In the aftermath of Narendra Modi’s victory in the 2012 Gujarat
assembly elections, a much-respected writer-activist known for his
liberal views had accosted me at a dinner: “I heard you on television
suggest that Narendra Modi could be the BJP’s prime ministerial choice
in 2014. You are wrong, India will never accept a divisive figure like
him.” In July 2013, when we did an election tracker poll claiming
that Mr Modi was the preferred prime ministerial choice by some
distance, the same gentleman rang me up: “Change your pollsters, they
are being influenced by media hype.” In May 2014, when Mr Modi won a
spectacular victory to become prime minister, I received an sms from
my friend again: “How could this happen? This is not the India I know.
I am so depressed.”
What is true of the Indian liberal’s plight in 2014 is mirrored in
the US in 2016. I have little doubt that many Americans are
“depressed” at Donald Trump’s famous triumph. In Washington last
month, a journalist-friend was happy to buy me a drink, relieved he
said that the Trump campaign had come unstuck by sex tape revelations.
Now, as he, like so many other pollsters and pundits, are wiping the
egg off the face after getting the US election verdict so horribly
wrong, the question should be asked: do we in the media and the
opinion industry allow our personal biases to influence our
professional judgement?
Lets be honest: much of the Delhi-based mainstream media like the
Washington press corps have a liberal outlook. Nothing wrong with that
per se. Believing in the values of tolerance, equality, individual
liberties should be central to a profession like journalism which
prides itself on making a difference to society. As journalists, we
should be reaching out to the finer values of our readers/viewers,
not to their baser instincts. But what happens when populist
demagogues, be it a Modi or a Trump, strike a chord with millions of
voters in a democracy. Do we disregard their views simply because they
do not match our beliefs and compromise our credibility in the
process?
In countries as large as India and the United States, Lutyens Delhi
and Capitol Hill Washington can never represent the popular mood. Why
even in a country as small as Great Britain, the bright lights of
south London do not reflect the outlook of the Little Englander as
the Brexit vote revealed. In the 2016 US presidential election,
America’s ‘rust belt’— once industrial power-house states like
Michigan and Ohio – became its Hindi heartland, reflecting the plight
and concerns of the working class over identity and job losses. The
Trump slogan, ‘Make America Great Again’’ resonated most powerfully
here in the manner that the “achche din” war cry echoed in the bastis
of a UP and Bihar in 2014. The sloganeering had a racist, xenophobic
edge in the US by targeting the immigrant just as there was a latent
anti-Muslim appeal to political Hindutva.
And yet, the fact is, a large section of the media wasn’t willing to
accept the dominant sentiment on the ground. As the iconoclastic
liberal film-maker Michael Moore, while predicting a Trump win in July
this year, had forewarned his ideological fellow-travellers, “If you
think Trump cant win, you need to exit that bubble right now. You need
to stop living in denial and face the truth which you know deep down
is very, very real.”
Moore is not wrong. Many of us in the television business in
particular live in an air-conditioned “studio bubble”, a comfort zone
where we are surrounded by familiar talking heads and predictable
voices. Pundits with pre-decided opinions are given disproportionate
air time and saliency in preference to “real” people in the bazaars
and mohallas of a vast country. A studio-driven media model can
falter at election time if it gets disconnected from people. As can
pollsters who get trapped in statistical jugglery and computer data.
To quote Moore again: “Do not discount the electorate’s ability to be
mischievious or underestimate how many millions fancy themselves as
closet anarchists once they draw the curtain and are all alone in a
voting booth.”
Pollsters and journalists cannot afford to live in denial mode: an
edit page article, a studio debate or an opinion poll might gainfully
analyse an issue but can it really get into the minds – the anger and
the frustrations – of millions of faceless voters? Which is why we
need to shed our ideological blinkers (and possibly, our intellectual
laziness) and become the eyes and ears of society rather than simply
an echo chamber of the elite studio chatterati. We need to get back
to the core of our profession of being reporters who tell the news
rather than smug, almost narcissistic, propounders of our own
opinions.
At the same time, let not the Trump win become another stick to beat
the liberal media, or indeed, an exercise in self-flagellation. Lets
not forget that many of us in this country did predict a Modi victory
in 2014 even if one may have had reservations over the brand of
politics he represented. Lets also not allow the toxic chamber of
social media’s cheerleading armies to push us on the defensive and
threaten a deeper commitment to truth-telling as journalists. So if
a politician like Trump revels in sexist remarks, espouses bigotry,
resorts to hate speech, they must be exposed journalistically. Our
liberal values must not colour our judgement on who is winning or
losing an election, but they must aid us to raise inconvenient questions and inform audiences on
on what is right and wrong. That is at the heart of being a
true journalist rather than a noisy propagandist.
Post-script: Last month, I interviewed under-graduate students in
Washington’s prestigious Georgetown University, the overwhelming
majority of whom were Clinton supporters. I immediately tweeted how
America’s millennials were with Clinton, forgetting a cardinal
principle: a presidential race is not a school monitor election, so
rushing to instant judgements based on small focus groups is injurious
to professional health!
