British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) headquarters in London. AFP.
New Delhi: The BBC’s hit job of a documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi has more to do with than just ideology or ignorance of the Indian reality. It is part of a well thought out revenue and growth strategy. With its public funding drying up fast amid serious stigma of a strong left-liberal bias, the BBC has been trying to break ground into hitherto not-so-seriously explored markets, such as India.
This is not to say that BBC does not have an anti-India bias or is objective when it comes to viewing a former colony or that it does not have a colonial superiority complex. On the contrary, UK’s public broadcaster is using all this to its advantage so as to create and expand its footprint in the burgeoning Indian readership market.
Showing India in poor light, criticising its government of the day, harping on the social divisions of India, playing up the fuzzy, and at times contradictory, Indian identities that animate the date-to-day reality of India, treating it worse than failed states such as Pakistan, ostensibly for liberal ideological reasons, is all just a thin veil behind which the real motive is money and business.
According to a study by media analyst Amol Parth, who has charted the revenue growth of major global media platforms in India versus their fall of revenue and readership across the rest of the world, “Between March 2019 and March 2021 BBC grew by 173 per cent in India, which was almost 5 times its global growth which stood at 35 per cent. In March 2019, India’s percentage share in BBC’s total growth globally was 11.14 per cent; India’s share in growth touched 23.11 per cent by March 2021.”
This is also the timeline on which lies the Delhi Riots of February 2020, the biased anti-India coverage of which by almost all the global platforms, including the BBC, reached appalling levels.
Evidently, the anti-India reportage is just a way to grab eyeballs, a sort of marketing stunt, to make inroads into the burgeoning Indian market, as against the sagging fortunes of these global media outlets in the rest of the world.
Simply put, the idea is to use shock and awe as a strategy to overwhelm readers into paying attention, meaning more hits and, therefore, more revenue.
According Parth, the words that have predominantly been used by global media houses in the context of India have been “negative, divisive sparking outrage, inspired with contempt and designed to ridicule India”. According to the same study that chose 500 headlines randomly from the most “reputed” foreign media organisations revealed 10 words used again and again to capture India: fear, hate, violence, riot, Hindu, Muslim, Kashmir, cow, mob and protest.
The lopsided anti-India reports that the so called hallowed global media outlets churn out are a result, partly of their ignorance that stems from their armchair journalism, and partly of what has been called reflexive cynicism that has come to define, contrarian in journalism.
The decline in readership and at home has led to a fall in their revenue. This has been the primary motive of global media houses such as the BBC to venture out and look for better bigger greener pastures such as India, using cynicism and fear to spice up their reports.
India has emerged as the most promising market for global media outlets. In recent times the sunshine character of India as a market for global news consumption is underlined by the fact that India at 130 million has a third largest English speaking population in the world after the United States and Nigeria.
In more relative terms, English speakers in India are almost double the entire population of the United Kingdom as also nearly 40 per cent of the entire population of the United States according to an estimate.
Parth has drawn readership data as indicated by American media measurement and analytics company ComScore.
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