Anyone who has been a witness to an election season is familiar how media plays a big role in shaping public opinion. The need to shape opinion and public discourse is at its highest since the stakes are high too. Elections, especially the magnitude of the one India witnessed in 2014 certainly has the capability to shape the destiny of a nation for the next several years. Given the significance of this, the media employs various strategies to shape the public opinion towards one political party or an ideology.

For those of you who have closely followed Narendra Modi’s election campaign in 2014 Lok sabha elections, will be familiar the extensive usage of social media, especially twitter and Facebook to engage the public and directly connect with the people. With 437 Rallies, 5827 Events, 3 Lakh Kilometers, it was a campaign on a scale that wasn’t seen in the history of Indian politics. What Narendra Modi achieved through his brilliant campaign strategy was to ensure the country didn’t see another coalition government at the center. It was huge and potentially a game changer.

What made this victory so significant was, it was for the first time the whole gang of media in Indian Mainstream Media were just stumped as to how they weren’t able to ‘contain’ this man in spite of their relentless efforts to label him as ‘Mass Murderer’ or ‘responsible for Gujarat 2002 riots’. An image (Gujarat 2002 riots) media tried to build and tag with Modi suddenly seemed to have been quashed!

But alas they had failed miserably! In spite of years of effort to ‘contain’ Narendra Modi, he had managed to pull off a spectacular victory. The people of India had voted for their leader with no ambiguity. This was truly a feat to achieve given the years of political witch hunting. It was the first step toward ‘Congress Mukt Bharat’.

The secret sauce!

However despite this spectacular victory and the subsequent wins in the state elections, BJP couldn’t continue its dream in state elections for a long time. There was some ‘narrative’ being slowly built up. Media and chattering class has been slowly ‘setting a new agenda’ for the days leading up Delhi elections. Delhi elections would prove to be the first speed break in BJP’s mission of ‘was as if the Media had finally found their secret sauce again! They had finally discovered a new way to influence public opinion, in spite of increasing social media presence!

1. Agenda Setting:

Agenda-setting theory is associated with Maxwell McCombs & Donald Shaw (1972).

Premise:  Media does not tell us what to think, but rather what to think about.

Evidence: Mass media have not been proven effective in determining how audiences will accept opinions and point of view in media reports. But mass media are effective in determining what audiences see as newsworthy. By the issues they cover, media can legitimize a story or marginalize either the entire story or certain aspects of it.

• Case in question: Delhi church attacks

Let’s sample how certain Indian media outlets like NDTV, The Hindu, etc and international media outlets of the likes of BBC, NY Times, International Business Times, Deutsche Welle (Germany’s international broadcaster), NPR churned out article after article about the church attacks. All of them in the time frame of December 2014 – February 2015. In the days running up to Delhi elections the media reported all incidents of church attacks as a pre-meditated effort to target the churches without bothering to get to the real cause of these attacks. They were cleverly indicating that these attacks were all communal in nature and politically motivated. Even Barack Obama issued a statement calling for religious intolerance in India.

Photo courtesy: India Times

It’s very crucial to note the timing of this sudden uproar in media on increasing intolerance on Christians and church. Watch how this amplifies almost at the same time as the Delhi elections. It is almost as if this ‘outrage’ was just ‘manufactured’ to work well with the Delhi assembly election schedule.

Photo courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delhi_Legislative_Assembly_election,_2015

In hind sight, the ‘agenda’ might seem to be too obvious for anyone to see, but imagine consuming these reports almost every other day in the news during those days. The objective of this ruthless publishing of church attack articles was served. Media had just pulled off a successful ‘agenda setting’ stint by cleverly bringing significant importance to an issue (church attack, in this case).

The outcome of such relentless churning had to pay off and it did. Here’s what finally happened in Delhi assembly elections. What the media had managed to do was to make an issue salient in the minds of the viewers and built an opinion on a subject which was totally devoid of facts. Sadly, the facts after investigation proved otherwise. Another article here also shows Delhi police reports proved that these attacks didn’t have any communal angle to them!

2. Priming

Priming theory draws on political science research of Shanto Iyengar, Mark Peters & Donald Kinder (1982).

Premise: Media provide a context for public discussion of an issue, setting the stage for audience understanding.

Evidence: The amount of time and space that media devote to an issue make an audience receptive and alert to particular themes. Likewise, audience perception of events is impacted by historical context with which they are familiar (through experience or through media).

• Case in question: Dadri Lynching – Rising intolerance and  Award Wapsi

After the successful outcome of its agenda setting, some media outlets were keen on picking other story which would help build the narrative they had started. The narrative of rising intolerance took a new shape with the unfortunate event when Akhlaq, a Muslim ironsmith was lynched by a mob in Dadri. This time, it was the Muslim community (another minority) that was under attack! This time around, the influence of public opinion was primarily to prove that secularism in India is suddenly under threat.

An excerpt from the article published by The Hindu is provided below.

Watch the usage of words used in the excerpt above, under the name of facts mixed with exaggeration. The article here and here prove beyond doubt that the excerpt above is anything but facts!

With each passing event, the sophistication of the methods adopted by media only increased. While the earlier style of churning article after article from both Indian media outlets like this one from The Indian Express and International media like Time, NY Times, etc continued, a new approach was adopted. It was ‘Award Wapsi’. This incident was used thoroughly to maintain the image certain media outlets wanted to be alive in the memory of Indian public. This so called outrage on rising intolerance had several takers in the literary community (mainly the left liberals) and few from the film fraternity. This ‘campaign’ (as revealed recently here by Nayantara Sehgal) was given prime time coverage by the media. All of them seem to be hand in glove. Reports of someone like Aamir Khan vouching for rising intolerance only made the agenda look real. Again, the issue was kept alive right through the Bihar assembly election and possibly few days after, just to appear as not a pre-meditated campaign!

Photo courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bihar_Legislative_Assembly_election,_2015

Like the earlier incident of Delhi church attacks, the real beneficiary of this rising intolerance debate and using Dadri lynching incident (which had nothing to do with banning beef) was the alliance of Maha Ghatbandhan which registered a convincing win in the Bihar elections in 2015. Media had managed to successfully keep another topic alive, just long enough to further its agenda of showing minorities in India as a persecuted community!

A detailed fact finding article throws light on the actual facts of Dadri lynching.

3. Framing

Source: Framing theory attributed to Erving Goffman (1974), drawing on work in economics.

Premise: Media provide a focus and environment for reporting a story, influencing how audiences will understand or evaluate it.

Evidence: Framing theory deals with social construction on two levels:

• Perception of a social phenomenon by journalists presenting news
• Interpretation of that phenomenon by audiences

Framing provides a rhetorical analysis of the text (an issue, or the reporting of the issue) to identify perception and/or interpretation. It involves the use of metaphor, spin, storytelling, jargon, word choice, and other narrative elements. Framing has been called an exercise in power (who tells the story first) and persuasion (manipulation of audiences).

• Case in question: Sabarimala Temple case – Violation of right to worship of woman?

The recent stories covering Sabarimala temple by the media seem to suggest the discrimination towards woman at the place of worship. Although this has been reported in the garb of ‘equality for women’ and their ‘right to pray’, the real issue seems to target something else. The effort has been to prop up these stories to show Hinduism as a religion with regressive practices, something which is not acceptable in a 21^st century democracy. A very detailed account of the history and tradition of Sabarimala has been well written here on MyInd.net which tries to answer the rationale behind such customs at Sabarimala temple.

Here’s a quick update on the Sabarimala case. “Taking a swipe at religious customs and temple entry restrictions violating women's constitutional rights, the Supreme Court on Monday said no temple or governing body can bar a woman from entering the famous Sabarimala shrine in Kerala where lakhs of devotees throng annually to worship. “Why can you not let a woman enter? On what basis are you prohibiting women entry? What is your logic? Women may or may not want to go (to worship at Sabarimala), but that is her personal choice,” Justice Dipak Misra, who headed a three-judge Special Bench, pulled up the Travancore Devaswom Board, which manages the shrine.

Further details on the case can be read here.

These events in isolation may appear as a genuine effort to fight against inequality towards women. But when looked in the context of other religions where similar customs and restrictions exist, the selective reporting by media to highlight a case pertaining to Hindu place of worship convince us of their ulterior motives. A very detailed account of the ‘conversion war’ and ‘religious freedom’ is documented here. Sample this excerpt from the article above to get a sense of how well funded these agenda driven movements are. An excerpt of the article below shows it’s not a level playing ground to have a fair debate on these topics.

Given that the media has now been adopting these strategies to peddle its agenda, the question now arises as to how one should be prepared to fight this?

One such solution seems be increasing the influence of social media exposure to the still largely ‘un –reached’ population in India. Although the strategies which once worked very well for Narendra Modi in winning the 2014 elections, don’t quite seem to work the same way. The scale of public outreach through campaigns or public rallies cannot be applied to communicate with public on issues of governance. They call for a totally different model of communication.

Although efforts like Mann ki Baat, Narendra Modi mobile App, etc have been getting favorable responses, but the government needs to discover more effective channels of communication so that it can disseminate the information about all the good things it’s doing to the public. The government needs to champion new ways to nip the misrepresentation of facts by media in the bud rather spend time in clarifying a false story.

There is a dire need to build narratives which challenge the false reports from certain media outlets and provide fact based rebuttals. Until this happens, we will only be victims of more agenda setting stints from these media outlets.