The Missing Centre

Drawing of clear battlelines in the media space is not really a bad thing because polarisation always precedes compromise

- R. Jagannathan

YOU don’t need a five-star political analyst to tell you that the Indian media has never been as divided as now. Few journalists and op-ed writers—or, for that matter, even “objective” historians like Ramchandra Guha—now bother to hide their political inclinations or affiliations. You are either “secular left” or “communal-right”—either with “us” or against “us”. There is no neutral space, and that is not as bad as it sounds. Between a media that maintains a pretense of neutrality and one that openly declares its political inclinations, one should prefer the latter, as it at least brings underlying biases out in the open. You know what to discount. The joke is really on the mainstream Lutyens English media, which is still claiming neutrality when its sympathies are obvious to everyone and the dog at the lamp-post.

If one were to name names, one would put NDTV and India Today TV in the anti-Modi, anti-BJP/RSS side of reportage, while Republic TV and Times Now veer towards the other side; CNN News18 is somewhere in the indeterminate middle, swinging both ways. The polarisation sometimes happens within the same media house, with the likes of Rajdeep Sardesai and Rahul Kanwal on one side, and Gaurav Sawant on the other, in India Today TV.

When it comes to newspapers and digital publications, the Times of India is probably somewhere in the middle, happy to swing both ways, while the Indian Express, Hindustan Times, Hindu and