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Update on 19 April, 2005:
Rajdeep Sardesai,
launches Broadcast News in collaboration with TV-18
The Indian media is shameless.
The 2004 Lok Sabha elections are over. A new PM is in place. It is Dr. Manmohan Singh, former finance minister in the PV Narasimha Rao cabinet, not the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi. Nor her children. Nor Vajpayee, or Mulayam Singh Yadav.
All that is fine, the dance of democracy goes on. Let it.
Starting almost two months before the Lok Sabha elections, all the newspapers, magazines and television channels drilled into our heads their various opinion polls, analyses, drivel. All of them went out the window. Brilliant.
As the Lok Sabha elections drew nearer, the TV channels neared hysteria.
Hysteria in the Indan audio-visual media - that can only mean Rajdeep Sardesai and NDTV. Rajdeep
Sardesai - the one of Ji Chota Shakeelji fame - drives himself to stratospheric levels of hysteria whenever anything happens. I mean anything. It need not be newsworthy, it need not be of any political importance, but he flies into hysteria nevertheless. But I digress. We shall tackle Rajdeep Sardesai another day.
The elections conclusively proved that the Indian electorate and its intentions are extremely difficult to fathom. Opinion polls fail with striking regularity during all elections, and this election was no better.
Usually, exit polls fare better - this time, they too were
thrown into the dustbin.
We all know the final outcome. Here is a list of what all their exit polls said, the day before counting of votes in the 2004 lok sabha elections:
Headlines Today - 248 seats to NDA
Star News - 263-275 NDA
Sahara Samay - 263-278 NDA
We all know what happened.
How did the media react to their own massive blunder? Did the
Indian media examine why their exit polls failed to discover that the NDA would be given the boot?
Nope. Nothing. Not a murmur.
In fact, journalistic ethics dictate that, as soon as the
elections and countings were over, that the Indian media examine
its own failed predictions, analyses, opinion polls and exit
polls. Call in the same psephologists. Call in the regular talking heads. Let's go state by state. What was our sample in this state? How was it selected? Was it sizeable enough? Were there any other issues?
Why do opinion and exit polls go wrong?
Apart from gasping, cheering and declaring again and again that the results were shocking,
all that Rajdeep Sardesai, Prannoy Roy and their counterparts in the rest of the
Indian audiovisual media did was to move on the unfolding political drama.
There is no acknowledgement. No attempt to critically analyse
their own failings. No sense of shame, no guilt at misleading (however inadvertantly) their viewers on who is going to come back to power.. nothing.
Can we expect such an admission, an examination anytime in the future - say, before the next elections?
I will tell you what will happen. Rajdeep Sardesai and Prannoy will
face each other, will make a cursory mention of how exit polls could fail,
will make that same comment amoubt 'how the Indian voter's
intentions are very difficult to fathom" and move on to further showelling what passes for informed
analyses on us. Their counterparts in the other channels probably would not even do
that and would jump right into even more opinion polls and exit
polls. One is shocked that these people call themselves
journalists.
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Here is what Rajdeep Sardesai himself says about the media's failure. The following are a few short excerpts from this column that appeared in Mumbai tabloid Mid Day.
Read the full column here -
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Forget the theories then. The media needs to introspect on its own role. Unlike the Indian voter, did we get carried away with the hype and the hysteria of the India Shining campaign and the Vajpayee cult of personality? The answer, regrettably, is that we did.
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Trapped in our air-conditioned studios and driven by the need to see elections as entertainment, most of us in television channels forgot that there was more to voter behaviour than chunavi quawalis and big fights.
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Personally, I must confess to have committed the cardinal journalistic sin of suspending disbelief.
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I think there is a way to describe the media's total failure in predicting elections results using one of Rajdeep's favourite phrases - Hamam mein sab nange hain..! Only, in this case, this applies to journalists.
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