Mr. Magoo in India: An Outsider’s View of Indian Media

I arrived in New Delhi just a few days after a 23-year-old Indian phys­io­ther­apy stu­dent – whom the local media are refer­ring to with pseu­do­nyms such as “Brave­heart,” – was raped with a long pole by six men after she boarded an unli­censed bus on the out­skirts of Delhi. The grue­some story of the middle-class student’s rape and death the fol­low­ing week quickly went viral, not just in India, but around the world, mak­ing it part of the inter­na­tional media buzz through­out the holidays.

Now into my third week in Delhi, the story illus­trates one of the stark dif­fer­ences between Indian and U.S. media. It is still sur­pris­ing to me as a jour­nal­ism pro­fes­sor that both the main­stream and alter­na­tive media in India have yet to reveal the woman’s iden­tity. Most informed Indian jour­nal­ists know it, as well as those of her father and the “friend” who was dri­ven from her side the evening she was raped. But the media here have duti­fully with­held names in large part because Sec­tion 228A of the India Penal Code pro­hibits the release of rape vic­tims’ identities.

The British media have released the name, and a Delhi-based wire ser­vice reporter I had cof­fee with recently shared “the name” with me, but so far no Indian news out­lets, web­sites or social media have divulged the victim’s name or that of her fam­ily or friend. And the jour­nal­ists I’ve talked with here gen­er­ally agree with the pol­icy, see­ing it as a pro­pri­ety issue — lest peo­ple would think less of a woman who was raped, regard­less of the crim­i­nally vio­lent circumstances.

After two-and-a-half weeks I still don’t get it. But at least I’ve stopped demand­ing explanations.

Even Mr. Magoo, as I call myself when I’m clearly beyond my depth, can rec­og­nize that I’ve reached an unyield­ing obstacle.

In other ways the Indian media bear great sim­i­lar­ity to U.S. media. India has more national cable news net­works cater­ing to the Indian audi­ence – four in Eng­lish and four in Hindi. They pick one story and run 24/7 cov­er­age of it for days on end until the next what-a-story finally goes viral and dethrones it. One CNN/IBN pro­ducer told me they “reduce the lemon to the bit­ter end.” I said that we do the same thing, although not quite to the same degree. We call it “beat­ing a dead horse.”

I con­sider myself for­tu­nate that Braveheart’s rape buzz gave way after three weeks to the recur­ring news peg of sol­diers get­ting killed on the Pakistan-India LOC (line of con­trol, what we call a bor­der). Appar­ently one of the dead Indian sol­diers was beheaded – a detail too grue­some to resist. Here the jin­go­ism of the right-leaning cable TV chan­nels had one star-host repeat­edly turn­ing from recount­ing details of the story to shout into the cam­era, “Why is India just talk­ing?” and “When will India act?”

Given that both India and Pak­istan have nuclear weapons aimed at each other’s cap­i­tals, I hope Prime Min­is­ter Singh doesn’t flip on those chan­nels for at least another three weeks. That’s when I leave the coun­try. I for­got to bring my iodine pills and I’d hate to think what exces­sive doses of nuclear radi­a­tion might do to my already prob­lem­atic hairline.

Like in the United States the buzz emanates from the media cen­ters and tends to drown out sto­ries that could have per­co­lated up from the periph­ery. In fact, that’s such a com­mon prac­tice here and in the States, that most news orga­ni­za­tions don’t even bother to send reporters to the periph­ery look­ing for sto­ries, except to cover sto­ries that have gone viral, like when rancher Robert Krentz was mur­dered on his ranch some 50 miles from the Mex­ico border.

Because I’m con­sult­ing with a mul­ti­me­dia jour­nal­ism pro­gram in Delhi, I’ve had a to meet all types of jour­nal­ists, includ­ing web­mas­ters and web entre­pre­neurs. As in the United States, some of the most fre­quented jour­nal­is­tic web­sites are using Word­Press, which appears to be earn­ing its place along with Google, Microsoft Office and Adobe Pho­to­shop as a de facto “killer app.”

The web­sites that have large back­end staffs writ­ing com­puter code may strug­gle quickly imple­ment­ing design changes, encour­ag­ing inter­ac­tiv­ity and migrat­ing con­tent to mobile. Word­Press has wid­gets that rework con­tent for India’s ubiq­ui­tous mobile phone pop­u­la­tion. In 2012, more Indi­ans accessed the Inter­net via mobile than with com­put­ers, accord­ing to Inter­net trend tracker Mary Meeker.

India’s jour­nal­is­tic web­mas­ters also report that angry right-wing respon­dents tend to over­run the com­ment spaces on their web­sites, just like in Amer­ica. There’s research that says the same is true in the United States, and even in Ser­bia, but I’ve seen noth­ing say­ing why that is the case, even though it seems to be a transna­tional trend.

Anshul Tewari is an entre­pre­neur­ial for­mer jour­nal­ism stu­dent who started YouthKiAwaaz.com, India’s pre­mier crowd­sourced web­site for young adults aged 18 to 29. He started it a few years ago as a blog but Tewari now says it draws 5 to 6 mil­lion hits a month and he has hired a 16-person edi­to­r­ial staff and is look­ing to expand.

Tewari says young peo­ple don’t want to just read about issues. “Shar­ing is the future of online,” he said. His is a highly edited site, but that occurs in the back­ground, accord­ing to Tewari. “To users it appears to be opin­ion and blog­ging, but on the back­end, it is edited journalism.”

YouthKiAwaaz.com accepts about one-in-eight sub­mis­sions, but tries to pro­vide feed­back to every blog­ger, includ­ing inform­ing rejected sub­mit­ters what other sites will pub­lish their mate­r­ial, Tewari said.

Indian web­sites gen­er­ally have not had suc­cess insti­tut­ing pay­walls, so many are strug­gling to break even. Tewari said his site man­aged to grow and fund its ini­tial hir­ing efforts through use of Google AdSense, which pays a host to pro­vide audience-relevant adver­tis­ing on its website.

But a lit­tle while ago he dropped all adver­tis­ing from the site and began fund­ing the oper­a­tion with what he calls “spon­sored campaigns.”

That’s a fund­ing trend that U.S. Inter­net researcher David Karpf says was devel­oped by left-leaning polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions, such as MoveOn.org. The orga­ni­za­tions want to have more peo­ple listed on their rolls. They get more clout by count­ing peo­ple on their lists as mem­bers and they want to get more infor­ma­tion on poten­tial vis­i­tors’ tastes and polit­i­cal views.

Karpf said jour­nal­is­tic sites have also started using “A/B test­ing” of vis­i­tors to their web­sites. An NGO, such as Oxfam, will pro­vide spon­sored cam­paign fund­ing to YouthKiAwaaz.com in exchange for plac­ing an Oxfam poll or option test on the site. The NGO can test the polit­i­cal or social pref­er­ences of the tar­get audi­ence, accord­ing to Karpf. The poll infor­ma­tion may be use­ful to the spon­sor­ing NGO, in terms of the ques­tion being con­sid­ered, but also in terms of the com­bined demo­graphic, psy­cho­graphic and polit­i­cal infor­ma­tion it pro­vides about the youth­ful respondents.

Tewari claims that he now achieves three or four times the rev­enue stream rely­ing on with these NGO spon­sored cam­paigns than he did with ads. Plus, the ad rev­enue was up and down with eco­nomic con­di­tions and the NGOs doing spon­sored cam­paigns give him a con­sis­tent rev­enue stream out over a two-year period.

Tewari is 22 years old, but seems much older in per­son. I thought he was at least 24.

Story by Richard J. Schae­fer, asso­ciate pro­fes­sor, Com­mu­ni­ca­tion and Jour­nal­ism. Schae­fer is in India as a Ful­bright spe­cial­ist scholar con­sult­ing with the AJK Mass Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Research Cen­tre (MCRC) at Jamia Mil­lia Islamia University.

Schae­fer, who is a co-founder of the Cross-Border Issues Group, also directs the M.A. pro­gram for the Depart­ment of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion and Jour­nal­ism, and admin­is­ters an inten­sive jour­nal­ism intern­ship pro­gram in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. On his cross-border trav­els he often refers to him­self as Mr. Magoo.

He is work­ing in India with the fac­ulty of the pres­ti­gious MCRC to revamp its MA in mul­ti­me­dia jour­nal­ism cur­ricu­lum. “I hope they’re learn­ing half as much from me as I’m learn­ing from them,” Schae­fer says of the bright young staff he is assisting.

Media Con­tact: Car­olyn Gon­za­les (505) 277‑5920; email: cgonzal@unm.edu