A media role in Modi's success?
At first we were in denial and now we seem to be opting for lazy analysis to explain the most probable outcome. Many commentators are already looking for explanations other than the obvious one—by and large the people of India, especially in the north, appear to have been persuaded by Modi-led BJP's agenda of better governance and development presented with a tint of Hindutva.
The opponents do not want to accept this and are suggesting that the news media should be given credit for Modi-led BJP's good performance in this election. Additionally, it is being suggested that the BJP's performance must be attributed to thousands of crores spent by the party in a media blitzkrieg or mass propaganda. All those who are saying that TV has made difference are ignoring the scale of the ground campaign run by Modi, which was much larger than any other party. I will come back to the media blitzkrieg later.
Not surprisingly, many commentators have latched on to the report from the Centre for Media Studies, just out, which found that in TV's prime time coverage Modi got significantly more air time than Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal. It was about 33 percent on Modi, about 10 percent on Kejriwal, and only about 4 percent for Gandhi. In the last phase of election it went up to 40 percent for Modi.
Understanding the value of a systematic media content analysis, however, I suggest we should not read too much in to these numbers. Why am I saying this? One, overwhelming finding of studies on coverage and content has found that, by itself, news media's effect on political attitudes and voting behavior is very limited. The news media plays an amplifying role and in the absence of an on-the-ground campaign and mobilisation it has limited or no significant effect.
Two, we cannot ignore the context of the prime time TV coverage. A large segment of the Modi-centric air time was dominated by criticism of Modi and discussion of a genuine fear among minorities. The BJP tried to shift the debate away from secularism-communalism debate to governance-development debate in the prime time news media, but failed. Mostly because on most news panel debates the BJP spokespersons were outnumbered by Modi critics, often the debates ended up focusing on polarisation and Modi as a divisive figure. For news media, especially television, personality centric coverage is cheap to produce and easy to sell.
By doing this they were expressing genuine concerns, but in a way Modi-critics and political opponents, on TV, lost the opportunity to critically evaluate his development agenda and Gujarat model by focusing too much on polarization. There were many sophisticated articles in the newspaper on Gujarat model, but that analysis was not presented to non-reading public by the TV panel debates. The TV decided to focus its criticism on the clichéd secularism-communalism debate.
There is much to criticise in the Gujarat model of development, which is a sort of neo-liberal economics on steroid. Interestingly, while BJP's campaign was trumpeting the Gujarat model, at the same time, in the west the publication of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century was fostering a debate over how neo-liberal economic model had increased economic, social and political inequality in the world. Surprisingly, this debate did not diffuse in the Indian media.
Now let us briefly look at mass propaganda argument levelled against BJP. Propaganda and persuasion both exploit symbols and imagery embedded in a culture, but propaganda depends on avoiding deliberation on the issues by blocking alternative sources of information. The archetypical case was Nazi and Communist propaganda that succeeded by blocking alternative sources of information. This was not the case in this election. Sources of alternative information were many and debates were very vigorous.
Moreover, a problem with the propaganda model is that it shows disrespect to voters. The voters can be swayed by framing a persuasive argument to produce a desired shift in attitudes, but to say that the voters were swayed by propaganda is problematic. I will suggest that rather than understanding BJP's campaign from perspective of propaganda model, a better explanation can be found by looking at a communication model of political persuasion in light of mass marketing and ground campaign.
The media consultants working for BJP/Modi campaign have been quite open about their methodology and overall strategy. They seem to have followed the theory of Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC). Additionally, they repurposed 'brand marketing' techniques, used in the arena product marketing, political marketing and campaigning. The BJP's campaign in the mass media and social media was supplemented by an on the ground campaign, which made it effective. The campaign presented Narendra Modi as the product, the idea, the vision and the credible spokesperson.
India Today’s Kunal Pradhan and Uday Mahurkar reported, "Over the last nine months, Modi has travelled 300,000 km, or seven times the Earth's equatorial circumference. He has attended 5,187 events, addressed 477 rallies in 25 states while sleeping barely five hours a night, and harnessed the Internet and mobile telephony to connect with an estimated 230 million people, or one in every four voters." (See the excellent reporting on the subject-Maximum Campaign).
The fact is that a large plurality, in a first past the post system, has voted for Modi-led BJP and the agenda of good governance and development. It would be a bad loser-argument if we fail to recognise that BJP/Modi have performed so well because in addition to ground campaign they used all types of mass media and social media tools to reach out to the voters, including virtual reality and telepresence by simultaneous broadcast of his speech to remote locations. A 21st century political campaign cannot be conducted using 20th century media tools—and all the political parties, National Election Commission and political observers must accept.
However, a serious issue to consider, going forward, is the amount of money that was spent by the BJP. The National Election Commission will have to look into it and see where a level playing field can be created without stopping the parties and candidates from running an effective campaign.