How TV sets govt’s agenda

I hate to admit it publicly, but for the last fortnight or so, ever since Parliament has been in session, I haven’t read my six daily newspapers very carefully. My day has begun much earlier and so I’ve just about had time to scan through the front pages. So it was in this quasi-ignorant state I discovered, that while I was busy running after runaway rail budgets and their errant authors, our country was going through a spot of swine flu trouble. When I probed deeper, I found that in just the last 20 days, 12 people had died of the virus and the reason I’d missed this news is because TV had not gone big on this story. We reported it but compared to the coverage of swine flu in 2009, and the death of Pune girl Reeda Sheikh, the large number of deaths this time has virtually gone unnoticed.

Now, most of you will probably start cussing the media on this — ‘Sensationalist press has no time for real issues,’ I’m sure some will say. But here’s what’s got me stumped — why hasn’t the government made even one public statement about swine flu? In Parliament, you see ministers rake up the smallest issues but not one has been about the roadmap to tackle the disease which is spreading in four states.

Is it possible that the government isn’t paying any attention to the H1N1 virus because no TV reporter wearing a hazmat suit has landed up in a remote part of India? Maybe it takes pointing on live TV towards unfortunate chicken culling to get the government to sit up and take notice. And while health ministry officials were pretty thrilled this time to be left alone to tackle the crisis, they do miss one happy by-product of TV cameras zooming on their backs — apparently, unlike in 2009, when people were rushing to get themselves screened at any trace of flu, the lack of hype this time around has meant, slower detection of the disease.

But more than any of these examples, it’s actually been the Norway foster care story that showed how TV’s become the agenda-setter for the government. You only had to watch the government scrambling backwards up the slippery slope of public opinion about the two unfortunate Indian children and their even more unfortunate parents, to figure that one out. Here’s how the government got caught in it and then lost the plot. The story broke at a perfect time — the lull between the dying storm of the Lokpal debate and the tempest of the yet-to-start budget session. It was a classic made-for-TV story and admittedly some of my colleagues got carried away with the whole brown-versus-white and cultural-versus-legal debate.  Now, I can see how the media can get it wrong with their limited resources in the form of a lone reporter being parachuted into alien Stavanger, and being blinded by the snow and what they deem to be public pressure favouring the migrant family against the villainous child services agency. This can easily be dismissed by the viewer, who will always have the option of switching off or changing channels. But does the government have the option of switching off its own mind and doing what TV says?

A friend who covers the external affairs ministry tells me the local embassy always knew the Bhattacharya case was a complex one, and that the diplomats had tried to tell South Block not to meddle in the case. But New Delhi, it seems, only had ears for what they heard on TV — from the pleas of the grandparents as they agitated outside the embassy, to the politicians and people who proclaimed their pathos in public. They blame the media now, but shouldn’t they have spent their time finding out the real story? We make so much noise about our intelligence gathering, so why weren’t R&AW operatives posted in Norway finding out the basic facts before the government issued one diplomatic threat after another?

They can blame the media and TV debates as much as they want, but this case exemplifies a classic failing of this government. Formerly too arrogant or complacent to respond to the media, they are now letting our studios decide their issues. My insider friend says it all started sometime last year, when Anna Hazare burst into the scene and the UPA read him all wrong. That’s when they lost their confidence, that’s when they felt they got the public sentiment wrong and that’s when they outsourced their agenda-setting to us. For elections, I have done a show called ‘follow the leader’ but it’s a bit unnerving to suddenly see leaders following us.