Mahesh Vijapurkar : Why is the media blatantly targeting AAP and Kejriwal?
Does
a tweet by Kumar Vishwas about drains joining a river, Ashok Agarwal quitting
the Aam Aadmi Party and Shazia Ilmi preferring a Delhi Delhi
This targeting of AAP
has not ceased, the most recent example being the toppling of two metal
detectors at Churchgate Station yesterday (12 March) while Arvind Kejriwal was
exiting. Even as the visuals showed people trying to right them – they are
flimsy frames – the channel went on to describe it as ‘vandalism’ and,
surprisingly, called up a Shiv Sena spokesperson for a comment. It was said
that the train Kejriwal took from Andheri was ‘special’ without mentioning
whether it was hired by AAP or if the Western Railways had provided it to avoid
confusion and chaos. The morning newspapers did not mention it at all but the
damage had been done – the aam aadmi in a khas train! Another channel went
around asking commuters leading questions about being inconvenienced.
The
media needn’t be as indulgent of AAP as it was when Rahul Gandhi travelled by
Mumbai’s local trains in 2010, but there could, at the very least, be avoidance
of bias. The manner in which reportage is happening shows a certain level of
unfairness. At least, asking newsrooms to stop twisting things could be a good
beginning.
There
could be any number of examples of these distortions. Except for the
back-to-back interviews that Kejriwal gave listing the work he had done as
chief minister, he also made it a point to rub it in that AAP’s wins in Delhi
Recall
the television screens going ablaze with a sting showing, as per the footage,
AAP candidates willing to take money in cash, agreeing to take up an assignment
as a fixer, etc. No doubt they played safe by saying the authenticity of the
video was unverified. But it caused enough damage, including narrow losses in
the Delhi
Let me deal with another instance of media
misrepresentation mainly because, to be honest, it emanated from a lack of
understanding – I dare not say 'ignorance', can I? – of official processes.
When he opted for the Tilak Road Delhi
No
doubt the house would have been inspected by him and or his family before
the choice was made. Had he moved into the premises which Sheila Dikshit had
occupied for 15 years, there would not have been an official correspondence.
But since he opted for something else, a letter had to go from his office. That
made it, 'See, this common man has asked for a 10-bed-room house'. So Kejriwal
became a liar, seeking a pair of bungalows adding up to 10 bedrooms though the
second was to be his camp office, as already explained here earlier. That he
was already a resident of a four-bedroom apartment which his wife had been
given in her capacity as an official of the income-tax department, and that an
additional room was no upgrade, did not cut any ice with the media.
On
a news show, an anchor in fact, went on to discuss whether AAP and its leaders
were cleverly “exploiting” the media, because a few tight shots replayed on a
round robin pattern gave a disproportionate impression of reality. What
remained unsettled was if the media was also chasing Kejriwal and AAP. Wasn’t
it instead, an intelligent use of the media?
After
all, the BJP and the Congress have managed to provide a particular perspective
to their respective leaders’ rallies by setting up their own camera crews and
providing feeds to TV stations. It is possible they did not pan the crowd if it
was small. It is possible that other parties, especially AAP, cannot afford
such an arrangement and need to be intelligent to exploit the media.
As
of now, none of the major rallies of the other smaller parties have received
such an allocation of airtime because it means the studios must allocate
budgets and hardware plus manpower to cover them. Neither has it occurred to
them that AAP cannot afford it to use the same techniques as BJP and Congress.
But yesterday, the Marathi channels showed him speaking at Vikhroli in Mumbai.
Take
Rahul Gandhi’s interactions with various sections of the people to 'understand
their problems. Be it his meeting with the rickshaw pullers of Varanasi
However,
a conversation between an interviewer and the interviewee, Kejriwal, at the end
of a live telecast becomes stuff good enough to go viral on the social media.
He indicated the points he favoured highlighted, apparently in subsequent
telecasts if they were made in snatches, one should believe. That suddenly
makes Kejriwal an exploiter of the media unlike the Modis and Gandhis. Perhaps,
it is wishful to expect, or to even imagine, that media to offer a level
playing field by correcting for the aberrations that have been induced into
their content by controlling the content itself, even if AAP happens to be the
underdog. But no, it is easier to pounce on them, and trigger a tsunami of
adverse comments on social media, especially by people who are not residents of
Delhi
I
did a very small survey using Facebook asking Delhi residents to indicate the
changes they were noticing around the time AAP’s minority government was
halfway through its 49-day life. The observations were interesting as well as
exhilarating. The policemen posted outside a gated community wondered what
would happen to them were they to be brought under the control of the Delhi
Except
for one single instance when Kejriwal himself listed the work done by them in
the first 10 days, like mapping schools and engaging local people to monitor
them, giving a Rs 1 lakh ad hoc grant to them to meet the short term needs
quickly, the media hid these achievements from the people except for the
shenanigans of a movement trying to be a party and also a government. The
anti-corruption call centres and the rest took a back seat and days after AAP
gave up on being a government in Delhi
