And for a change, a large section of the journalistic community in Bihar seems to agree with even the hyperbole of what the Press Council of India Chairperson, Justice Markandey Katju said on February 25, 2012 this year: “The information I have gathered about the media in Bihar is not good… the press does not enjoy freedom at present… I have been told that people don’t muster the courage to write against the Bihar government or its officials. The Constitution is being violated by such people… You are a government, but you are not above the Constitution.”

So, is the Nitish government blue-pencilling what is available for public consumption? Are the undercurrents of manufactured consent shifting gear from paid news to Nitish brand-friendly content/regulated editing? There are no easy answers to these questions, particularly in times when there is unprecedented diversity in the media and any attempt to see it as a monolithic entity is fraught with the risk of generalisation. But some aspects of Nitish’s image such as the inflating media narrative are too obvious to escape your attention. Let me share something that could be a pointer to this in some ways.

In June this year, I had written a piece for another website on the callous media coverage of the menace of encephalitis in Bihar. A reader responded to the article in a way that had little to do with distorted editorial policy and indifferent reportage to the deadly spread of the disease. His tirade was overtly “political” and centred against the political control of a popular daily in Bihar and Jharkhand, as he wrote: “Prabhat Khabar is known better to be the mouthpiece of Nitish government and is alleged to get the return in form of government ads… it becomes evident that they are now confining themselves as Nitish’s press releases, which clearly justifies what Katju said when he was in Bihar.” How much validity this comment carries is open to debate, but in my visit to Patna this July, I found that this assessment somehow showcased the general perceptions about the media-state government relations in Bihar.

And about the daily Prabhat Khabar doubling up as Nitish’s mouthpiece? I found something that was suggestive of that, but don’t know whether it was conclusive enough. On July 11, Prabhat Khabar launched a 40-page fortnightly tabloid Panchayatnama exclusively for the rural areas. If you opened the next day’s (July 12, 2012) Prabhat Khabar, you could be forgiven if you believed that the state government had launched the fortnightly. Apart from the customary report about the Chief Minister’s presence in the launch ceremony, the front page of the paper was filled with showcasing the state government’s initiatives for rural development and empowering Panchayati Raj institutions. How much should be read into it? Were the lines separating State Secretariat and Prabhat Khabar’s editing desks getting blurred or were they breached altogether?

Not prone to accepting conspiracy theories easily, I have been of the view that any government needs the paid-for-pages in the print media to advertise to the public about its programmes and policies. That’s a legitimate means of political communication in all representative democracies (hope political communication theorists Almond and Powell would approve). But, our collective nasal instincts have to smell the rat when the government lays fall-in preconditions for placing lucrative advertisements. It becomes more pronounced in a state where in absence of big-time private advertisers, the government is the big cash cow to be milked for ad-revenues, especially for regional papers. The question is – haven’t the media houses/television production houses throughout the country been subserviently wooing Babudom and political masters for ad-revenues and meaty assignments?

The government-advertisement cash cow in Bihar has certainly grown fatter in an image-obsessed Nitish regime. Providing a statistical perspective to this upward spiral in the state government’s ad expenditure (particularly in print), Dhirendra Jha observes:

“From Rs 4.5 crore in 2005-06 (the Rashtriya Janata Dal ruled for most of this fiscal, losing power to the JD-U-BJP alliance in November 2005), Bihar’s ad expenses rose 20 per cent to Rs 5.4 crore in 2006-07, and then almost doubled to Rs 9.65 crore in 2007-08. If that wasn’t startling enough, the figure trebled to Rs 27.5 crore in 2008-09. The government was revelling in the joys of favourable newsprint, and the figure topped Rs 34.6 crore in 2009-10, before dipping a bit to Rs 28.5 crore in 2010-11…but the dip can be explained by the fact that an election code of conduct restrained ad-allotments for a few months in the runup to Assembly polls in November 2010.” (Open, April 14, 2012)

Here, two questions emerge. First, are the big boys of Indian media faring any better in Patna? That “here” implies – are they more distant from 1, Anne Marg (CM’s residence) than the regional papers? Patna always had a flourishing press and once had major local newspapers like The Searchlight, Pradeep, Indian Nation, Aryavarta and Bihar Herald which have either disappeared, integrated or been replaced by newspapers from media giants like Bennett and Coleman group, Hindustan Times group, Anand Bazar Patrika Group (the latest entrant which launched the Patna edition of The Telegraph in early 2010), the Hindi giants like Dainik Jagran and even the new local papers. Are national players less vulnerable to the government’s carrot-and-stick policy towards the media (in terms of awarding or denial of government ads)? Development with the right neo-liberal numbers of 13 per cent GDP growth/“change” (almost as underachieving as Obama) /sushasan (good governance) have been the running themes of narratives in these papers also. But, how much is that motivated or does that amount to Nitish hagiography? No easy answers.

However, the “feel good” factor of metropolitan solutions that the media’s engagement with Bihar’s governance and development seeks to exude has takers in an aspirational middle class – a section that has been buying the “change” theory. And the media seems smug in restricting its narrative to that only. So a considerable chunk of readership is inclined to concur with media projections, having little idea of the complex layers of socio-economic and cultural forces that constitute the political economy of the state. I have referred to some of these factors in an earlier piece: http://www.newslaundry.com/2012/06/failing-the-first-test/

Second, perceptions about the state government sneaking into the editing desk shouldn’t make us lose sight of an equally serious but well-documented threat (assuming you have been reading P Sainath) – of paid news. The role of poorly-paid stringers becomes particularly important in the context of subtle ways in which paid news can work in areas beyond the state capital and district towns. The mofussil media space, run almost completely on the shoulders of stringers, is highly fertile ground for planted stories (this is not to suggest that the journos striking deals in five-star ambience are any less vulnerable to it; Radiagate has demolished such flawed assumptions). And the scale on which stringers are working could be gauged from a simple but revealing piece of statistic from Hindi print space. The country’s largest selling newspaper, Dainik Jagran has news-related staff strength of 12,000, out of which only 5,000 are full time journalists; the remaining 7,000 are stringers!

If the site of the Kautilyan statecraft is ruled by people who are resorting to Chomskian insights into “manufacturing consent”, it shows how the media is figuring in the Nitish regime’s obsession with image building exercises. But in times where the media is marked by diversity and cacophony, media control has become an anachronism. Nitish Kumar realises that, but perhaps is banking on another thing that contemporary media is offering to image-conscious regimes – the power of hype. The question is, for how long? Whispers are getting louder. The Chief Minister should be in the State Secretariat. Editors should be working at their desks.