What we don't say

A friend from the US who's thinking of moving to India recently popped up on my gmail chat. Lot of disasters happening around India, he said. Oh nowhere near, I answered, because that's how it feels, though both Myanmar and China do have long borders with India. Oh but what about the floods in eastern India, he asked. Oh those! They happen every year, I said. And aren't there a lot of farmers committing suicide? Er...yeah, that happens too, it's easing up, I said.
It was his next question that finally shook me out of my cocoon of blase 'ya-that-happens' cynicism. "I didn't see any of this in the Indian media", he said. "Is it true the Indian media only reflects the concerns of the rich and the middle classes?"
Suddenly, here was a question about something not in the next country, or next state, or next village: this was about my life, about something I do every day. I edit a newspaper, and I have to admit that though ours is one of very few dailies in the country that hasn't sold its soul, even we cannot emerge completely clean from that charge. We are not impervious to competition, and we do get influenced by it.
So, yes, the Indian media does largely reflect only the concerns of the upper and middle classes. After all, they are the 'customers', the people who buy papers and magazines, and the goods advertised in them and on TV. No one's really digging for the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid yet.
That's why papers tend to push away drought and flood and farmer suicide stories to the inside pages, where they are reduced to briefs, space permitting. TV usually doesn't bother at all - there's IPL now, and other masala. Besides, it costs more to run a TV channel. You need more advertisement revenues. No advertiser really wants to pay top rupee for space on a channel about bhookha-nanga (hungry-naked) people. It's just not cool enough.
This is only the half of it, and it should be of concern to us all. However, what's never spoken about is the more insidious omissions that advertising money forces upon the media.
For example, yesterday, the papers in Bangalore carried reports about a lift accident at a building site where two labourers were crushed to death. Seven others were injured. The reports gave all the details except the most obvious ones: they didn't mention the building site, or the name of the construction company.
That's how it goes. The construction company is a big one. It has big money, it is a big advertiser. Our paper carried their name, but I am unpopular with the marketing people; I don't bend enough before their concerns about advertisers. So I have lawsuits from builders stories of whose sins we dared publish.
Otherwise, we editors are supposed to heed phone calls from the marketing department whenever a client is responsible for people dying or some such thing, and quietly bury the report, or at least delete the 'good name' of the moneybags in question. Apparently, everyone does it.
I am lucky to work in a newspaper whose owner still stands by his editors and on the side of editorial freedom. However, this is an extremely rare breed.
The norm now is for the marketing department to sit in on edit meetings and pass judgement on what can be printed and what can't. Readers seem to not care - even those of them, and there are many - who know that this is how the big papers work, continue to contribute to their success by subscribing to them.
The cost of production of a day's newspaper is never less than 6 rupees for any of the major papers in any major city in India. The papers are sold for half that price or less. The accumulated losses have to be compensated somewhere, and a profit generated. The more the copies sold, the more the losses to be recovered.
That money comes from advertisements. So dear reader, when you pay a pittance for your paper, please know that you are pushing news media to economise on the truth.
And next time you read a newspaper or watch TV, spare a thought to the news that's left out. We editors are told it's because you - customer, buyer - want it so.