Indian Media: Humpty Dumpty Had A Great Fall
By Prabhat Sharan
15 December, 2010
The Verdict Weekly
Like the nursery rhyme which alluded to the cannon of Royalists in
England, the media like the egg in the Lewis Carroll’s famous novel
“Through the Looking Glass,” has fallen from the wall atop where like
a clown it was cavorting, leaping and uttering inane and mindless
filth in the name of news.
Like any pop culture, the Indian media that had subliminally permeated
the culture, influencing the masses without any responsibility is now
going through doldrums; it has caught fever when the society finally
sneezed.
The media- a Dali clock with a distorted face and hologram hands,
changing and altering truth to keep up with the corporate interests
24 hours and never telling the correct time, is now finding its cogs
rotting, disintegrating and spinning away in the lies of its creation.
It is thrashing in the death throes. And death throes sometimes
manifest in infantile desperation of clinging to the ebbing of life in
a surrealistic lunacy. This is what is happening with the Indian
corporate establishment media.
The recent scandalous behavior of hacks strutting as journalists in
the corporate establishment media is not just confined to the crawling
in front political elite as imbecile conduits. The crawling is there
in every socio-economic sphere which it proclaims to mirror.
The behaviour depicted by the Indian media in recent times has made
the study of the renegades and sychophancy of brown babus in
pre-British era redundant. The reason: Indian media is enacting out
the roles in real time and today’s generation does not need to delve
into the past to find out the behaviour of such renegades through whom
the imperialists controlled the Indian sub-continent for over 200
years.
The postulate that India never got its freedom was never more, truer
than in today’s India. The corporate media if at all is reflecting or
mirroring a reality, than it is certainly doing a good job of
presenting the sub-conscious desire of the Indian ruling class
desperation to gain acceptance and serve, neo-imperialists nation.
A case in point is the adulation and going overboard, sometime back by
the Indian media on the visit of USA President Barrack Obama or for
that matter Oscar winning streak of British film Slumdog Millionaire.
The gushing over this film winning awards resonated, the desperation
and servility towards neo-colonial nations run by corporate dictators.
The brouhaha over the movie which ironically was far from the tragic
truth of tales of people living in the hovels, fighting against all
odds chucked at them by an exploitative system in India, showed the
slave mentality of the Indian media.
It also showed the western neo-colonialist controlled Indian corporate
media desperation to infuse the superiority and the cultural hegemony
arising out of the neo-liberal economics of USA.
The game played out in the British controlled Indian sub-continent was
and is again, being played out. Of course, from the point of USA, the
conferring of awards to a movie made by a British company and directed
by an English film director on a topic of poverty may have been a
sub-conscious act of catharsis for the economically battered
Americans.
But then the Indian media’s enthusiasm stemmed from a purely servile
desperation of a slave jumping in joy on being thrown crumbs by the
master.
And herein lies the fact; the reins of the establishment media, is now
controlled by corporate conglomerates.
In America mass media subtly controls the minds of the masses through
news media and features films glamourising consumerism and life styles
of the rich. It overtly and covertly controls and manipulates
thoughts, desires and opinions from politics to physical beauty. After
all, monies are involved, and for corporates, people are just
commodity from whom profits have to be extracted.
Cult rock singer Jim Morrison once said that to control media means to
control the minds of the masses. And this is what the Indian corporate
media post-orthodox economic structural adjustment, embarked 1990s
onwards.
Neo-Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci in his study on Mussolini’s
fascism said that the ruling class likes to control the cultural
symbols and through that they control the people by making them accept
an exploitative system as a part of their lives. The ruling class uses
cultural symbols and accord them legitimacy only to infuse feelings of
inferiority into the minds of the masses and then presents its own
cultural symbols as a superior form.
Thus consent for hegemony is manufactured. Noam Chomsky, the
linguistic philosopher in his brilliant study on the use of the media
by political and corporate conglomerates explicitly states that the
western media has nothing to do with the mirroring of the reality. In
fact, what it does is disseminate disinformation and packages a
twisted reality through a series of lies in the guise of impartial and
objective news reports.
But Indian corporate establishment media has gone many steps further
down. They have even thrown off the veneer of being objective. The
Indian media since 1990s has been desperately trying to legitimize the
advertising propaganda of the corporates as ‘main stream journalism.’
Nobody denies that from time immemorial journalism has always been
used to push and further particular political ideologies. But the
newspapers then never shied away from declaring their political
colour. The reader, thus, knew the footing on which the writing and
ideas were being churned out.
But the twentieth and twenty-first century media under the garb of
mission-oriented journalism, swims in the sludge and slosh of
corporate economics with a sole aim: to further corporate
totalitarianism. And since USA is the hub of corporate dictatorship,
the Indian media like a devoted court jester has always been trying to
be more loyal than the king.
And when a king showers praise or claps the court jokers are bound to
feel elated and this is what the Indian corporate media like a bunch
of jesters, is doing. Hiding the reality, legitimizing the
commodification of tales of starving bodies, trivializing the most
humane emotions and glorifying the ‘greed-for-capital,’ the Indian
corporate media is drilling a cynical, ‘taken-for-granted-desensitised-attitude,’
into the minds of the masses. A desperate attempt is being made to quell
the spark of rebel in embryonic stage; and thus such gushing of self-praise over the
condescending conferring of accolades from any neo-colonial corporate
controlled nation.
At the turn of the century, the Indian corporate media was gushing in
a similar manner over the winning of Miss Universe and Miss World.
Reams and reams of news print and photographs and time spaces in
television news bytes, were churned out with superlatives eulogizing
the emerging womanhood and beauty of Indian females. The western
corporate controlled cosmetic industry was keen to establish its
foothold in the sub-continent and change the very aesthetics of beauty
in the minds of Indian masses. Moreover, since Indian ruling class was
envisaging of making some of the centres in the sub-continent trading
hubs-like Shanghai, Singapore or Los Angeles- the rates of Indian
flesh also needed to be hiked up. The flesh pots were being hyped up
and the exploitative businesses of bodies were being eulogized as
‘hostess and escorts and theme parties.’
Nobody is denying that Indian females are beautiful but then nobody in
the Indian corporate media is answering as to how suddenly, nowadays,
not a single Indian female even manages to reach the runner-up
position in these contests. Ironically, these contests if analysed,
had always been nothing but an insult to a woman, reducing the concept
of beauty not just to a set of physical attributes but also to a
chalked out concept of physical beauty that is totally alien and
relative in different geo-social structures.
It was apparent that the move to crown some Indian females was carried
out at the behest of multi-national cosmetic industry which was
hell-bent on finishing off the local concepts of beauty and indigenous
cosmetic industry through cultural hegemony. The Indian corporate
media played the role of rag tag mercenaries for the corporate world
and this is what they continue to do; and then like jesters scream in
joy like a fizz from a soda water bottle whenever crumbs of accolades
are thrown at them only to find later, the bubbles of joy disappearing
in the empty space of derision and smirk. And, then “All the King’s
horses, And all the King’s men/ Couldn’t put Humpty together again.”
Prabhat Sharan is a Senior Journalist with interest in social, working
class, wild-life conservation, media, philosophical and literary
studies. He can be contacted at [email protected]
