The media wish list for 2018

Less hate and fake news, a more growth-oriented ministry and a benchmark for the Indian media industry are my new year wishes

A dozen news channels in English, Hindi, Kannada and other languages actively spread hate and false information. Whether Rahul Gandhi saw a movie is more important than the distress at banks, stalling Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, unemployment, the burning and lynching of ordinary Indians or rising corruption. Scores of websites spread false news through WhatsApp, Facebook et al. My first new year wish then is that advertisers, investors and audiences should shun these in national interest.

There is a huge amount of concern (and research) globally about fake news, its amplification by social media and what it is doing to societies. Social media has become a magnet for psychopaths to come out of the closet. For long it was assumed that this didn’t matter because it is not indicative of violence on the ground. But that is no longer true. Many of the lynchings in India are a direct result of false, incendiary videos being circulated. This is true for the debate around Brexit in the UK or racism in the US. A toxic atmosphere of hate, violence and fear pervades several democracies and invariably the causes can be found online.

Now the EU, UK and even the US are breathing down the necks of Google, Facebook and others in their bid to combat hate speech. In India Boom, SMHoaxSlayer, Ministry of Facts or AltNews among others call out fake news. But largely there is either encouragement of hate brands by investing in them or tacit approval by ignoring their excesses. Yet, Padmavati, a film on a fictional queen, was banned by several state governments without seeing it. Last week a special panel of the Central Board of Film Certification cleared it for release with modifications.

And that brings me to my second wish. That we had a Ministry of Information and Broadcasting that had a growth-oriented view of India’s Rs 126,200-crore media and entertainment business which brings in 0.9 per cent of its GDP. That it understood how critical freedom is to creative industries. These industries need more screens, avenues for distribution and better monetisation not more censorship.

One film employs between 200 and 400 people directly and many more indirectly, creating millions of jobs and bringing in thousands of crores in taxes. About three-fourths of the Rs 14,230 crore that Indian films made in 2016 came from the box-office. Films could generate two-three times as much in jobs and taxes except that India is hopelessly under-screened. Against China’s 40,000 screens for 1.38 billion people, India has 9,000 for 1.2 billion people. Incidentally China was at the same screen level as India in 2011 when the state decided to push investment into building screens catapulting it to the world’s second largest film market.

But India has one advantage over China. It has a creatively robust local industry which dominates the market unlike the Hollywood-dominated China. Padmavati and other attacks on creative freedom chip away at this strength leading it down the same path as Pakistan which has no media industry to speak of. After liberalisation India has been recognised as a place that produces some of the world’s best managers, technologists, doctors and creative talent. To continue doing that it needs to have the same kind of freedoms that brought it up to this point. The freer a democracy the bigger, more profitable is its media industry, a la the US.

My third wish then is that we become more like the US media and entertainment industry where both news and entertainment industries bring in over 3.7 per cent of GDP, are huge employers and have an institutional back-up which ensures that freedom. If a talk show host in the US makes fun of the president he doesn’t have to worry about being arrested or his show being pulled off-air. Everything from the constitution, press bodies to the judiciary backs up his freedom.

To reach there India needs to be a well-functioning democracy that is secure enough to laugh at itself and examine its warts instead of turning on filmmakers or journalists who do either. But to be a well-functioning democracy it needs to have a totally free media and entertainment industry. What was that about the chicken and egg?

Let me shut my eyes and make the wishes anyway. Amen

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