When Yogi Aadityanath became the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, we showed nothing but Yogi for a whole month,” a top business executive of a TV news channel told me. “Do you think Modi liked it?”
Her point was that the biggest god TV news channels bow before is TRP, the weekly television ratings that drive advertising revenues. It’s a business, after all.
“After a month of showing nothing but Yogi, we found that Yogi stopped delivering the TRPs so we were back to Modi,” the executive said. When asked why TV news channels like theirs featured so little of the opposition, the reply was: “They don’t do anything that can get us TRPs.”
Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ascent to power in 2014, TV news has become more of a Modi government mouthpiece. This has not happened entirely by choice. The behind-the-scenes coercive strategies driving this change was revealed in a recent report in The New York Times.
The depraved pursuit of a non-story around the death of Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput is a good example of what happens when the two gods of Indian news TV come together: Modi and TRP.
Also read: Sushant Singh Rajput death dominated TV news airtime for past 4 weeks, industry survey finds
A joint venture
News of Sushant Singh Rajput’s unfortunate death by suicide came at the right time for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This was just the story the Modi government needed for one of its prime tricks to manage public opinion: distract and rule.
It helped that Rajput belonged to Bihar and hailed from a caste that mostly votes for the BJP and its allies there. The failure of the Modi government in handling the Covid-19 pandemic, the standoff with China in Ladakh, the economy, and the migrant labour crisis are all issues that needed distraction, in Bihar and elsewhere in India. The people of India must not be given any time to think about what’s going wrong with the government. Their enemies lie elsewhere, in Bollywood for instance. The ‘liberals’ in the Hindi film industry have to be shown their place, and what a bonus if Shiv Sena leader Aditya Thackeray can also be targeted?
For this to play out for weeks, the story has to be stretched. To stretch the story, hollow investigations must be ordered. The case must be snatched away from an ‘unfriendly’ Maharashtra government and Mumbai Police, and central agencies must aid a media trial by leaking all kinds of personal information and speculation to the media. The lapdog media will do the rest.
But it is not simply the Modi government’s bidding that TV news is up to. The Modi government has no need to go after Rajput’s former girlfriend Rhea Chakraborty, for example. That is being done purely to create a story out of nothing, for their larger distract-and-rule imperative.
The Modi-TRP alliance was a naturally winning combo, almost as soon as Modi kickstarted his prime ministerial campaign back in 2013. TV news began to show his speeches live from start to finish, something it rarely ever did before. Usually, channels would show snatches of a live speech by a political leader, and then cut to the top news points as bulletin headlines.
But Modi demanded the breaking of conventions even at the cost of editorial propriety. The BJP made the task easier by providing a direct satellite feed so the channels didn’t even have to send their outdoor broadcast units. Some TV anchors and journalists objected to this within their organisations. The objections were overruled when the TRPs came in, clearly showing the popularity of Modi’s speeches with the audience.
Also read: Sushant Rajput death is BJP’s chance to finish brand Aaditya Thackeray, after Rahul Gandhi
Breaking the alliance
In the Sushant Singh Rajput story, the BJP’s interests would be better served if TV could go after the Maharashtra government or the Bollywood ‘liberals,’ both of which channels are doing. But nothing is as sexy as blaming the Bengali ex-girlfriend, also a Bollywood actor.
There’s drugs and depression, personal chats and details of how Bollywood celebrities live their lives. There’s vicarious, voyeuristic pleasure in knowing what Rhea Chakraborty has ordered for lunch from a takeaway joint, and what she said when she saw Sushant Singh Rajput’s dead body. When even a channel like India Today, which at least tries not to sound deranged, has to go after the non-story, it tells you about the power of TRP.
TV news has the ability to give any story a pro-Modi spin. However, there are stories TV news may not want to cover at all, but is still forced to, because TRPs. In other words, the Modi-TRP joint alliance can be broken. The best example of this was the Rahul Gandhi hug. When the Congress leader surprised everyone by hugging Narendra Modi in Parliament, TV news had no choice but to show it, cover it. Sure, they denounced Rahul Gandhi, but ignore the story they could not. The visual was TRP material, for curiosity’s sake if nothing else.
TV news bends before Modi, but it crawls before TRP. Anyone who wants to grab the attention of TV news needs to produce TRP-worthy events. Visual, controversial, full of suspense and mystery, a clear hero/victim, and a clear villain/victimiser are some of the hallmarks that make good TRP-worthy TV.
The author is a contributing editor at ThePrint.
Also read: Seeking justice for Sushant Singh Rajput, Fadnavis likely to play ‘active role’ in Bihar polls