the news. the views. the juice.
Exit polls have lost much of their sheen after some priceless flops. But Yogendra Yadav and his team at the centre for study of developing societies (CSDS) came closest to predicting the Uttar Pradesh elections right, for CNN-IBN, with just a sample of 7,000 in a state of nearly 15 crore people.
Image: courtesy Mail Today
PRESS RELEASE: Inclusive Media for Change, an initiative of the Delhi-based centre for study of developing societies (CSDS), is inviting applications from print and electronic journalists for media fellowships to explore grassroots issues in rural communities.
The fellowships are open to fulltime and freelance English and Hindi journalists. The fellowship duration is 3-6 weeks, and the amount on offer is Rs 150,000.
The topics and projects chosen must be about rural livelihoods, agrarian crises, rural environment, distress migration, hunger, malnutrition, public health and primary education.
Applications must be accompanied by a 500-word synopsis of the project proposal, a break-up of five story ideas, two samples of published work, a rough break-up of travel/boarding requirements, and a supporting letter from the editor assuring leave for four weeks and publication of the fellowship output.
Completed applications can be mailed to im4change.csds@gmail.com
The last date for submission of applications is 30 September 2011.
“India lives in its villages.” “Agriculture accounts for 60% of the Indian economy.” “Two out of every three Indians live in the rural areas.” The cliches abound about Bharat id est India.
Yet, a study of India’s top-three English and Hindi newspapers shows that they devote only a minuscule porportion of their total coverage to rural India’s issues, crises and anxieties.
The journalist Vipul Mudgal, who is currently with the Delhi-based centre for study of developing socieites (CSDS), selected 48 issues of The Times of India, Hindustan Times and The Hindu, and Dainik Jagran, Dainik Bhaskar and Amar Ujala from 2009, for the study.
An analysis of the news items in the six top-circulation dailies found that, on average, the papers devoted 2% editorial space for their flagship editions to the issues and concerns of two-thirds of India.
Out of between 100 and 200 items a day, just over three items had a rural theme.
The biggest portion (36%) of even this meagre news coverage was to non-agrarian issues such as crime, general or political (Naxalite-related) violence, accidents and disasters.
There is also little difference in the coverage of rural issues between the English and Hindi dailies, despite the latter being presumed to have their nose to the ground.
“One reason for their lack of interest could be explained by the fact that their readers, advertisers and journalists, particularly in the metropolitan editions, come from urban backgrounds.
“The dailies tend to be more consumer-focused and try to fulfil the needs and aspirations of educated and upwardly mobile urban consumers whose universe often has limited space for issues of poverty and underdevelopment,” writes Mudgal.
Read the fulll article: Rural coverage in Hindi and English dailies
Infographic: courtesy Economic & Political Weekly
The verdict in the assembly elections to the five States has been signed, sealed and delivered, but the battle is still on between the English TV news channels, with both Times Now and CNN-IBN making contrasting claims of their leadership on E-day and the accuracy of their exit poll and survey predictions.
As the former Times Now CEO Chintamani Rao wrote some months ago:
“These are not conflicting statements. But when you see the ads from which these claims are quoted, notice the asterisk: *conditions apply. It seems that at every news channel there is someone whose job is to slice and dice TAM data until they find a combination of audience, markets, and dayparts in which that channel is No. 1. The most prolific of these data analysts seems to work at CNN-IBN.”
Nevertheless, Times Now‘s potshot at CNN-IBN’s post-poll survey—”get the right picture, not the wrong figures”—is interesting because, for all its heft, Times Now was happy doing a a cheap “poll of polls” debate in the studio, while CNN-IBN was spending good money to feel the pulse of the nation through Yogendra Yadav‘s CSDS.
CSDS got many things wrong, but at least it is better to have spent and failed than not to have spent at all?
Also read: It’s their opinion that they have done an exit poll
Indian Express editor-in-chief Shekhar Gupta attacked environmentalists in a recent column.
“Drive out… don’t fly,” he wrote, and you will find bounteous fields in Punjab and Haryana, and not the caked, cracked and dried mud-flats with withered saplings that characterise drought that afflicts half the districts in India today.
Reason: the foresight of regional leaders and some central governments, which invested heavily in irrigation in the 1950s and ’60s. This, said Gupta, had happened because:
“…most of this was done in decades when the most retrograde and jholawala movements in the history of mankind had not yet arrived on the scene.”
The labelling and stereotyping has provoked a ferocious reply from the political scientist, Aditya Nigam, a fellow at the Centre for Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), on the website Kafila, whose tagline screams “Run from Big Media”.
Nigam writes:
“…It is equally common knowledge that increasingly opinion makers in the media—editors and senior journalists in particular—are known to be making huge amounts of extra income (and other forms of assets like free shares, houses and so on) from sources other than those provided by their employment.
“This self important and self-righteous tribe of people in contemporary India who think they are above every body else and cannot open their mouths without a claiming a moral high ground, also needs to be made accountable.
“We are not suggesting that any particular person is in the pay of anybody else—even though the grapevine has innumerable stories to that effect—of the ultimate moral corruption of most mediapersons. But surely when opinions are expressed as ‘disinterested’ and ‘objective’, the public must have the right to know whether these opinions are actually disinterested. And what better way can there be when politicians have to disclose their incomes, and we are calling upon judges as well to follow suit, that we also demand the same of editors and mediapersons.”
Candidates in elections have to declare their assets and liabilities before the elections. Bureaucrats do too. And now judges have joined the ranks.
Should journalists follow suit?
Read the full article: ‘Editors and journalists must declare their assets’
The 2009 general elections have been marred by widespread accusations and whispers of media hanky-panky.
The Wall Street Journal‘s India bureau chief Paul Beckett accused reporters, editors and newspaper owners of holding the Indian democratic process to ransom. Women journalists in Andhra Pradesh wrote to the Election Commission drawing attention to Telugu dailies selling news space to political advertisers. And on top of all this, there are well-established institutional deals and so on.
How much of all this buying and selling affect reader trust in media vehicles? Not much.
The National Election Survey 2009 compiled by the Lokniti team of the Centre for Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) for The Hindu asked precisely the question:
Question: “Do people trust the news they read in newspapers?”
Answer: “Forty-five per cent of respondents said that they greatly trusted what they read in newspapers. A similar number said that they somewhat trusted newspaper reports. Around 10 per cent had little faith in what was reported in the papers.” (emphasis added)
Also read: Forget the news, you can’t trust the ads either
Sucheta Dalal on selling news and buying silence
The scoreline: different strokes for different folks
Salil Tripathi: The first casualty of a cosy deal is credibility
Exit polls are said to be more reliable than opinion polls in gauging the mood of the electorate since pollsters catch respondents immediately after they have cast their ballot.
But for the second successive time in five years, mainstream Indian media organisations have fallen flat on their faces in their “exit poll” projections, throwing a big question mark over the authenticity of their claims, the reliability of the pollster’s methods, and their use as a media device.
Obviously, the size of the country, the size of the electorate, the multiple parties and issues involved, etc, making prediction an immeasurably difficult task, but the consistency with which polls are getting it wrong throw a big question mark over the role the media is performing in our democracy: do they have their ear to the ground, catching the pulse of the people whose eyes and ears they are supposed to be.
Or have they become a megaphone for uninformed news, views and gossip, no different from a roadside tea shop.
***
In 2004, all the exit polls predicted a return to power for the NDA giving the ruling alliance a lead of 40-90 seats and more; in the end, the BJP-led alliance fell 32 seats below the predictions and was routed by the UPA.
In 2009, all the exit polls predicted a thin lead for the ruling UPA; some predictions sighted a single-digit margin between the two alliances. In the end, the Congress-led UPA ended up almost 100 seats ahead of the NDA.
***
2004 Elections
NDTV-Indian Express: NDA 230-250, Congress + allies 190-205,
Aaj Tak/ Headlines Today: NDA 248, Congress + allies 189
Zee News: NDA 249, Congress + allies 176
Star News: NDA 263-275, Congress + allies 174-186
Actual tally: NDA 187, Congress + allies 219
***
2009 Elections
NDTV: UPA 216, NDA 177, Third Front 15
Star News-AC Neilsen: UPA 199, NDA 196
CNN-IBN-CSDS: UPA 185-205, NDA 145-160
India TV-C Voter: UPA 189-201, NDA 183-195
Headlines Today: UPA 191, NDA 180
The Times of India: UPA 198, NDA 183
Actual tally: UPA 256, NDA 164
