Author: mxmadmin

 

 

By Ranjona Banerji

Happy Diwali!

Why not write about Diwali, said the Editor.

Unspoken subtext: instead of your usual ranting and raving.

So I dumped the rant and looked around me.

For years, Diwali coverage in the media walked along a few set routes:

What people could do, what they should do, what they wanted to do, what others wanted them to do, what the market wanted and how expectations matched reality.

However, as media-owners got greedier, they refused to allow their journals and platforms to mention any retail outlets, food, clothes and so on, because they felt that they could earn ad revenue from them. This meant that the platform could not present a reasonable guide to readers and even worse, that small outlets got left out because they could not afford advertising rates.

And the consumer, of news and information, also got left out. No help to make informed choices was available any more.

Much has changed from those early days of course.

Tech rules your life, bombards you with deals and tries every trick to get you to spend, using all the info about your likes and dislikes that it has stored and exploited.

But you are still left without anyone to sift through, to give you opinion and ratings, to review what’s available. So your mind is scrambled by choice, but once again it depends on who paid the tech giant the most.

You can no longer search for anything without getting sponsored options showing up as well as shopping sites.

The other stories about Diwali: about market reactions, about expectations from retailers who are still struggling after two years of the pandemic and the general decline of the economy, about households burdened by inflation and unemployment, those are also buried. They are not positive enough and worse they show the Government of India in a bad light.

Thus we have “debates” about firecrackers for Diwali, endless discussion on the Congress president, new, old, ancient, future…

It saves the mainstream media from having to look at the real world.

May your Diwali be as happy as you can make it. More light than sound, if you’re lucky, and some beacons of hope.

*

Meanwhile, in the other media world: The Wire takes down its investigations on Meta, to investigate its own investigations. It soon learns that the most unethical take great glee in questioning The Wire’s ethics.

Eminent columnist Tavleen Singh makes a rookie error on TV: she presents gossip as fact, gets roasted, takes it back. I blame the lure of TV that forces you to sound more knowledgeable than you are by presenting all this glam publicity.

Sections of the media happily present a clearly fake bad-CSI picture of Modi ji in a classroom. To prove either that Modi ji did go to school or that all schools in Gujarat have laptops. Because, well, what else can they do but push BJP IT cell publicity matter?

Yes, yes, the Congress Party has a new president. It is either this one or that one.

And finally, the Modi government displays its vindictive side as ever. Journalist Sanna Irshad Mattoo was stopped at immigration at Delhi airport, as she was on her way to pick up her Pulitzer Prize.

This is the second time that Mattoo has been stopped this year. In case it needs to be spelt out, Mattoo works in Kashmir and won her Pulitzer for her photographs of the pandemic.

Kashmiri journalists have been systematically targeted since the state lost its legislative status, under the Modi government.

Apart from the usual suspects who spoke out for Mattoo and against the government’s actions, the bulk of the Indian media remains unresponsive and unsympathetic.

On which note, Happy Diwali.

 

Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator. She writes on MxMIndia on Tuesdays and Fridays. Her views here are personal