Victimisation is a commercial act, insists the same despotic government that often assures that nobody quite understands what they’re trying to do. Bouts of so-called misunderstanding – by media, citizens, the opposition, and the larger watching world – transform it into a saint, absolutely detached from victimhood, even while presenting the comparable symptoms: flinging blame, feeling perpetually attacked, and finally, more significantly, claiming to be ignored, all across history. They offer a mirror to you, who often feels the same things, caressing you to choose wisely at the ballot. “Choose me,” they say insistently, unable to afford the subliminal at the risk of sounding – all the while being – elitist.
In the 2024 US elections, Donald Trump appeared in all the popular podcasts. He became not only accessible to the population of young American men who overwhelmingly voted for him this election but also presented himself as the option that legacy media had cast aside. Inadvertently, he became the only real option for the American population that Big Media supposedly no longer seemed to care for. By positioning himself as a candidate willing to show up in alternative forms of media, Trump becomes a whistleblower of the same fold that has afforded him privilege in perpetuity. He can stay in the system, criticise it, and still benefit from it – as long as he shows up for fry duty at a McDonald’s. Trump revamped his image by slipping into the crack of two forms of media: traditional and the alternative to traditional media, both of which are perennially obsessed with one another.
Challenging status quo
In her book Video Culture in India: The Analog Era, Ishita Tiwary explores the impact of analogue video technology on Indian society during the 1980s and early 1990s. In one of the interconnected essays in the book, “Unsettling News: Newstrack and the Video Event,” Tiwary writes about Newstrack, which emerged as a response to the state-controlled television network Doordarshan. In a media environment dominated by the state’s narrative, Newstrack, a video magazine circulated through videotapes, offered an alternative source of news and current affairs to Doordarshan, establishing itself as a reproach to the status quo. This approach was accompanied by covering news overlooked – and hence discounted by the act of overlooking – by Doordarshan through stylistics that reinforced its self-image as the “alternative,” and even arguably, the “radical” form of news. Radicality stands in opposition to legacy, which is notorious for running the common middle-class Indian – upper-caste and self-victimised – into the ground.
In her well-articulated essay, Tiwary argues that Newstrack’s use of close-ups, shaky camera movements, and rapid editing created a sense of immediacy and “liveness” distinct from the more polished and controlled aesthetic of Doordarshan’s news broadcasts. While sometimes criticised for its sensationalist characteristics, this aesthetic contributed to Newstrack’s popularity and impact. She calls this media a “video event,” which, she argues, is a precursor to the sensationalistic imagery we often see in television news today, infamous for wringing news for TRPs. Favoured by American conservatives over legacy media like print, television news, and its comparatively less-funded contemporary – YouTube “deep dives” and podcasts by individuals like Ben Shapiro and Dhruv Rathee – are either seen as a subsidiary or autonomous from Big Media. The former gets off on painting the latter as “vultures” who have sold out to the status quo.
Legacy media, owing to its system of checks and balances, is ripe for the accusation of gatekeeping. Through its model of presenting “alternative” news – and hence, not bothering to report the so-called majoritarian news you're already encountering in the state- or elite-controlled media – non-traditional formats shirk their responsibility to present all the facts. (On the assumption that the facts are less favourable to the narrative it is building has been covered or wilfully twisted by the fact-checked media houses anyway). Perhaps this mode of operation was what Newstrack employed when it portrayed the anti-Mandal protests, often violent and disruptive, as a justified response to the government's policies, ignoring that an anti-government stance in this account was an alignment with the status quo. It is worth noting that the magazine was highly censored, which only fortified its appeal to the otherwise tame urban viewer.
Newstrack focused on the anxieties and grievances of upper-caste students who felt that reservations would unfairly disadvantage them, downplaying the historical and ongoing discrimination faced by lower-caste communities. Employing emotionally charged language critical of the government's decision to implement the Mandal Commission's recommendations, primarily featuring perspectives critical of the commission's implications, the magazine gave less airtime to those who supported reservations.
Media that offers itself as an alternative inevitably yields itself to misuse, especially when it shrugs off checks and balances. In an article about Dhruv Rathee, Hartosh Singh Bal, Executive Editor at The Caravan, said: “In the larger sense of the media landscape, let this game be played out. But don’t call it journalism. It is fact-based propaganda in one direction.” The article continues, “The more popular such formats [as Rathee’s] are, the less viable journalism is…” One could argue that independent news organisations like Scroll, The Wire, The News Minute, and The Caravan, to name a few, are also “alternatives” to legacy media, which in India's case, has been co-opted by populist sentiments shared by the ruling government. The internet dissolves the line between individual creators and other independent channels like Dhruv Rathee’s and the Daily Wire and independent news organisations. But where one is simply a curator of publicly available knowledge, the other is a reporter uncovering news, and where one narrativises the other limits themselves to disseminating the facts.
‘Forgotten’ media
One could interpret Tiwary’s work as suggesting that media democratisation predates the internet and that the analogue video era in India represents a significant, but under-researched, archive for understanding this process. Focusing on analogue video in India, she draws attention to a period often overlooked in media scholarship, which tends to prioritise the digital age. Her work implicitly argues for the importance of studying these “forgotten” media forms to gain a more thorough understanding of media history and democratisation. Her emphasis on video parlours, video libraries, and the circulation of videotapes outside of traditional theatrical channels challenged the narrative that the internet alone ushered in an era of media democratisation, with these alternative channels allowing for the circulation of diverse perspectives, bypassing the gatekeeping functions of established media institutions long before most Indians had a data plan.
Video Culture in India is an important book that dismantles the serendipitous illusion of media use for political purposes, arguing that it has a long history and contemporary digital media practices often build upon earlier strategies. To overlook this reality affords the despotic government the feat of originality. One might think that's an uncomplicated conclusion, but Tiwary brings years of archival and ethnographic research to unpack this at a time when media literacy is paramount for every citizen, and consumer, worldwide. Video Culture in India also includes an essay on a media-savvy religious leader – a charismatic and provocative cult leader with a luxurious lifestyle – focusing on visual self-representation through a series of video recordings. Oh, she’s talking about Osho, by the way. Your guess was wrong.
Video Culture in India: The Analog Era, Ishita Tiwary, Oxford University Press.
