“Our life is lived in, rather than with, media”- Deuze.
The term mediatisation lacks a normative definition- it is more of an evaluative concept. Mediated reality, or a society where media, and not interpersonal communication becomes the most important source of information is a scenario is independent of media ownership. It doesn’t matter how ‘free’ media is, for a society to be mediatised. It is more a measure of how dependent the society is on the media for exchange of information.
Media effects is the study of the causal impact mediated information has on individuals, it comprises of quantitative functions like framing, agenda setting and priming. Mediatisation essentially is more complex, and looks at how media permeates everything, It is a multi-flow, systemic change that is larger than just media effects.
The media has always been an institutional arena of interaction, which is why it plays an important role in any political discourse and public opinion formation. Media Logic is a threefold contention between political, professional and commercial interests that any media-house faces that are in constant struggle with each other for being the factor of influence in the kind of news being covered.
To explain the complicated relationships that make up mediatisation as a process in political communication, various theorists suggested frameworks. Stromback’s mediatisation thesis is a four phased process of how political logic and media logic contend with each other on a traceable continuum.
Stromback looked the process of mediatisation as a relationship between mediatised publics, political actors and state actors. If phase 1 signified more political mileage, communication which is not dependent on the media and incorporating mediated conversation as only a part of the entire electoral campaign; this scale then moves up to more autonomous media body that relayed decisions back to political actors, phase 3 has a substantially dominant media with a pervasive media logic that takes precedence over political logic. At the 4th Phase, political logic is completely governed by media logic and a political party is perpetually on campaign mode.
Mediatisation in India.
Mediatised public in India is fragmented and unequal. It is made up of different kind of publics, from different class, religion, education backgrounds in smaller counterpublics of identity politics. The political actors are represented of parties, pressure groups and lobbies. They seek to form public opinion and engage with political logic with the purpose of winning votes through media, seek to influence policy, and the public relations of the party as a professionalised, marketing venture. The media actors are ofcourse owners or employees of the media industry. These actors are ruled by ideology, profit or even power alliances, that further concretise the ability of capitalist news to remain incidental and keep the public blind from the structural inequality underneath.
Contemporary political communication in India
Mediatisation began with the rise of vernacular papers in 1980s.While the rest of the world was potentially looking at the loss of printed dailies in the next decade, the 2013 readership survey put Times of India readership at 7.6 million, and national Hindi Dailies with the largest circulation- Dainik Jagaran and Dainik Bhaskar at 16.5 million and 14.5 million respectively. Currently, even as these media houses begin to digitise and offer e-versions of their daily news, the demand for physical paper copies have not gone out of business at all. Vernacular news has also found a massive avenue in television. From the single Doordarshan Channel in the 1990s, in 2013, there were nearly 800 channels out of which atleast 36 are 24x7 news channels. With the advent of news TV, there came the idea of talk shows, expert debates and remarkable forms of political communication that helped in polarising and politicisation of the public.
In the middle of all this, India has a rising audience for internet, and is one of the biggest social media user bases in the world. The fragmented nature of the Indian public sphere, given the inequality and multiplicity of public spheres, some with more access to media sources than the others- Indian media is heavily hybridised. A combination of newspapers, television news and the internet has combined to create a degree of mediatisation of the society that requires political communication through it seem all pervading. Being apolitical, or not being exposed to political content in India in 2020, is very nearly impossible.
Who pays for this news?
India has both commercial and political media owners, therefore revenue comes from state funded advertisements and paid news- where information which has been paid to be published are made to appear as news and not advertisements by interested parties. While TV news channels are predominantly commercial, they are often in these network systems which are driven by long term political and profit maximisation schemes, that support a political-corporate nexus’ therefore giving out a mix of propaganda and polarised content.
Professionalisation and The Internet
However, the professionalisation of the journalist is also a fact that has to be considered, despite the commercial-political affiliations that bind all media houses. Professionally genuine journalists have in the internet age have found a new way to fulfil their journalistic functions, by forming quasi-independent organisations and crowd funded story-telling to be able to do their work with more authentic care.
Social media has paved the way for new, small scale production aimed at a targeted audience, or the formation of independent media ownerships who do in-depth journalism like citizen.in, and wire.in illustrate the possibility of giving all news platforms an equal winning chance on the internet.
Ofcourse the organisations like Quint, FirstPost, Scroll.in which are the news channels for the digital natives have the kind of content that are solely tailored for the internet age, increasingly traditional media channels are catching up in their utility as online players.
News has also turned into a form of interpersonal communication with the rise of ‘influencer’ social media activists and journalists using predominantly Twitter or Instagram for their stories. Faye Dsouza, who resigned as the host of a daily talk show and editor of Mirror Now, runs an operation called ‘News that should have been headlines’ from her Instagram page that has a large young demographic following, Saket Gokhale is a lawyer-activist who does detailed RTIs into various government policies and shares their details through platforms, building up on the public opinion in individual capacity as professional journalists.
Journalists were never in the limelight as much as media houses before contemporary times- not in the same scale. Freelance Journalism has always existed, but a formidable public popularity for a journalist as a ‘hero’ figure, the idea of a ‘true journalist’ as someone who speaks truth to power, is a new phenomenon where the internet has actually turned journalists into popular figures, like in the case of Rana Ayuub, a former investigative reporter for Tehelka who became the subject for a New Yorker issue on Hindutva, and is a freelance writer in the Washington Post for stories regarding India. However, her stories are profiled and coloured strongly in her own opinions and ideological interests. Her targeted audience is therefore an echo-chamber of those who already agree with her, and the worth of her work is measured by ideological leanings rather than its critical content.
Mediatisation of the society has polarised political communication completely. The myth of objectivity has been erased, to be replaced by ‘news that suits my ideology’ versus ‘fake news’. ‘Fake news’ here is not just deliberately misreported, fabricated pieces- but any piece that doesn’t suit the perspective of an ideological faction. The fake news conundrum is ofcourse even more ironic because manufacture of doctored, misreported, unsourced misinformation forwarded virally through social media intermediaries have been the ground-zero for political communication, or mis-communication in todays age at the same time.
All in all, therefore if one goes about believing every person speaks for an agenda, fact-checking is often also another layer of misinformation and there is no absolute truth, one would find themselves describing news in contemporary India.
