In Election Year, Religious Issues and Opposition-Bashing Dominate Primetime TV News in India
This correspondent analyzed 809 videos across eight different primetime shows on Times Now, CNN-News18, NDTV 24x7 and India Today, and quantified the dominance of religious themes in mainstream media discourse.
The Indian media is far from covering itself in glory. Graphic: Meghnad Bose | Images courtesy: Times Now, CNN-News18, India Today and NDTV 24x7
It's election year in the world's largest democracy. But even as India readies itself for what is going to be the biggest parliamentary election ever in the history of the world in terms of the number of eligible voters, the Indian media is far from covering itself in glory.
An analysis of eight primetime shows across four of India's leading English-language television news channels shows that religious issues and targeting of Opposition parties have dominated the discourse on the airwaves in election year.
The constant focus on the Opposition is complemented only by how rare it is for these shows to question the policies and politics of the Narendra Modi-led government instead.
This correspondent analyzed 809 videos across eight different shows on Times Now, CNN-News18, NDTV 24x7 and India Today. The videos were categorized into the following categories:
If we are to assign an equal weightage to each of the channels, here are the themes that top the charts. Religious issues maintain their top spot, at 39%. And criticizing the Opposition comes in second with 17%. Together, these two themes account for a majority of the overall spread.
Reacting to the data, Ramit Verma, a political content creator and the man behind the popular media critiquing channel Official Peeing Human, said, “I would have been surprised if this wasn’t the case.”
He pointed out, “Anti-Opposition debates and religious debates go hand in hand. Even the religious debates are anti-Opposition debates in a way. Because what they say during those debates is that BJP has done so well, and speak against Congress, saying they opposed things like the Ram Mandir.”
Verma isn't new to this style of media coverage analysis, or the pattern it throws up.
In October 2019, he had tabulated a list of 202 debates conducted by four major Hindi TV news channels. In the period he had studied, there had been 79 debates attacking Pakistan (the leading issue), 66 debates attacking the Opposition, 36 debates praising Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and its ideological parent organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). There were also 14 debates on the Ram Mandir.
However, in that same period, there were zero debates on:
The economy
Unemployment
Education
Healthcare
Public infrastructure
Farmers' distress
Poverty and malnutrition
Women's safety
Environmental protection
Mob lynchings
Questioning of any government decision or policy
Speaking about the inspiration for his analysis, Verma says, “I had watched the documentary ‘Manufacturing Consent’ in which they talk about how narratives are formed. There is a comparison shown in the film between the amount of newspaper coverage accorded to two different wars. From the time I saw the film, the idea was stuck in my head that to create a narrative, it’s about how much you push something (to viewers). There was also a Vox video I watched on “firehosing of falsehoods.”
He added, “By that time, I had already started making videos mocking the ‘godi media’. I thought - what will be the easiest way to drive the point home? To find out the data of what they’re covering and show that.”
Times Now in 2024: Religion Express
Take a look at the following examples. These are among some of the episodes of the primetime shows on Times Now, The Newshour with Navika Kumar and India Upfront with Padmaja Joshi.
Aastha Ends 500-Year Anguish | Is This The Dawn Of 'Ram Rajya' In Bharat ? | Newshour
Congress Pran Pratishtha No Show 'Decoded' | Ram Avoided To Retain Muslim Vote?| India Upfront
Ram Mandir Devotees Wash Over Ayodhya | Congress Can't See Temple 'Tsunami'? | India Upfront
BJP Mocks 'Anti-Modi' Alliance | Congress Losing Face & Friends? | Newshour Debate
Gyanvapi Case: ASI Survey Reports Set To Be Public | Why Block The 'Truth' Of Gyanvapi? | Newshour
With topics such as these, Times Now's videos were extremely editorialized in favor of Hindutva and the ruling BJP, and sharply against the Opposition parties.
74 out of the 98 videos analyzed on the playlists of the two Times Now shows were either on religious lines or had criticism of the Opposition as their primary theme.
CNN-News18: On Similar Lines
The two primetime shows for which data was collected are The Hard Facts with Rahul Shivshankar, and The Right Stand with Anand Narasimhan. None of the 111 primetime videos from these two shows on CNN-News18 fell into the category of 'criticizing the Modi government'. But 21 of the videos were focused on criticizing the Opposition.
Commenting further about the most popular theme on primetime news, Verma added, "The religious debates propagate divisive emotions within the audience. They create an us-versus-them attitude. 'Hindu khatre mein hain (Hindus are in danger)' is an easier sell for votes than to show what you have done on the development front. Then you don't care whether social infrastructure has improved or not, whether income has increased or not.”
Kaushik Raj, an Indian freelance journalist, echoed Verma’s viewpoint. He remarked, “They are just trying to divide and polarize the society in the name of Ayodhya, now Kashi and Mathura. Who is going to take advantage of that? Prime Minister Modi's party. So, we know who they (the channels) are working for.”
NDTV 24x7 Following Suit
The two primetime shows being looked at are The Last Word with Marya Shakil, and the long-running NDTV show Left, Right and Centre.
India Today: Religion Tops the Theme Charts
The two primetime shows analyzed in this dataset are Newstrack with Rahul Kanwal, and News Today with Rajdeep Sardesai. India Today published a significantly higher number of videos on their primetime playlists on YouTube than any of the other three channels. This is also why the calculation to show the dominance of religious issues across the four channels was done with each channel being considered to be of equal prominence or weight. If that adjustment hadn't been made, the results would have unfairly skewed towards what India Today's data looks like.
As the graph below shows, India Today also has had more videos on their primetime playlists about religious issues than any other theme. That makes it four out of four channels to have religious issues as their most dominant theme.
A Cautionary Note
Across these four leading English-language news channels in India, there is a distinct pattern in the themes of coverage - not only in terms of what is discussed, but also in terms of what is not. Which are the issues raised, and which ones are ignored?
As Kaushik Raj asks, “Did you find any debate talking about unemployment?”
The data in this article is an indication that the English-language television news media in India isn’t really fulfilling its role as the fourth estate of democracy, one that holds power to account. It brings to mind a quote this correspondent happens to walk past every day.
“A cynical, mercenary demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.”
Those were the words of the editor Joseph Pulitzer in the North American Review published in 1904. In the years since, they have been engraved and displayed prominently within the walls of Columbia Journalism School, an institution Pulitzer helped establish, for hundreds of incoming journalists to remind themselves of their duties.
A hundred and twenty years since those words were published, for a country 7,000 miles away, they still serve as a cautionary note worth paying heed to.
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View the full methodology and code on GitHub here, and take a look at my other data stories here.
