Why is the media allowing AAP to manipulate it all the time
For a party that rules one of India's smallest state (which is not even a full state) AAP manages to grab national headlines far better than any of its far bigger rivals. With the exception of BJP, AAP has been the party that has dominated national news for quite a while.
Some credit for this goes to its energetic leaders who have a talent for spotting trend-worthy issues like odd-even, allegations against Jaitley, fake degree charge against PM Modi, etc, and have an unmatched ability to indulge in sensationalism without sounding insincere.
Also Congress' ineptness as opposition has created a vacuum which underpins AAP's impressive rise to national discourse.
But these factors alone can't explain why it's AAP and not other bigger and more established players like Nitish Kumar, Naveen Patnaik, among others, who get this incessant attention. For instance, let's ask why Nitish, after securing a landmark record fourth consecutive electoral victory in Bihar, has been overshadowed by Kejriwal - a novice who won a much smaller state?
The obsession of our English-language media with Delhi, with themselves being centered in NCR, gives AAP an immense advantage in its task of being in the news and steering national discourse over other, more regional players. A very active social media presence also helps.
Yet, the ability of AAP to steer the national discourse, or at least its capacity to get itself inserted into the national narrative, is predominantly because of its mastery of manipulating and controlling the media. This it does through various carrot-and-stick methods as discussed below.
Active promotion of favourable articles
After BJP, AAP has the largest fan following in social media. Its leader, Arvind Kejriwal, with 8 million followers on Twitter, is surpassed by only Prime Minister Narendra Modi among the galaxy of political leaders present on the social media platform.
But AAP, unlike the BJP, is very active in sharing articles and other stuff from media which is in sync with its agenda. This means that by creating pro-AAP content, a website or a portal can get a very high traffic volume. This incentivises the media to create more pro-AAP content as at the end of the day, media needs traffic and AAP, by sharing pro-AAP content, brings in that traffic by providing access to its large number of followers.
At the back of anyone making the decision to do a pro- or anti-AAP story, this consideration will inevitably enter and influence their choice.
Read - App-based bus plan a good move pic.twitter.com/fBKLHxB2yn
— AAP In News (@AAPInNews) May 31, 2016
Also from a look at the sites AAP shares more frequently from, one discovers that AAP carefully cultivates this favourable relation more with new media sites, which are not that conventionally large in scale, but are rising fast and have a disproportionate impact on the English language mediascape.
This has many advantages. Because these sites are not that well established, they are more affected by the consideration of getting a large audience that AAP can bring in. Also by promoting the new sites with which it has a symbiotic relation, AAP achieves a longer term objective of making the media more "friendly" to it as a political entity.
Baiting media by questioning its courage
A central theme of AAP's politics is its claim of being honest as against the corrupt traditional parties. To drive home this message, it often rakes up dirt against its opponents. The high and mighty are dragged down as allegations against them are hurled left, right and centre.
But why does the media, which is usually loath to become a medium of such relentless political one-upmanship, and is, paradoxically, also averse to going after the big fish, play ball in such schemes of unscrupulous self-promotion that AAP practices without a pause?
The trick is simple: any allegation that AAP picks up, is instantly turned into a matter of media's integrity, impartiality and honesty, and its coverage become more important that its actual substance. All such allegations are prefixed by a dare to media to cover them.
And there results the double bind. If the media doesn't cover the allegations, AAP cries conspiracy and claims that media lacks the spine to raise the issue. In doing so, its stock among its own supporters rises while media's credibility is dented.
However, more often than not, if the media covers the issue, which it usually does, AAP gets to set the national discourse and capture the opposition space. This modus operandi was successfully used in attacking Arun Jaitley in the DDCA case as well as targeting PM Modi in the fake degree case.
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| AAP has a number of journalists, such as Ashutosh and Ashish Khetan, in top positions. |
Nepotism and trolling
AAP incentivises media to report favourably about it by rewarding journalists with top positions within the party and government. It has inducted many former journalists into top positions - Ashutosh has been made member of the all powerful Political Affairs Committee (PAC), Ashish Khetan has been made the head of the Delhi Dialogue Commission (DDC), and Kunwar Sindhu, a veteran Punjabi journalist, has been made head of Punjab Dialogues. All those wannabe politicians who are in journalism are thus inclined to go soft on AAP to get entry via the easy lane to politics.
AAP leaders also target journalists critical of AAP - motives are attributed to such journalists, their integrity is questioned and the party's active social media troll machinery is set loose on them. All this creates an environment where it becomes difficult to report any adverse issues related to AAP.
Show me evidence of corruption. Do innuendos & spiteful remarks attributed to unknown sources amount to journalism? https://t.co/BkLFICfuWn
— Ashish Khetan (@AashishKhetan) June 1, 2016
Don't promote a culture of lies & insinuations in the name of journalism. This is wink-wink nudge-nudge trash. https://t.co/MJDWrmvQbT
— Ashish Khetan (@AashishKhetan) June 1, 2016
No. I don't have any communication from fountain ink or by this reporter. Am going to write to the publication https://t.co/xk19XeZF1t
— Ashish Khetan (@AashishKhetan) June 1, 2016
So, through these carrots and sticks, AAP ensures that journalists cover it favourably and prominently, again making certain that it gets exactly the type of spotlight it is constantly seeking.
Advertisement spending
AAP government spends crores of rupees on advertisements. These adverts are an important revenue source for the media, thus provides AAP an important leverage.
Smaller media houses that are relatively more dependent on the party are careful not to cross the line. Inevitably, this gives the impression that the new media os favourably disposed towards AAP.
Dangling defamation
AAP, in its initial days, was extremely irritated with the loose reporting on it, with any negative news about it getting on their leaders' nerves. To address this problem, the Delhi government decided that it would file criminal as well as civil defamation suits against media whenever it deemed necessary.
This made negative reporting about AAP a costly affair as media houses risked being dragged into courts, a harrowing experience in any part of the world. Media houses being commercial organisations can't afford the large litigation costs and thus are cautious about negative reports on AAP. Thus the stick of defamation suits has again been something AAP has adroitly deployed to control the media narrative.
A caveat
However, this is not to say that media has not at times been unfair to AAP. There are sections of media which have waged a motivated smear campaign against AAP. But as it turns out, AAP has cleverly used that very smear overload from some news organisations to defend its own manipulation of media.
A party that was born with promise to get rid of the malpractices that prevailed in our democracy has sadly become a master at exploiting them for its own growth. It's something AAP supporters as well as its critics need to ponder upon.