It’s telling — and disquieting — that nearly 60 per cent of the orders passed in the last three years by the News Broadcasting & Digital Standards Authority (NBDSA) were against programmes that violated its ethics code on communal harmony. An analysis of the NBDSA orders since 2023 in this newspaper points to a brutish and cynical race to the bottom in a time of churn. Faced with intensifying competition in a far more crowded and fragmented media landscape than before, television channels and digital broadcasters have chosen the path of maximum shrillness and least resistance, becoming megaphones of the powerful — and the hateful. In the social media age, where no one needs a TV studio to broadcast to the world, they are trying to mimic its worst aspects. Because it rewards extremes, outrage and spectacle, channels and platforms are jostling each other to abandon responsibility and to frame news in ways that purvey divisive spectres and stereotypes.
There are high costs of this abdication. There is an unchecked sharpening of polarisation and shrinking spaces for deliberation and dialogue. In a plural and diverse democracy constitutionally committed to protecting the freedom of citizens to profess, practise and propagate their religion, this backsliding is worrying. But the price must be paid not just in terms of the fraying of the larger promise of democracy. It must be paid, too, in terms of an erosion of trust in the very institution that these channels and platforms claim to be part of. Their pursuit of viewership at all costs erodes their own — and the media’s — credibility. This is visible, today, in the declining TV audiences and increasing irrelevance of these channels with clickbait images, gladiatorial contests and hate-filled screens. It is visible, too, in growing signs of the citizen’s disengagement with a public sphere of shared understandings.
It is welcome that the self-regulatory body has called out the targeting of the minority. It has done well to draw attention to these attempts to paint a community as the Other, as singular, aggressive and conservative. But, in the end, the NBDSA can only prod and nudge gently. The responsibility of calling a halt to this dismal noise that pretends to be news must be owned more widely — beginning with those who own these studios.
[Editorial content from Indian Express]
