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...

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 spr...

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...

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...

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 b...

In this episode of Election Beat, Vamsee Juluri, professor of Media Studies at the University of San Francisco, and the author of Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia and the Return of Intelligence , says the Indian media is too focused on Hindu nationalism to please politicians and therefore fails in its duty of civilisational revival. He observes that TV channels are noisy and the polarisation...

In this episode, Manisha Pande, managing editor of Newslaundry and writer and host of TV Newsance, a critique of broadcast news, says the most troubling development of the last few years is that television news has turned against the people whose travails it is supposed to cover. Even public rejection of certain TV channels by people on the ground, their refusal to speak to reporters of these chan...

In this episode of Election Beat, Sitaraman Shankar, editor of Deccan Herald and CEO of the group that publishes Deccan Herald and Prajavani, says the government needs to be more transparent, interact with the media more and do less headline management. He says the newspaper’s editorial positions that are often critical of the Modi government  are not about being anti-BJP, but are critical of cert...

In this episode of Election Beat, senior political journalist, commentator and writer Saba Naqvi speaks about the sanitisation of hate speeches in the mainstream media through “factual coverage”, and the absence of outrage at the egregious statements made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. She says media houses are “running” to do “safe” interviews with Modi, in which follow-up questions are not all...

In this episode, Vinod Pavarala, Senior Professor of Communication at the University of Hyderabad, says news media are promoting a singular narrative which permeates across the society and ends up negating the country's plurality. He says that the free media in a democracy like India is expected to do a lot more than follow “objectivity rituals”, such as he said-she said reporting. But, he say...

In this episode of Election Beat, Mrinal Pande, writer, journalist and former editor of the Hindi daily Hindustan, tells Savyasaachi Jain and Nirupama Subramanian why Hindi news organisations have bought into the narrative of Hindutva. According to her, from the time when the Hindi press was ignored by most political parties, the right wing was cultivating it, having sized up its reach across 11 p...

In this episode, R Jagannathan, editorial director of Swarajya, a centre-right publication, tells Savyasaachi Jain and Nirupama Subramanian that the ruling party has always been very keen on managing the media, referring to Narendra Modi’s lack of willingness in being interviewed as something not new to India’s media landscape.  He claims that the use of draconian laws being used against journalis...

In this episode, Kalpana Sharma, who has worked at Times of India, The Indian Express and The Hindu, and is a columnist writing on the print media for the online platform Newslaundry, tells Savyasaachi Jain and Nirupama Subramanian that with a few exceptions, mainstream print media has failed its task of critical examination of politics, restricting themselves to coverage of events and speeches wi...

In this episode, Girish Kuber, the influential editor of Loksatta, the Marathi daily from the Indian Express stable, says media often get their election coverage wrong because journalists tend to report what they wish or hope to happen as opposed to what is actually happening on the ground. They tend to write for their peers and sources, not for the reading public, and this in turn affects credibi...

In this episode, Neerja Chowdhury , the veteran columnist, political commentator and author of the bestseller How Prime Ministers Decide , takes a long-term view of election coverage over the decade. She talks to Nirupama Subramanian and Savyasaachi Jain about how journalists try to catch the prevailing mood and undercurrents in an election. The dominant issue in this election is Prime Minister Na...