Political Reporting in the Age of Modi and Trump

DAN GILLMOR - (US) journalist, author, professor,^Ξ Arizona State University:

I think the quality and the quantity of lies is unprecedented. The lies of the past - they weren't so relentless and they weren't about such big things. I think politicians tried in the past not to get caught lying. Today they don't care about being caught. The goal is to persuade the public that the truth is wrong and that the lie is the truth. This is how authoritarian regimes work, and dictatorships, and cults do that stuff right. And dictators require cults to operate. And yeah, we're in some pretty deep shit on this.

KALPANA SHARMA - (India) freelance^Ξ, formerly of Indian Express, Times of India, The Hindu:

I think that fear of being arrested is a very real one because, if you get arrested, then they'll slap on this anti-terror law. And some of these people have been picked up under this terrible law, which doesn't give them bail; they've been locked up all these years. So it's terrifying to be a dissident, to write critically, to promote your point of view, which you should be able to in a democracy. So yeah it's very dire in that sense, it's become worse in the last 10 years.

WILL BUNCH - (US) political columnist, Philadelphia Inquirer:^Ξ

More journalists were, I think, arrested last year than any time [in US history]. And that was because of the Gaza protests. Certainly, the way journalism was restricted and cracked down on is a preview of what could happen in a fascist-style America, if Trump gets returned to the office.

VIKHAR AHMED SAYEED - (India) deputy editor, Frontline^Ξ magazine:

In my own province of Karnataka, a very bold and fearless journalist, a critic of Narendra Modi and the BJP’s (Bharatiya Janata Party) divisive identity politics was assassinated in 2017, Gauri Lankesh.^Ξ Look her up and you'll get a sense of what her journalism represented, and why she was murdered—or rather—assassinated.

NARESH FERNANDES - (India) editor-in-chief, Scroll.in,^Ξ formerly of Times of India, Wall Street Journal, Time Out India:

This government has completely shut down whistleblowing, so that kind of thing has really disappeared. This government hates data. For the first time in a century, we haven't done our census, for instance. It massages the numbers so it can present a false picture to people.

India was the pride of the third world and the developing world—a model in our statistical systems. All of that has been completely gutted. Even the official comptroller and auditor general, [who’s] supposed to do this work of looking at the government's accounting and spending, barely produces the number of reports it used to. And people in government don't leak. It's become very difficult to even access—they’ve physically restricted access to government offices, to parliament. So yeah, we're talking a different level here.

SAYEED: Mainstream media in India is completely in awe of Modi. They worship Modi. This is very vigorously seen in television, where news channels are competing with each other to appear to be more servile to Modi and his administration. This trend conspicuously began in 2014 when Modi was elected to his first term. The entire television media capitulated to and became his fans rather than critical conscientious journalists.

FERNANDES: Y’all have one Fox news. We've got…every channel is Fox news.

Every time an American tells me all things are really bad in America—you have no idea. In America, your institutions hold, your institutions work the way they're supposed to work. It was all those Republicans who refused to do what Trump wanted in all those small towns where he tried to fix the vote and other states.

In India, everything now walks lockstep with the institutions that are supposed to be independent, and often even the courts, sometimes all the way up to the highest levels.

SHARMA: They have already put forward what is called a broadcasting services bill.^Ξ So earlier, the news channels that came through cable had to register with the government, with the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. And they could be regulated in the sense the government could object to some content that they felt was either misleading, or fake, or liable to create a problem, and they could be asked to take that content down. They could even shut down one of these channels for a short time. Now what they've done is anybody, any content creator who does news-related content, has to register. So these YouTubers, for instance.

We have a lot of news channels on YouTube now, which are not regular news channels. They are independent journalists who have stepped out of mainstream media and started their own—and they're hugely popular in the Indian languages. And people now watch all these things on their phone. Nobody sits down to watch the news, right?

So they are the ones that would be in trouble now because if the bill goes through, they will have to register with the ministry, which means the ministry will then have the power to tell the social media intermediary, like YouTube, or Facebook, or wherever they're posting it, to take it down because it's against some rule that the government has.

So there's a big fight, a pushback, against it. But, to me, the very fact that this government, despite the fact that it has not got a majority on its own, is still pushing ahead with this is an indication that its attitude towards having a free and independent media as an important aspect of democracy has not changed. It does not believe in it.

[This bill has since been withdrawn. New legislation regulating online content creation is expected.^Ξ]

FERNANDES: [The oppression of journalists] has meant tax raids against a lot of people. They use tax law in an inventive way. And in India, as they say, the process is the punishment. Things take forever to actually be resolved or not resolved. They hang forever; it takes a lot of work.

People are afraid to voice support, and even more afraid to put their money where their thoughts are because tax law is used to great punitive effect.

LAKSHMI CHAUDHRY - (India) founder of Splainer.in,^Ξ formerly of In These Times, Alternet, The Nation:

There's no money in this country for media. If people shut down, it won't be because of free speech or whatever, it may be because of money, because there's nobody here who wants to fund news. It's too risky. It certainly doesn't make money these days, right?

Indians are not willing to pay for news. They're amongst the lowest in the world. So you have all these wonderful independent digital media outlets, but the thing is, who's going to pay the bills?

The other thing the government has done, if you are a nonprofit, typically you're being funded by funds abroad, right? In order to receive funding from abroad, you need to have something called a FCRA license. They can take the license away, and that's what they've done. They've gone to all the leading nonprofits, all the foundations and the think tanks and just yanked their license so they don't have funding, right? They're very smart. They go after the money. It's not illegal. They just say, “Oh, violated foreign exchange rules, blah, blah.”

SHARMA: NGOs that have been working on issues of human rights, for instance, their funding sources have dried up. So the ability to organize and also do research—all this has gone off and is much less than it was 10 years ago. So if you see the whole picture for us journalists, quite often, if we can't ourselves go and check something out, we often depend on some of these research groups, who go into the initial research, which we can then follow up on. But now with that happening, it's really vast areas that are not being reported on. We just don't know what's happening.

FERNANDES: The BJP has a propaganda wing that it bizarrely calls the “IT cell,” as if there's some sort of information technology involved with it. But all they're actually doing is paying troll farms. And that can be quite intimidating if you haven't faced it before. I just block a lot of people, but for a lot of journalists, it can really get to you. And there have been other journalists killed in India^Ξ just by people who didn't like stories they have done.

So there's a high…it's a high risk profession.

BUNCH: India seems to be a few years ahead of where we’re heading, where what starts with manipulation of the media eventually reaches a tipping point and becomes control of the media.

GILLMOR: I think it's the inevitable result of where we're going, unless the voters say no. And look, given the trajectory we're on, it's a matter of time before prominent American journalists are at physical risk.

It starts with people with less power carted off. I was going to say a New York Times reporter—when they're doing almost nothing but normalizing the extremists—(but) I don't think they're the ones to get carted off. That's less likely immediately, but it's certainly foreseeable at some point if things go as badly as they might.

BUNCH: It seems like here in the big newsrooms, in the United States, there's a total lack of imagination as to what could happen. Nobody seems to believe that they themselves could actually be arrested, or if not arrested, at least be audited by Trump's IRS, or sued by these conservative front groups. [They would] have to spend their day defending themselves in court, instead of reporting; all the ways journalists can be hassled and tied up and restrained from doing their jobs.

SAYEED: During his campaign in March and April, [Modi] demonstrated a remarkable prejudice against India's Muslims. The brazenness of his statements shocked many people who heard them, voters in India primarily. Muslims have been citizens of India since the foundation of the Republic in 1950, since India's independence in 1947, and have historically had a presence in South Asia and in the Indian geographical space. But on April 20th, in an election campaign speech, Modi referred to Muslims as infiltrators. And so that was quite, uh, problematic. I'm putting it mildly. I think it was quite shocking for a prime minister who's sworn an oath on the constitution of India, a constitution that guarantees freedom of religion to make these kinds of aggressive, vituperative statements. Targeting the largest religious minority in the country was very condemnable. So yeah, that is one parallel perhaps with Trump, although, I don't think even someone like Trump would get away by making such a comment in America.

SHARMA: I think one can say safely that amongst the better off Hindus, especially the trading classes, they have always responded to the BJP, even before it became BJP and it was called Jan Sangh. Because I think their worldview coincided with that of the BJP—that this is a Hindu country. And everybody else in this country ought to be grateful that they're here.

Generally, businesses are happy with the Modi government because they feel it's pro-business, and they fear that if anybody else comes in they will give more emphasis to equity and social justice.

GILLMOR: I think corporate America—despite claims that they don't like Trump—their money is all going, most of it anyways, to Republicans who are the Trump cult.

BUNCH: Trump's been coming to this area a lot because Pennsylvania is such a key swing state. He had a rally about two months ago in this area. Everybody talked to me; nobody yelled at me for being in the media. They weren't super friendly, but they were willing to tell me what was on their mind. And what was on their mind was just utterly living inside a bubble of disinformation.

It was just impossible to have a conversation with these people. Nothing in their world view is grounded to what's actually happening. You know: “we have the worst economy ever,” “unemployment is terrible,” “gas prices—” which have been going down for the last two years, “—are unaffordable,” “climate change doesn't exist.” And they're at a rally with 10,000 people who all think the same way. They drove up there listening to talk radio, hearing those views thrown back at them by the hosts or the other callers. They'll go home tonight and watch highlights of the rally on Fox News. They're just in a total bubble and there's no way to pierce it.

SHARMA: I think there's not enough of a constituency that appreciates the need for a free press, except for those of us who are already in the trade who make a noise and write about it and agitate. You don't find enough sympathy around you, because people are quite cynical about the news. They don't believe it. They're more willing to believe some of the nonsense that goes around on WhatsApp than to believe what I write or somebody else writes or what appears in the media.

I'm constantly meeting perfectly intelligent people who will say things to me, and I’ll ask, “where did you get this information from?” And I discover that it's from WhatsApp or something. And I say, “Do you read the newspapers? Do you read anything?” It is not even based on one semblance of fact. And as I said, these are educated middle class people, and that is a frightening thing.

CHAUDHRY: I used to walk in the park, my driver taking me there and dropping me off, and there were these people shouting about free speech. And I said, “What do you think?” He says, “God it’s stupid.” Because what does he care about free speech? He cares about the fact that he can't get running water, educating his kid so that she doesn't have to be working poor. He has so many priorities that come before free speech.

I'm sure it's true even in America. Someone who's working at McDonald's, their first priority is not free speech. Probably healthcare comes 20 spots ahead of free speech.

CHAUDHRY: I do think one of the reasons why the rates of news avoidance are climbing every year, which I think we should be the most worried about because it's people who actively, consciously avoid the news, is because of this kind of way in which they're spoken to in news. I find it permeates everything, The New York Times too, there is a certain tone of like moral outrage, or righteous indignation, or whatever you want to call it. And I just don't know if people respond to that anymore.

I mean you have to imagine how exhausting it must be to do like, grueling work, not have any financial security, worry about climate change, raise your kids. Honestly, really, someone is shouting at you and saying, “Oh, look, this person is so terrible.” Yeah. Of course, it's terrible.

GILLMOR (via his newsletter^Ξ): Most of our journalists are doing a terrible job. This is terrifying, because the 2024 elections could be the last gasp for liberal democracy and basic human rights, including freedom of speech, in America. If you get your news from our major media organizations, you aren't getting the full story on the danger.

BUNCH: The typical elite journalist is a person of the center left on social issues. Gay rights or whatever—they're very liberal, right? But as a result, they're terrified of being called liberals because they think that will undermine them. And it's a fear based on the fact that “I am liberal,” or “I do vote for Democrats, and I don't want people to really think that I'm biased.” So the natural human nature is to go the other direction. And bend people over backwards to show favoritism to conservatives on the right, to show that they're not liberals and they're not biased.

So like, fascism is a classic example. I don’t want to sound like a hysterical left-wing person on Twitter. So, as a professional journalist, I’ll come up with some other term. I’ll call it “ultra conservatism,” or something like that. I don’t want to call it fascism because then people won’t take me seriously.

I think the mealymouthed nature of so much of journalism—not using the real hard-hitting terms to describe what's happening—it deadens. It causes those alarm bells not to go off. And you don't want to pull a false alarm. But when there's a real fire, you need to pull the alarm. In this case with what's happening with the fascist republican platform. It's time to pull the alarm.

GILLMOR: The things that are failing us today are not new in any sense because it's happened again and again. The form of journalism we’ve been practicing is a sort of “get both sides.” The slavish devotion to quoting both sides on an issue falls down when one of them is brazenly lying. And then that practice becomes malpractice. It's a norm that had a certain amount of usefulness, though it was never ideal. And I think journalists have always known, or should have always known, that reality is more nuanced than two equal sides.

MELANIE EVERSLEY - (US) executive editor, Black News and Views,^Ξ formerly The Grio, USA Today, Fortune, the Root:

There was a case involving a young black woman named Tawana Brawley. She claimed to have been beaten and raped by several white men and she said one, at least one, had a badge.

As an intern with New York Newsday, one of my jobs was just to sit on the curb and watch the church and see if anybody ever came out. Not much happened. Looking back now I could definitely say that what evolved was a media circus and didn't really serve the story. I was one of many people just sitting on curbs around the city waiting for any of the players involved in this story to come outside and say something. There was, I would say, less of a focus on “let's just go up there and try to find somebody who really saw what happened and who could really talk about it.” We were all wrapped up in, “Let's see if the three lawyers who were involved in the case—let's see if they come outside and say anything at all,” the press conference.

I feel like we were a little bit too tight to what the official statement was rather than digging for the real story. I got to see the story from beginning to end. And I have to say still, I think that the way people were practicing journalism back then didn't really serve us.

SHARMA: It's coalesced because of the kind of government we've had for the last 10 years, but the change actually began with what we call the Murdoch-ization of the Indian media.

A younger generation took over and they decided that they wanted to turn The Times Group into a profit center. You're familiar with it in the US, but it meant that news was anything that could sell their product, which was their brand, whether it was the magazine, which was part of their group, or the newspaper.

And later, because we had no restrictions on cross-media ownership in India, the same group also started a television channel, both in English and in Hindi, and they have radio stations, and they're also very big on the internet now because they were one of the first to digitize. And other newspapers obviously began to follow that example.

The whole idea of news, that you cover everything, was turned on its head to news that will sell.

SHARMA (continued): So it's a combination. And then of course, you have this government come in 10 years ago in 2014, the Modi government, which was not just media savvy, but also wanted to make sure that media toed the line—that nothing critical came in about its policies, that the opposition did not get the space that they wanted in the media. And so they began to turn the screws on the newspapers that were trying to do at least a balancing act. So if you study the newspapers of the last 10 years, you will see this decline.

SAYEED: In one single media house, under that umbrella, several news channels function. And so over the past two decades, someone like Mr. Paranjoy Guha Thakurta has showed how [mainstream media] has consolidated under very few individuals who are close to the BJP. Because BJP’s political economic system, their system of governance has been described as being anchored by a crony capitalist and neoliberal nexus with majoritarian tendencies, right? So they thrive on funding and support from big money.

FERNANDES: See, the fact is that some of India's biggest corporations work hand in glove with the government. They can just tap the shoulder of their friends in high places and get them to act on their behalf.

BUNCH: The media wasn't well-equipped to handle the rise of Donald Trump. The media seems — surprisingly, given everything we know now—poorly equipped to handle the second rise of Trump.

GILLMOR: Journalists have been flailing around trying to respond [to right-wing politicians spreading misinformation]. It was reasonable for a long time to try to protect the old norms, in a sense. I think journalists have never wanted to get out of that comfort zone of thinking that they can quote two sides to an issue and their job’s done, thank you very much.

But it's completely clear that, in a time when actual reality is denied by a significant part of the population and in one entire political party, the old framings, the old norms, are done.

SAYEED: In this situation, social media has come to the aid of rigorous anti-establishment journalism. Trump is using social media to reach the voters directly, his campaign team, etc. But in India, what has aided the opposition against Modi to cohere, to consolidate has been social media activism led by independent content creators.

Dhruv Rathee has led a very fearless, rigorously researched campaign against the BJP through his [YouTube channel], and he makes some very slick videos which are edited very well. So he's used social media very well, even his subscribers on YouTube are perhaps, I don't know, I reckon there must be 25 million at least.

CHAUDHRY: So the latest Reuters digital report shows 82 percent of Indians watch at least one news video on YouTube every week. That's a huge number. Though the most kind of subversive, like Ravish Kumar, for about whom there's the documentary—he's on YouTube. He left the big TV channels, the whole bunch of them.

BUNCH: Changing the mindset is hard. But there is an awareness that it needs to be done, which is the first step. And I'm not totally pessimistic about it. Before 2024 is out, I might be making my first TikTok, so I should be—that's the thing about journalists, most journalists, our goal is to reach people wherever they are. [You’ve] just got to adapt. People in my generation, the internet didn't exist when we were coming up and there was no such thing as page views and it's like, you just wanted to get on the front page.

I think people want to be informers of people. They want to change the conversation and, at the risk of sounding naive, in some sense yeah, change the world through journalism. And putting those words on a printed page isn't going to do it anymore.

So how do you reach people if you want to change the world? I think that conversation is going on. I really do.

EVERSLEY: We learned the basics, that there are two sides to every story, you have to be objective. The old school lessons. I've since learned that's not necessarily the case, and maybe isn't useful.

Whether you like it or not, everybody has an opinion. The trick is being able to go into a news story and tell both sides with that opinion. And in fact, I think it helps to have a passion about something, because you're going to tell that side of the story with a bit more passion than somebody else who doesn't really care about that issue. So I think the old school lessons of just, “tell both sides and that's all you have to do.” That's obsolete.

I did have one professor, his name was Richard Kozak, who said, “You know that stuff about, ‘tell that side, tell that side,’ that’s a bunch of bunk.” It’s not necessarily that you have to take a side, but you got to use the facts that you are able to uncover to show people what the reality is, and then that should help them make their decision. I feel like that was the closest to reality and that was really helpful.

Tell the truth, but do the best job that you can of telling the truth and showing how you arrived at that truth.

FERNANDES: We face no restrictions. All the restrictions are in your mind. The chilling effect works only if you choose not to put on a sweater. They attempt to create a climate of fear, but you can choose not to be scared. I tell young people this is the time at which journalism is needed more than ever. And all it takes is the ability to type, a mind to think, and a spine to keep upright.