-government stance, perhaps in an attempt to create investment in the economy.

The problem is to somehow create public awareness that truth is as much a factor of facts as that of media production and the values of its mouthpieces. This bias is sometimes blatant and audiences must learn to pick them up. Recently, a popular actor said that our Prime Minister is a better actor than him. Given the entertainment potential of that story, a channel picked it up for its prime time debate. In it, the anchor repeatedly cut off the opposition’s spokesperson while she sat silent through the ruling party spokesperson’s argument, even though there were factual errors on both arguments. Recently, the Congress Party lamented the media silence over its campaigns while providing undue coverage to the ruling party, thereby creating an unfair advantage.

The Congress argument is fallacious. The media is heading for a split right under our noses, dividing itself up on political affiliations. There are channels that seem blindly pro-government, and those who are less blind. Objectivity is no longer seen as lack of bias, in an acknowledgment of what an observer calls ‘inherent bias’. So channels whose owners have no political intent behind those biases have invested in balance—hiring anchors and reporters with inherent biases on multiple sides of the divide, in a hope that biases will cancel themselves out. This must be lauded as a great innovation. In the U.S., a somewhat hegemonized inherent media bias is on the liberal side since most liberal values purport to uphold democratic values. They are now challenged by the emergence of conservative channels such as Fox, in turn pitted against the ultra-left MSNBC. In India, we’re fast gravitating towards a politically divided media that chooses its stories selectively, has no hesitation in taking sides, and supporting causes. It would be far more desirable to have a set of channels, each of whose programmes reflect inherent biases. The problem, though, lies in educating the audience about bias-based value systems.

Stuck in a limbo is a third kind of news channels, the dogged category that is fighting to keep a balance, either in a naive belief that objectivity does exist, or in the pretence to show lack of bias as the right value, or making a pusillanimous attempt to appease social media trolls and to avoid government arm-twisting. Acknowledging inherent bias not only removes the burden of the fallacious value of objectivity, it also tells the audience more realistically why all facts are, in fact, constructed through storytelling and gatekeeping mechanisms.