3 minutes reading time
I stopped by the local tea stall near the bus stand this morning. The old CRT television mounted in the corner was blaring some recycled debate from Delhi, the volume cranked up so high the plastic casing rattled. Four men sitting on wooden benches were nodding along to a tailored suit screaming about who the real anti-nationals are. It hit me right there. You don't need to bribe these four men for their votes. You don't even need to bribe the local ward councilor. You just need to buy the screen they are staring at.
Buying an MP is expensive. Buying an entire political party is a logistical nightmare with too many moving parts. But buying the microphone? That is just a clean, high-return investment.
Think about how you steal water from the public tank. You don't go door to door paying off every family in the street to look the other way. You just buy the man who operates the main valve. You give him a script and tell him to shout that the tank is already empty, or better yet, that the people in the next street are the ones stealing the water. By the time everyone figures out the lie, your tanker has already left the neighborhood.
This is the media ownership loophole. We like to think of the press as the independent referee in our electoral circus. But what happens when the referee’s paycheck is signed by the same billionaires who sponsor the winning team?
Look at what happened in 2014. Network18, one of the biggest news networks in this country, was swallowed whole by Reliance Industries. The corporate takeover of the newsroom happened in plain sight. It was printed on the business pages, celebrated as a masterstroke of corporate strategy. Nobody marched in the streets. Nobody recognized it for the absolute betrayal of the public trust that it was.
Now, five or six corporate houses own the airwaves. They decide what makes you angry. They decide what you ignore. It is a highly efficient machine. When the prime-time anchor screams about a border dispute or a religious insult, no one asks why the prices of dal and cooking oil are climbing. The news doesn't report reality anymore; it manufactures compliance.
Independent journalism requires a conscience. Corporate PR disguised as prime-time news only requires a budget. And the people sitting in the air-conditioned boardrooms in Mumbai and Delhi have calculated the math perfectly. Why spend hundreds of crores funding local campaigns and negotiating with regional satraps when you can just buy the network and broadcast your propaganda directly into the living rooms of millions of cowards who will swallow whatever they are fed?
The politician is no longer the master in this arrangement. The politician is just an actor auditioning for screen time. The real masters are the ones holding the remote control, laughing at how cheaply they bought our reality.