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Tag: Shashidhar Nanjundaiah

  • Why media education needs its own delivery format. In the first of a two-part article, Shashidhar Nanjundaiah dwells on the news media

    Shashidhar Nanjundaiah: What ails our news media education

     

    By Shashidhar Nanjundaiah

    The government’s decision last month to scrap the University Grants Commission (UGC) will not change much on the ground for the quality of media education. Each field has its own imperatives, and education in journalism needs an approach that cannot be a part of an overarching structure and format. Neither the popular success of our news media nor the perceived failure of our media education system is a true indicator of quality. To the snooty intellectual, the industry is not good enough a measure of quality. But in my experience, that is simply not true. Even with the business imperatives, it is possible for meaningful journalism to flourish, so rejecting our most critical stakeholder will not help the cause of good education. I have had the privilege of framing, revamping and restructuring media curricula in my tenure, both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, so I believe I owe myself the introspection I am about to make.

    In all the three categories of endeavours, I have operated with a troubling feeling that somehow we are accidental media educators—our products are largely a result of individual students’ backgrounds and doggedness. In each graduating class, a small percentage ‘makes it’, another group manages to find employment, yet another set of aspiring journalismstudents is pushed into the industry through clever marketing and by leveraging institutional credibility.

    Yet, that is not really what impresses the external stakeholder community. Rather, the industry is most worried about disappointing—declining, even—output standards. Many of our administrators are originally professors and not business executives. So it is beyond comprehension why more of us are not more troubled by lack of quality in our products. I hold this lack of concern on top of my list of why our media schools’ output is far less than desirable.

    Dealing with student diversity. Students’ differing educational and social backgrounds make up the biggest challenge in today’s higher education system, and is particularly challenging when it comes to fields like ours where expression abilities are critical. Regrettably, this challenge has become a sort of a cross to bear—an unavoidable trade-off to achieve business imperatives, to be tolerated and pushed through. This is why, having taken on the challenge of accepting students with varying social strata and educational backgrounds, our media educators largely fail to transform them into deliverable professionals or scholars—the very qualitative goals that an educational system should aspire for. Rather than blame the iniquities for poor output, such inclusiveness of student backgrounds should delight colleges themselves because of the opportunity it provides. Even government systems are doing it, if the Delhi school system’s recent success is anything to go by. So it should be possible for a college to take advantage of the diversity, even design specialised learning systems around it. Higher education in media can go farther by diversification of curricula and include more field projects that encompass diverse social, educational and geographic backgrounds of students.

    Overcoming a template approach. Secondly, the UGC curriculum in journalism leaves much to be desired, so affiliated undergraduate and even postgraduate colleges are left languishing. The mandated 148 credit hours to achieve each year at the undergraduate level (one credit hour gets halved when it is practical or workshop input—so much for motivation!) translate to approximately 3.5 hours of classroom input per working day (six days a week). With assignments, this is heavy load at the college level, where independent work should be emphasised. Colleges must then compromise the non-mandated time to squeeze in non-mandated input—which, surprisingly, includes internships and field work. This one-shape-fits-all approach simply cannot work for media education. Journalism and related media studies must be heavy on individual learning in simulated practice and on the field. Even within the existing structures, it is possible to instil depth of learning through the rigour of practice. That is, long hours of classes make far less sense than long hours of guided and independent practice.This requires flexibility at college levels and devoted guidance that unpacks diverse, quality and tangible output.

    Rote vs repetition. Of course, it is not all about processes. But repetition of processes alone provides experience, understanding and maturity. It is not enough, for example, to devote a semester to producing one issue of a magazine. Unless students continue to produce issue after issue for years, their learning will remain incomplete. Repetition also enables assessment to record learning over time, rather than the snapshot method that examinations and one-time performance will evaluate. Colleges that already practise this method have surely seen the growth in their students’ output. The converse of this method is the infamous rote method, where students habitually memorise for a one-time performance. Colleges and students—and regulators—routinely encourage this method, and to me it seems a cynical exercise. All of us in the education sector are aware of the immediacy problem with rote—that most information memorised for short-term returns is stored in short-term memory. Yet it is the most popular method. This must mean that we don’t really believe our education transforms a student into a professional: Good marketing does.

    The concepts-practice trick. By and large, our media education curricula do get the conceptual foundations right. However, clearly we have not moved with the times. Digital medium should be seen as a paradigm shift in media practice. Yet our education system dwells too heavily in the past to be able to come out of it. The other extreme would be to go so far into the current practice realm that journalism students walk and talk like toolsy apprentices of a machine works plant, with little conceptual grasp of the enduring and changing philosophies, roles, responsibilities of the media. Neither of these extremes is acceptable to the practice of the media—only a well-grounded but practical mix of the two will work. And this is why a flexible model including concepts-practical-field-repetition-diverse model will work, where any margins of error may truly be beyond the control of the college.

    For example, news writing is not a core part of curricula across our systems. Sure, it may form modules within courses, but ask any media practitioner in India, and you will hear the lamentation about the biggest problem among today’s graduating classes—the lack of expression skills. But it is not expression skills that students lack. They lack the systematic direction and guidance and putting them to use. From constructing thought to constructing sentences and building stories, writing and speaking effectively are the two skills that can indeed be developed far, far more effectively than it is currently. Add to that understanding of the various worlds around, from the neighbourhood to the geopolitical, from entrepreneurship to the stock markets, and so on. And you have a potent mix. But, as I said before, repeated practice is key.

    Caught in the conundrum of perceived correctness and real practicality, educators often end up bemoaning the systems that they are not a part of—leaving graduating students at the mercy of good branding, clever marketing, influential parents, and the student’s individual chutzpah.

    The business of education. College after college displays a gaping chasm between the confidence of the administration and an on-ground reality. Infrastructure, industry contacts, guest faculty—everything surrounding the core seems to excite us. When administrators at typical private institutes do seem troubled, it is almost invariably about enrolment numbers. How do we attract more students, they seek to understand. The enrolment numbers are the carrot before the funding horse—higher numbers means better equipment, infrastructure, a fresh coat of paint for the college. Since most of ouradministrative heads are teachers taking on business positions, this anxiety is understandable. It is reinforced by managements, many of whose decisions do not consider the entire product cycle. Administrators often speak the language of the promoters because growth in numbers and business is their hardest burden to bear. Indeed, spurt numbers through enrolment-marketing is seen as the hallmark of achievement. I argue that the best growth in numbers happens organically and by word of mouth.

    Fostering independent work. A factor of this business approach manifests itself in the way we quantify check boxes. Administrations offer satisfaction at the numerous guests from the industry (including Bollywood stars!) who have graced their campus, claiming that the industry-academia connect is accomplished. Only in infrequent cases does the industry participate in integral ways—setting up training news labs on campuses (perhaps under CSR initiatives), providing well-structured internships, providing guided training on an ongoing basis. Of course, these are also factors of location—if you are located in Noida or Mumbai or other big media hubs, there is a better chance the student is better exposed to the industry.With the predominantly classroom-and-lab style of learning they receive, students of journalism and allied subjects suffer from disconnect with the practice. True, teachers who are both aligned with the industry and solid in foundational concepts are hard to find. But teachers at this level are largely triggers and facilitators, and can go a long way in fashioning increasingly independent student work.

    The measurement of success of education is often disputed. There is a need to align student expectations with institutional goals for the student—which, usually, is gainful employment without compromising on the principles of practice. A revamped regulator needs to go much farther in the direction of structural changes, but most of all, it must permit media education to develop time and space for its unique concepts and practice, rather than depend on one set by some umbrella structure.

    Part 2 of this article – on media education outside of news media – will appear next week

     

    Shashidhar Nanjundaiah has led leading media institutes in India, as  Director of Symbiosis Institute of Media & Communication, founding Director of Indira School of Communication, and first Dean of India Today Media Institute. He pioneered research on the socio-economics of a newly liberalised Indian media marketplace. Currently, he observes how India’s media industry is shaping itself in this decade. He has also edited newspapers and magazines in India and the US. The views here are his own.

     

     

  • How India’s news television can channel bias and still uphold values, writes Shashidhar Nanjundaiah

    Weaving inherent biases into news narrative

     

    By Shashidhar Nanjundaiah

     

    I see the emergence of a public sphere. I had this premonition about five years ago, too, when social media promised to be a platform for democratic discourse, with people of eclectic beliefs would pitch in and the intersection of those ideas would evolve into public policies or social values or other forms of social evolution. Well, suffice it to say I have revised my opinion of social media after the 2014 election in India, Brexit, and the 2016 US election. Thankfully, new forms of evolution of news television have re-energised my optimism. But what I have to recommend is not some inventive rocket science—it is merely a trend around the bend.

     

    Until recently, Gurmeet Singh Ram Rahim was so popular that one of the top news channels invited him to a paid annual conclave, interviewed him, and even asked him to croon his favourite number, “You are the love charger”. The exposure of this cult, with its mammoth following among all classes of people, merely endorses what we believe in, and what we accept as knowledge. Once he was convicted, media channels feasted on the opportunity to bury him. The self-styled baba reportedly had anywhere between two and seven crore followers, depending on which side of political spin you listen to. Yet this so-called affliction they speak of is too widespread to be dismissed as mere madness.

     

    The unresolved dichotomy between having our values defined by established social structures and the democratic right to form our own is the most lucrative space for our news media today.Irrationality, for example, has become a wonderful tool for the media to exploit. This is coupled with a legal framework that allows the media to participate in definingour values whileregulating itself and selling products. This mix includes the freedom to cherry-pick the stories to tell, a process called gatekeeping. Add to that the concept of “social media management,” and you have a potent recipe for mass galvanisation of seemingly irrational concepts. There is a lot of emotion being spilled on user-generated platforms, often manipulated by communication managers to provoke more display of emotional and irrational opinion.

     

    Let me provide a perspective to the new structures governing news flow. Journalism evolved in the 18th and 19th centuries through the Industrial Revolution, from the concept of public sphere, a physical and a conceptual marketplace of ideas. Soon, though, that concept was muddied by the press’s commercial dependence on corporations. In 1947, the so-called Hutchins Commission, assigned by the US media to research and recommend media’s functions in society, recognised social responsibility as its primary and overarching function. The Fairness Doctrine was introduced in the same year, placing equitable content regulation on television coverage to ensure the “free marketplace of ideas.” Pro-government scholars somewhat uncritically observed how the social responsibility function legitimised the institutionalisation of the media in a political and social structure. On the other hand, the sceptics lamented that public opinion lost out to organized media, and that the media turned opinion makers of an undesirable kind.

     

    Development communication emerged in the so-called third world as a somewhat necessary alternative to make the fourth estate help a nation in catching up with its western counterparts. In India, funded by the government, radio and television were envisaged to play this role, tying it to an invisible government string. A big ideological dilemma loomed before both the government and the media in 1982, when television went colour and added commercials as an additional revenue source. It was a “mixed model”, loosely combining developmental and commercial goals. By 1991 when media economy was (one of the first industries to be) liberalised, programming also reflected the emerging consumerist society. A study that compared the pre-liberalisation Hum Log with the post-liberalisation Swabhimaan found a stark contrast in the reflected social values. News channels on television, however, have floundered or basked (depending on which side of the debate you’re on) in the absence of any visible, external structures that govern them.

     

    Today, we find ourselves at the cusp of the re-emergence of development communication of a different kind, in a very different format. The strings defining the values of development are only defined by the side that a channel takes. There is every opportunity for dissent and debate, but our news media has increasingly caricatured that value, creating a format of debate but snuffing out its essence by letting the agendas be dictated by extra-democratic values. For example, a popular business channel claims that its goal is “not only about news, but about a rising India”. To develop this agenda, a channel may often be seen to create a semblance of debate but maintain a pro-government stance, perhaps in an attempt to create investment in the economy. Unfortunately, the values are ever-changing even within a channel, as exemplified in the Gurmeet Singh case.

     

    So how can the news media move with the trends and yet not lose complete sight of its role? Let me first place the caveat that the media’s role of a socio-political watchdog is unfortunately at stake. Indian media is in a transition between a conventional, watchdog media environment of information and critical inquiry and a new, partisan atmosphere of commerce and political pressures. While our media still shies away from expressing bias, its counterparts in many countries do not. While they do not explicitly state an ideological affiliation, it is clear as day to the audiences of channels and newspapers where the platform stands. This is especially so in developed media markets such as the U.K. and the U.S. In the U.S., a somewhat hegemonised inherent media bias is on the liberal side since most liberal values purport to uphold democratic values. They are now challenged by the emergence of conservative channels such as Fox, in turn pitted against the ultra-left MSNBC.

     

    So we’re already in a politically partisan media world, where news television uses different yardsticks to select stories, because it has no hesitation in taking sides and supporting specific causes.It would be far more desirable to have a set of channels, each of whose programmes reflect inherent biases.The problem, though, lies in educating the audience about bias-based value systems.

     

    If we are indeed gravitating towards a public sphere role of the Indian media, it is important to recognize what it stands for: a network for communication information and points of view—opinions expressing affirmative or negative attitudes. But that definition of public sphere has taken on a whole new meaning in the era of social media, competition, government-sponsored media (through advertising), and of course, inherent bias.The difference is that while a traditional news package was expected to provide opposing or diverse opinions or evidence, today the differentiators are the channels themselves. To understand an issue in all its hues, a viewer is expected to scan across various channels, each providing a slanted perspective.

     

    Stuck in a limbo are a third kind of news channels (an obvious example in my mind is NDTV), a dogged category that is fighting to keep a balance, either in a naive belief that objectivity does exist, or in the pretence to show lack of bias as the right value, or making a pusillanimous attempt to appease social media trolls and to avoid government arm-twisting. Acknowledging inherent bias not only removes the burden of the fallacious value of objectivity, it also tells the audience more realistically why all facts are, in fact, constructed through storytelling and gate keeping mechanisms.

     

    But today’s problem is to somehow create public awareness that truth isas much a factor of facts as that of media production and the values of its mouthpieces. This bias is sometimes blatant and audiences must learn to pick them up. Recently, a popular actor said that our Prime Minister is a better actor than him. Given the entertainment potential of that story, a channel picked it up for its prime time debate. In it, the anchor repeatedly cut off the opposition’s spokesperson while she sat silent through the ruling party spokesperson’s argument, even though there were factual errors on both arguments. Recently, the Congress Party lamented the media silence over its campaigns while providing undue coverage to the ruling party, thereby creating an unfair advantage.

     

    The Congress’s argument is fallacious. The media is heading for a split right under our noses, dividing itself up on political affiliations. There are channels that seem blindly pro-government, and those who are less blind. Objectivity is no longer seen as lack of bias, in an acknowledgment of what an observer calls ‘inherent bias’. Some channels whose owners have no political intent behind those biases have invested in balance—hiring anchors and reporters with inherent biases on multiple sides of the divide, in a hope that biases will cancel themselves out. This must be lauded as a via-media innovation.

     

    About the author: Shashidhar Nanjundaiah is a media observer and an eternal, if frequently amused, student of communication. He has researched the political economy of media from India’s liberalization period to the social media’s influences on media. Currently, he is an advisor to the upcoming J.G. University in Ahmedabad. Previously, he was the Director of Symbiosis Institute of Media & Communication, founding Director of Indira School of Communication, and first Dean of India Today Media Institute. He has also edited newspapers and magazines in India and the U.S.

  • Has copying without attribution become a disruptive new trend? Will it sound the death of intellectual property in writing? Good old time will tell, writes Shashidhar Nanjundaiah

    Guest Column by Shashidhar Nanjundaiah: Writer’s block, Walter Benjamin, and the problem of plenty

    By Shashidhar Nanjundaiah

     

    There are several reasons I’ve grown from a frenetic writer to an occasional one. And as always, let’s blame it on the usual suspect. Among the most significant reasons for my sporadicity is that social media has given me a writer’s block.

     

    As the 1930s German philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote, the proliferation of art destroyed the aura around the artist. The introduction of mechanical reproduction in the 19th century meant that it could be copied and distributed without the authenticity of the original. With the proliferation of social media, there is no aura in writing anymore.

     

    Ideas were never a writer’s domain alone. But putting them into words was somehow a privileged talent, so from Chaucer to Chetan Bhagat, people have heard the voice of the writer, not the voice of the people with ideas. When social media arrived, few expected it would be a platform for writing. It did evolve a new style of writing—pithy, pointed, direct—that was commensurate with the shifting marketplace of attention. Today, everybody on social media seems to have terrific expression skills.

     

    With the rise of storytelling and of professional storytellers that you can hire if you have ideas, the proliferation seems complete. It all started with writing for brands, and that’s a form of writing that flourishes to great business advantage. But the new trend is to share philosophical thoughts, social observations, professional dos-and-don’ts as well. In other words, writing on social media finally seems to be settling down.

     

    And in that environment of having lived more than a decade in the Facebook-LinkedIn-Twitter era, it’s a good time to take stock of what this new form of writing brings to the table: What is the biggest difference between traditional writing and new forms of writing? Has this new democratic form of expression evolved a different consciousness? Does the new style reflect honesty and individuality, or does it echo inevitability and perfunctoriness?

     

    Perhaps the biggest difference is that it’s largely shorn of pomp and superiority. Writers have traditionally been the bearers of information, insight, new thought and above all, new meaning to life’s various domains. They wielded authority and influence in what was largely one-way communication. The reverential attitude of readers towards traditional writers may persist, but the writing is no longer lapped up without analysis or independent commentary. The comments, typically underneath an article, are read with as much gusto as the article itself.

     

    Security of the control over privacy walls also means more honesty. Today’s writing is personal and modest in scope, often an opinion that seeks approval in smaller, more intimate, friends’ circles within the social media. Echo chambers always existed, but social media platforms have increasingly put up opaque privacy walls, enabling us to express without the constraint of public view.

     

    Manipulating the perception of popularity is much like old times, except that its management is both easy and well-supported by the very platforms that also democratise communication. Because these ‘walls’ can be broken at will, they also enable us to segment audiences for our writing with much more precision—and influence.

     

    But what about the content? Social media observers will tell you that only one among hundreds of articles on social media catches genuine public fancy. Yet this ratio is very encouraging if you like the democracy of writing. In all fairness, I am routinely amazed at the number of people with ideas and insights—and these are people across domains, ages, and the proverbial professional ladder. You needed specialists to write about science, engineering, medicine, and so on, because those trained in any of those domains are not trained in writing, and vice versa. Not anymore, it seems. Simple, honest expression transcends formal training, and of course, the plethora of material available on the social media is great training material in itself.

     

    It is this plethora that is responsible for my writer’s block. Amidst this welter of insight, all of which seems well-consumed, how do I wedge out my niche thought? What if my idea gets torn apart—what would that do to my self-esteem as a writer? Benjamin would give us the Mona Lisa smile—my reading of him has always been that he played with ambiguity to overcome Fascist threats. In hushed undertones, he would say, this is all a good thing. It’s just history repeating itself. What happened to art with mechanical reproduction is happening to writing with social media’s digital reproduction. If, as Benjamin argued, the loss of aura at the hands of reproduction makes the original work of art lose its authenticity, we may propose that in the age of digital reproduction, it is enhanced.

     

    Reproduceability on social media has been well-harnessed—and it seems that’s a good thing. Along with ‘likes’ and emojis, what makes your favourite platforms rub their hands in glee is  reproduction through retweets, shares, or anything else they call it. Sharing—which can be seen as akin to printing more copies—is not always the norm, though. Many users of LinkedIn copy with impunity—and many of these are HR managers who are in charge of personnel behaviour. More often than not, attribution remains dubious and the promoters of the platforms seem to have no real problem with unattributed copying, since it’s all free. It seems intellectual output becomes property only when there is a monetary transaction to it. That said, those who copy are clearly not as worried about getting a message across as they are about promoting their visibility, and that, to me, is a telling difference.

     

    As you can tell from the tone I’m using, a traditional writer like me frowns at such newfangled but seemingly well-accepted behaviour as copying. Since it is all free and non-transactional, does it also make it ethical? Has copying without attribution become a disruptive new trend? Will it sound the death of intellectual property in writing? Good old time will tell. Democratization is great, but I now need to wrap my head around yet another new normal in proliferation and reproduceability.

     

    The author is an independent media educator and communication analyst with interests in social media’s effects on traditional media. He may be reached over email at shashi.nanjundaiah@hotmail.com. He has been an editor of magazines and the dean and director of leading media schools including Symbiosis and India Today Media Institute.