Trump’s return: The threat to US press freedom runs parallel to India’s media crisis

The US presidential elections are done and dusted. We in India can now go back to our own election season, with the impending elections in Maharashtra and Jharkhand at the end of this month.

Yet, one must admit that the world’s attention, including that of many in India, was drawn to the US elections. Not just because, as Americans love to remind us, it is the oldest democracy in the world, but because of the nature of the contest and the contestants. One has a controversial and colourful personality who has drawn attention to himself even when he was out of office for the last four years, and the other is a woman of colour, who had to step in at short notice and literally introduce herself to the American electorate.

In the end, the majority of Americans decided to go with the candidate they knew, Donald Trump. And they rejected the chance of making history by electing a woman, and that too a woman of colour, to the highest office. 

Entertaining and distressing as was the high-octane election campaign leading up to November 5, in the end it is not just the defeated Democrats who are introspecting about the reasons for their loss. The media too is beginning to ask how they missed the shift in American politics, where groups who were expected to vote one way voted another.

In India, we are familiar with this debate after the general elections this year, when the results threw up surprises, especially in states like Uttar Pradesh, where it was assumed that the BJP would do well, if not better than in 2019. That did not happen. And one reason was the underreporting of the extent of disillusionment amongst the large number of unemployed in a state where the government boasted about economic progress. 

In the US too, early analysis indicates that inflation and rising costs played a big part in voter choice and that even people who had earlier voted for Democrats switched this time.

Another interesting observation by commentators on various US television channels, relevant for us in India, is that the assumption that the “Latino vote” or the “Black vote” are monoliths and these communities vote in a particular way was wrong. It is evident that within these constituencies there is considerable layering and that voters make choices that are not necessarily based on their ethnicities. And the proof of that is the broad spectrum of support that Trump got in these elections, defying the usual calculations.

The Indian media too has been realising, especially in the last decade, that generalisations like the “Dalit vote” or the “Muslim vote” are irrelevant now. Caste, religion, gender, ethnicity, region – all these categories are now layered with many other factors, such as economic distress, for instance. 

The discussion in the US has now moved to how Trump will deal with his political opponents, having spoken openly of retribution during the campaign, whether his foreign policy will reflect his first term, and if his administration will deport illegal immigrants within his first 100 days in office, as he promised. Also, will his attitude towards mainstream media, which he has disparaged in no uncertain terms, be the same as in his first term. 

About the media, many dire predictions have already been made. Jon Allsop of the Columbia Journalism Review suggests that “Trump’s impending second term poses a credible and unprecedented threat to press freedom as America has known it”. Is this an exaggeration, an overreading of the president elect’s attitude toward the media? A day before the elections, in his last election rally, Trump referred to the media as the “enemy camp”. 

Most people in India might have forgotten Trump’s approach to the mainstream US media when he was elected in 2016. 

This paragraph, from an article by Kyle Paoletta in CJR sums it up: 

“Since he entered politics, a decade ago, Donald Trump has castigated journalists for their skepticism and independence, calling the media ‘the enemy of the people,’ a ‘threat to democracy,’ ‘fake,’ and ‘crooked bastards’ whom he vows to prosecute. Now that he has secured a second term, he will be free to make good on his promises. Already, during his first term, the Department of Justice conducted surveillance of reporters and charged Julian Assange with espionage; regulators seemingly sought to block a merger of AT&T and Time Warner as retribution for critical coverage by CNN; the White House arbitrarily denied access to veteran journalists. All of that fostered an environment of media suppression, leading to more than six hundred physical attacks on journalists nationwide in 2020 alone. Trump has welcomed the violence. ‘To get to me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news,’ he told a crowd in Pennsylvania this week. ‘I don’t mind that so much’.”

Some of this will sound familiar to those of us in the media in India – who have faced similar hostility, even if not openly articulated, for being critical of the BJP and especially Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

But what Paoletta goes on to write about the US media during Trump’s first term is even more reflective of what we have seen here. He writes:

“Perhaps the least palpable consequence of Trump’s return to the White House will be the most widespread: journalists self-censoring or otherwise altering their coverage. That phenomenon, which Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale, has called ‘anticipatory obedience,’ is a feature of societies with repressive governments. With Trump returning to office, it is hard not to count ours among them.”

“Anticipatory obedience.” Such an appropriate phrase for what we have witnessed in the mainstream Indian media in the last decade. Although here we also have “voluntary obsequiousness” in our media, especially in television channels.

There is another aspect of Trump’s attitude towards the US media that has some parallels here. In his first term, Trump was willing to engage with the mainstream media and appeared on various talk shows, although his preferred choice was always Fox News, the Murdoch-owned cable channel that was openly supportive.  During this election campaign, barring the two debates, one with President Biden and the other with Vice President Kamala Harris, he has kept away from mainstream TV.  

Instead, one gathers that on the advice of people like his 18-year-old son, he chose to appear on popular podcasts, such as the one by Joe Rogan, which was viewed by millions of people. An article in the New York Times on Trump and the media points out that this strategy gave Trump a way to “sidestep more confrontational interviews with professional journalists, where he might face tough questions, fact-checks and detailed policy debates. The influencers he met with rarely challenged Mr Trump, and often lavished him with praise.” 

This sounds familiar if you look at Modi’s record with the Indian media. To date, he has not held a single press conference or given an unscripted interview to any mainstream media, television channel, or newspaper. Instead, his preferred channel of communication to the electorate was radio, through the monthly broadcast “Mann ki Baat” and his party’s deft use of social media to spread his message. Mainstream media played its role by accepting scripted interviews and reporting without fact-checks and uncritically, anything Modi said publicly. Not a single other politician has managed to get that spread and reach through the media.  

If there is one aspect that stands out as different between the mainstream US media and India, it is the issue of official endorsement. In the US, major newspapers have historically endorsed one or the other presidential candidate. Such endorsement appears in the form of an editorial. It is argued that the editorial stance of a newspaper does not reflect or affect its news coverage. That is debatable, but this is how leading newspapers like the New York Times justify endorsing a candidate.

In India, there is no such tradition. Yet, even if our most widely read newspapers play a balancing game, the bias comes through. Perhaps not openly, but anyone who understands how the print media works would know that the importance given to some news, the placement of news, or the absence of some news indicates a newspaper’s political leanings without stating it in so many words.  

To argue that the Indian press does not lean one way or another when it comes to political parties is nothing short of hypocritical. When the Washington Post decided this year not to endorse either of the presidential candidates, there was a considerable stir in the US and some minor ripples here. The only Indian newspaper to respond was the Times of India in an op-ed written by the “Editorial Team”. 

I quote below one of the more extraordinary paragraphs from the piece:

“TOl’s principle of neutrality is rooted in a long tradition of Indian philosophical thought – be cognizant of all ideas and perspectives, don’t tie your identity to any one of them. To hold on to, to endorse, an ideology championed by anyone is the equivalent of intellectual baggage. In Indian philosophy, the same holds, even more so, when it comes to heroes. Picking and sticking to a hero or a role model is essentially an act of intellectual self-harm. It closes your mind.”

How wonderful it would be if the Indian media followed this! 

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