<b>Vanita Kohli-Khandekar:</b> Media and the rise of the right wing

Is the right wing-enabled spurt in liberal media's audience and revenue numbers for real?

Has Donald Trump and his right-wing ilk across the world managed to undo the damage that the internet had wreaked on news media? 

CNN, say reports, could end up making a $100 million over and above what it makes in a typical election year in 2016. In the last quarter of the same year The New York Times added 276,000 digital-only news subscribers taking the total (for digital) to 1.85 million. This was more than all of 2013 and 2014 and its best quarter since digital went pay in 2011. That seems to be happening in the UK, US and parts of Europe. For newspapers, magazines and cable networks (especially liberal ones) struggling with falling audiences and revenues, the rise of the right-wing seems like good news. 

Cambridge University’s John Naughton is an authority on the evolution of the internet and its impact on society, with several books and many research projects to his name. “I’m sceptical about the label ‘liberal’,” he says. “Most of the US news outlets now labelled ‘liberal’ supported the Iraq war. In the short run outbreaks of right-wing populism may give a temporary boost to mainstream media. Longer term, the decline will probably continue.”  

George Brock, professor of journalism, City University, London, agrees. “A year of political shocks in Europe and the US has boosted some liberal media in some places — for example The New York Times,” he says. “But it is almost impossible to generalise. And it is likely to be temporary: When the unthinkable occurs, many consumers of news turn to established media (often liberal in outlook) to find out more.”

Last year, in a piece for The Guardian, Naughton traced the impact of the internet on democratic politics. The first-order effects were seen earlier on in the millennium when the Net was used to raise money from thousands of small donors or to mobilise voters a la Barrack Obama. The second-order effects were its use to mobilise large-scale collective action, as in the Arab Spring. He quotes Helen Margetts of the Oxford Internet Institute and her colleagues from their book, Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action. It argues that the internet lowered the transaction costs for engaging in political activity creating a new kind of “turbulent”, fast-moving, unpredictable politics. Trump has leveraged this turbulence to make the internet a powerful enabler of post-truth politics. 

India just leapfrogged to the turbulent phase without the preamble. It doesn’t take much to publish or air any kind of lie about a person or threaten rape and violence. The Net has become a potent and dangerous tool for political parties in India. Read Swati Chaturvedi’s I am a Troll, for a sense of how social media is harnessed by the ruling party. But it hasn’t led to more business for media in India. Newspaper, TV or internet growth numbers are as usual. What it has done is polarise debate hugely, bringing ugliness into drawing rooms and TV studios. 

However, the only countries where this ugliness pushes people to react by using their wallets to support liberal media are the ones where the institutional framework that supports free speech is strong. This is true for the US and parts of Europe. So in spite of a president who treats mainstream media as “opposition”, large parts of the US media do their jobs without fear. Watch John Oliver or Stephen Colbert lampoon Trump mercilessly on prime-time television. As an Indian journalist you wonder why there haven’t been income tax raids, enforcement directorate notices, and accusations of anti-nationalism or some muck-raking through unnamed intelligence sources, against them. Either that or self-censorship to the point of abject alignment with the state’s point of view, which a portion of the Indian media is now showing.  

Brock says of the Western world: “Most of the boosted circulations are in countries where the risk of screws being turned is slight. But if the euro were to collapse, the migration crisis were to get worse and terrorist attacks were to continue, then political complexions would change. That can mean authoritarian governments, which do not enjoy liberal journalism, could act on the dislike — as it occurred in Turkey.” 

The growth spurt, it seems, is a flash in the pan.

Twitter: @vanitakohlik