Media myths of the ruralscape

The amount of rural reportage in the Indian media remains far too low, with even important stories such as those on farmer suicides tending to be ignored. One of the outspoken critics of this trend has been P Sainath, rural-affairs editor of The Hindu and 2007 winner of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts. He was also the journalist who originally broke the story on farmer suicides in India. He recently spoke to Himal about the hyper-commercialisation of the Indian media, and how this has created a structural compulsion to hide the truth about poverty and avoid covering important issues of rural India.

A decade and a half ago, you said that in India, where half the children go to bed hungry every night, the mainstream newsmagazines carry cover stories on weight loss. Things have not changed much since then, have they?
Well, in some minor ways things have improved. There is a growing number of journalists who are working hard to bring social-sector stories into the media. So there's some energy being built up on these issues, particularly among district-level journalists. It's not yet a critical mass, but at least it's a start. On the other hand, the media as a whole has fallen prey to what I call hyper-commercialisation. Of course, this is a larger problem – the media is very much a part of larger society, and cannot stand aside from larger social and economic processes. But I would challenge the proposition that the Indian media are pro-corporate and pro-establishment, for the simple reason that now we are big business, we are the establishment. The Indian media are deeply, directly invested in hundreds of sectors of industry. Corporate houses have investments in media, and now the media is itself invested in big business.