Social media,political discourse and the 2019 elections in India: Journalists’ perspectives on the changing role of the mainstream media in setting the political agenda

Abstract

With the rise in social media usage, India now grapples with the problem of polarized political discourse via digital platforms. In light of the general elections in 2019, veteran Indian journalists, during in-depth interviews, discussed how social media influenced political discourse and enabled a polarized political narrative that gave rise to aggressive nationalism and majoritarian viewpoints. Journalists asserted that social media were instrumental in setting the agenda for the mainstream media and that social media had redefined their professional roles as the platforms enabled the politicians to bypass the mainstream news media and reach the voters directly.

Keywords

India intermedia agenda-setting journalism misinformation political communication social media platforms

In a highly digitalized world, the mainstream news media’s influence appears to be waning as traditional media such as newspapers, television and radio are often no longer the only influencing power on people’s opinions (Ceron, 2014; McGregor and Vargo, 2017; Meraz, 2009). As information moves online, social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and web-based apps like WhatsApp can influence political discussion and discourse (Parmelee, 2013; Woodly, 2008). Social media platforms, with their power to promote unmediated communication between politicians and citizens, can potentially restructure political power by giving political parties the freedom to articulate their ideology, often bypassing the traditional news media (Bimber, 1998; Engesser et al., 2017; Rodrigues, 2014; Tromble and Koole, 2020). Digital platforms, thus, have the power to encroach upon traditional media’s role of agenda-setting and gatekeeping (Feezell, 2018; Graeff et al., 2014; Harder et al., 2017) and their proliferation has necessitated that professional journalists include social media as their primary sources of information (Parmelee, 2013).

India, being the world’s largest democracy and the world’s second-largest internet market, has witnessed a substantial increase in the penetration of social media platforms and mobile phones since 2014 (Aneez et al., 2019; CSDS-Lokniti, 2019). In the run-up to the 2019 general elections, social platforms were used effectively by politicians across party lines to influence public opinion (Pal and Panda, 2019) and the country witnessed a rise in the circulation of ‘fake news’ or misinformation (Ganguly and Kumaraguru, 2019), hate speech (Rao, 2019) and an increase in the activity of Twitter bots (Dhapola and Aggarwal, 2019; Neyazi, 2020).

As Indians gravitated more towards an online discourse in 2019 as compared to the 2014 general elections, little is known about how the rise in digital political discourse affected the mainstream media’s credibility, their role of gatekeeping information and their ability to set the agenda for discussion during the 2019 elections. By using in-depth interview methodology, this study gauges the views of veteran mainstream news media journalists in India on the influence of social media on political debates and discussions in the run-up to the 2019 elections in India. This study also explores how the increasing role of digital platforms poses challenges to the mainstream media and how will it shape the future of journalism in India.

Literature review

Indian media landscape

India has a rigorous media landscape and is among the largest media markets in the world. Indian print media traces its origin to the colonial era, has had a reputation of being the watchdog of the government in power, and has survived government censorship during the Emergency period of the 1970s (Rodrigues, 2010). With over 100 million newspaper copies sold each day, India is the world’s biggest newspaper market (Office of the Registrar of Newspapers for India, 2020). According to the World Association of Newspapers and Publishers’ World Press Trends Report (2016), seven Indian newspapers feature in the list of top 20 newspapers by circulation in the world. Dainik Jagran, a Hindi daily, is India’s top circulated newspaper with 6,866,000 copies sold each day. Among the English newspapers, Bennett and Coleman’s The Times of India is the largest circulated newspaper with 2,836,000 copies sold each day. According to a recent report by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN)-IFRA (2019), India is one of the few countries in the world that witnessed a growth in newspaper circulation (Owen, 2019). The WAN-IFRA report states that India’s newspaper circulation has mushroomed more than 8 per cent from 2014 to 2018. This contrasts starkly with the performances of other countries such as Romania (down 55%) and Australia (down 50%) during the same period.

India has also witnessed an exponential growth in the television industry since the 1990s. The country currently has over 902 private satellite channels, out of which more than 400 are dedicated news channels (www.indiantelevision.com). Neyazi (2018) notes that unlike the Western countries which witnessed mostly a linear growth in media – growth in print followed by growth in radio, television and the internet – India has witnessed tremendous growth across media systems in the last decade, making the Indian media system highly complex and fragmented. Within India, there are diverse and multilingual media systems, and Hindi language media, with a reach of 40 per cent of the population, is the largest media in the country (Neyazi, 2018).

The reach of the mainstream news media was evident in the 2019 general elections. The elections attracted a massive readership and viewership in India as both the print and the TV viewership saw a massive increase before and during the 2019 elections. According to the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC), the day of the election results (23 May 2019) witnessed an all-time high viewership for Hindi news channels with a total of 620 million impressions (Jha, 2019). Hindi news channels Aaj Tak, ABP News and India TV occupied the top three spots in ranking in that order, an increase of 30 per cent versus the average of the previous 4 weeks. As per BARC data, English news channels were viewed by 14 million people over the week, an increase of 60 per cent versus the average of the previous 4 weeks (Jha, 2019).

Print readership also saw a substantial increase some weeks before the election results. According to the Indian Readership Survey (IRS, 2019), the first quarter of 2019 revealed that the overall readership of newspapers had grown from 407 million readers in 2017 to 425 million readers at the end of the first quarter of 2019. As per the IRS, while Hindi and regional dailies grew at 3.9 and 5.7 per cent, respectively, English newspapers saw a 10.7 per cent growth (Malvania, 2019). The consumption of online newspapers also grew from 4 per cent in 2017 to 5 per cent in early 2019 (Malvania, 2019).

Media ownership pattens have also changed rapidly in India in the past few years. Family-owned newspapers have set up new cross-media companies that have gone public, and some privately-owned TV companies like NDTV and TV Today have listed themselves on the stock exchange (Bhushan, 2015). Rodrigues (2010), who critically examines the growth of print media in the recent years, states that with the economic liberalization of the 1990s, the media industry rapidly transformed from being family-owned to corporate-owned. According to Bhushan (2015), the rapid shift in the ownership patterns since the 1990s has, however, resulted in an internal shift within the media organizations. The corporatization of media has diluted editorial control over the content, and, as a result, journalistic standards have fallen in recent years (Bhushan, 2015; Mushtaq and Baig, 2020). Sonwalkar (2019) asserts that journalism in India and elsewhere is currently suffering from a trust deficit with questionable ethics, and terms the corporatization of Indian media as ‘murdochization’, wherein readers and viewers are treated as consumers instead of citizens.

In addition to the rising concerns about the quality of journalism, the traditional media faces an imminent threat from the internet and social media (Rodrigues, 2010). Rodrigues (2010) states: ‘The competition print media would face is . . . from citizen journalism and social media websites which may seek to fill the holes left by the print media in their coverage’ (pp. 65–66). The latest figures corroborate these assertions as the data reveals that the growth in traditional media has not been able to keep up with overall growth of digital platforms despite an increase in overall readership and viewership. News consumption in India has also moved from traditional sources such as newspapers to social media since 2014 as only 18 per cent read newspapers in 2019, down from 29 per cent in 2014; TV news consumption among voters declined from 46 per cent in 2014 to 35 per cent in 2019 (Aneez et al., 2019; CSDS-Lokniti, 2019).

The growth of digital platforms in India

With over 560 million internet users, India is the second-largest online market in the world and is ranked only behind China in terms of internet users (Diwanji, 2020). With over 269 million Facebook users (Facebook’s largest user base in the world), over 400 million WhatsApp users and 7.9 million Twitter users, India is among the leading markets for social media platforms in the world today (CSDS-Lokniti, 2019).

Deep penetration of smartphones and cheap internet data plans have propelled new media users in the country since 2014 (Aneez et al., 2019; Khurana and Kumar, 2018). While only 1 in 10 voters accessed Facebook in 2014, this figure jumped to 32 per cent by 2019 (CSDS-Lokniti, 2019). WhatsApp, a messaging app owned by Facebook, has 34 per cent of Indian voters as its users, compared with 22 per cent in 2017. As many as 31 per cent of voters watched YouTube, owned by Google, while the Facebook-owned Instagram has 15 per cent of the electorate currently using the app. Twitter, low on the popularity list of the masses but very popular among political leaders to disseminate information, is used by 12 per cent of Indian voters (CSDS-Lokniti, 2019).

The impact of digital platforms on India’s media landscape and social fabric

High penetration of digital platforms in India has enabled significant portions of political campaigning in India to go online as almost all the major political parties have not only created a strong digital presence but have also managed to cut out the mainstream press as an intermediary in the process (Pal and Panda, 2019; Prasad, 2019). Political movement on social media platforms was higher in the 2019 election than the one in 2014, and one-third of first-time voters were influenced by political messages on social media platforms (The Economic Times, 2019). The 2019 elections also witnessed small and regional parties garner support via social media platforms (Pal and Panda, 2019).

With a massive reach, social media platforms have also emerged as platforms of digital propaganda, tools of manipulation of public opinion and spread of misinformation in India (Khurana and Kumar, 2018; Neyazi, 2020). Pushing an ideology to make political gains is one of the main motivations of producing and circulating misinformation and fake news (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017). In India, the circulation of fake news on personal messaging apps like WhatsApp has emerged as a grave concern in recent years and fake/bot accounts were prevalent before the elections (Ganguly and Kumaraguru, 2019; Goel and Frenkel, 2019; Khurana and Kumar, 2018). Banaji et al. (2019: 3), in their recent report on WhatsApp’s role in mob lynching in India, find that ‘digital communication practices take place within particular socio-political contexts and in turn shape socio-political contexts’. Thus, WhatsApp messages, for example, work in tandem with ideas and stereotypes which circulate more widely in the public domain, including in the mainstream news media (Banaji et al., 2019). The report states that misinformation or disinformation often appears at the same time on social media and in mainstream news media and even in films (termed as transmediality), thereby validating the information for the user.

Social media’s role in enabling a style of populist politics and allowing hate speech in unregulated online spaces remained a dominant feature of the 2019 elections as digital platforms routinized hate speech in online political communication and participation in India (Rao, 2019; Sharma, 2023). The general elections of 2019 particularly witnessed hashtag wars such as #Chowkidarchorhai and #meinbhichowkidar (#Iamalsowatchman) between political rivals as parties relentlessly pushed their agenda on online platforms (Ganguly and Kumaraguru, 2019; Sharma, 2019). (‘Mein bhi chowkidar’ – I am also a watchman – was a slogan used by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as a counter-slogan against the rival Indian National Congress’ (INC’s) slogan of ‘Chowkidar chor hai’, implying that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was a thief).

To manipulate public opinion, automated Twitter bots (software apps that run automated tasks to influence opinion) made a massive attempt to boost traffic on Twitter in the weeks before the general elections, and such bots were deployed both in support of and in opposition to the incumbent prime minister, Narendra Modi, and increased the polarization in the country (Dhapola and Aggarwal, 2019; Neyazi, 2020). Thus, with an increase in social media’s penetration in the country, the dissemination of misinformation also spread at a rapid pace and resulted in a polarized political discourse before the elections. Little empirical research, however, exists that analyses the misinformation circulated during the elections and the implication of the rapid spread of misinformation on the mainstream media in India. Thus, we pose the following questions:

RQ1: According to the mainstream journalists, what is the extent of the spread of misinformation in India through social media platforms?

RQ2: Did the journalists observe more misinformation and hate speech in the run-up to the 2019 elections as compared to the 2014 elections in India? How was the 2014 campaign different from the 2019 campaign?

New media and the power of agenda-setting

Traditionally, the mainstream news media have set the agenda for political discussion as media coverage provides cues to the public about the relevant importance of the main issues (McCombs and Shaw, 1972). The web-based new media, including social media platforms, however, have necessitated a re-evaluation of the traditional agenda-setting theory (Bennett and Iyengar, 2008) and have urged scholars to examine the role of the public in influencing the news media (McCombs, 2005).

Studies indicate that the traditional media nowadays are just one part of the many factors exerting influence on people’s opinions (Meraz, 2009; Neuman et al., 2014). While traditional media still control the agenda online and continue to enjoy credibility and provide legitimacy to online content (Conway et al., 2015; Prasad, 2019; Scharkow and Vogelgesang, 2011), its effect is more limited and conditional now. The mainstream media retain their first-level agenda-setting power, that is, the power to tell the public what to think about. However, research indicates that their influence at the attribute agenda-setting level, which is the power to guide people how to think about an issue, is more limited (Ceron, 2014; Vargo et al., 2015).

Studies have also been conducted to measure the extent to which news content transfers between different media (Harder et al., 2017). Studies have demonstrated the two-way effects between traditional and new media (Messner and Distaso, 2008; Russell Neuman et al., 2014). Social media platforms can feed information to the mainstream media to carry forward the agenda primarily set by them just as much as the news covered by traditional media can drive discussion on social media platforms (Meraz, 2011; Rodrigues, 2014). The anti-corruption protest headed by the well-known Indian civil activist, Anna Hazare, is another example of the power of social media in setting the agenda for mainstream media. Rodrigues (2014), in an analysis of the anti-corruption protests held in 2011, states that the impetus for coverage of the movement came primarily from the social media that influenced the movement’s coverage in the mainstream media. Salience can be transferred with the social network, though the degree to which those agendas are transferred varies from person to person (McGregor and Vargo, 2017).

Social media have now become very effective tools for popular democratically elected politicians to set public agendas as social media provide political parties with the freedom to articulate their ideology and spread their message directly to the public (Engesser et al., 2017). In present-day political communication, new media and old media coexist and complement each other in a hybrid media system, each aiding politicians in their goal of reaching their audience (Chadwick, 2013; Klinger and Svensson, 2016).

Though the potential of social media as agenda-setters has been of interest to researchers, little research has gone into examining how these platforms shaped mainstream media’s coverage in the 2019 elections. Therefore, we pose the following question:

RQ3: What was the influence of social media platforms on mainstream media’s coverage in the 2019 elections in India?

New media and their influence on traditional news gathering and reporting

With growing interdependence between mainstream news media and social media platforms, the role of journalists and editors is constantly changing and expanding. While, on one hand, social media have emerged as primarily sources of news gathering for journalists (Alejandro, 2010; Belair-Gagnon et al., 2013), the prolific and unregulated nature of social media has also presented challenges for journalists in terms of the need to constantly authenticate the information available on these media platforms (Bharali and Goswami, 2017; Brandtzaeg et al., 2016). The extensive reach of social media has impacted the news gathering process for mainstream journalists as, unlike in the olden days, journalists now rely on social media for story leads and primary sources (Alejandro, 2010; Brandtzaeg et al., 2016). The verification of social media content and sources are, however, increasingly critical to journalists who need an efficient verification process for the overwhelming amount of social media content available today (Brandtzaeg et al., 2016). In the Indian context, scholars urge a more active role for the mainstream media to filter online content to restore the credibility and accountability of mainstream journalists (Bharali and Goswami, 2017). Thus, while social media have emerged as a potent news source for journalists, the mainstream media are still expected to filter and authenticate the content to lend it credibility in the chaotic online media world. To understand how the new media necessitated changes in the functioning of traditional media during the 2019 election campaigning in India, we pose our fourth research question:

RQ4: What adjustments do the mainstream news media journalists have to make to remain relevant in the social media era of political discourse?

Method

Veteran editors and journalists across India consented to in-depth interviews about their experiences of reporting during the 2019 elections. The three main criteria for recruiting participants were:

They need to have least 15 years of experience of political/public policy reporting in India;

They should be currently working with a mainstream news organization; and

They should have covered at least the last two general elections in India (2014 and 2019) as professional journalists.

Participant recruitment

The mainstream media journalists were contacted via their official emails, official Twitter handles and personal networking after the election results were declared on 23 May 2019. Within a week of the declaration of the election results, around 50 emails and messages on Twitter and Facebook were sent to journalists whose bylines appeared in the mainstream media for the election coverage. Eight journalists responded and consented to be a part of the study after being sent two reminder emails and messages. The response rate, thus, was 16 per cent. Though this response rate seems low, it is in line with recent studies that have reported low response rates in studies with journalist participants (Vu and Saldaña, 2021).

Sample

Eight veteran journalists (four men and four women) from seven leading news organizations in India participated in the study. To bring a multiplicity of views to this study, the consenting participants were carefully selected so that they represented different types of news organizations in India. The participants were sampled from the largest English-language and Hindi-language newspapers in India, including journalists working at The Times of India, the largest-selling English daily in India; Punjab Kesari and The Navbharat Times, the seventh and ninth most-read Hindi newspapers in the country, respectively (IRS, 2019); The Economic Times, the third-largest English newspaper in India; India Today, of the Aaj Tak media group, which is the largest broadcast group in India (IRS, 2019); BBC World Service, which is the oldest international multi-platform news agency in India that broadcasts radio, TV and online news; and The Print, a digital-only multimedia publication that was launched in 2017.

Three of the journalists were based in New Delhi, India’s political capital, and five were from the regional markets: Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh in North India and Kolkata in eastern India.

The participants were briefed about the interview theme prior to conducting the interviews. Interviews took place during June to August 2019 after the election results were declared and were conducted on phone and in person. Each participant was interviewed only once, and each interview lasted one-and-a-half hours to 2 hours. An IRB waiver was obtained at a public university in Northwest USA before starting the study. To protect the identity of the participants, we anonymized direct quotations to conceal the journalists’ identity and maintain confidentiality.

Interview questions

Each journalist in this study was asked the following questions in a one-on-one setting:

How did the social media platforms set the agenda for discussions during the 2019 election? How did the social media use/drive the election debates, if at all?

Are the mainstream media being challenged by the social media? If yes, how are the mainstream media adapting to the new social media-driven culture?

How are the political parties using social media platforms? Is social media usage driven by distrust of the mainstream media and how is that distrust being exploited by political parties?

How savvy do you think the public are in detecting fake news?

Is there polarization in Indian politics? Do you think the mainstream media is causing polarization, and how are they are reacting to it? Can we see fractured audiences like in the US with Right-wingers being attracted to some channels while others gravitate towards others?

As a journalist, how much do you depend on social media? What advice can you give to remain objective and unbiased in a multimedia newsroom environment?

Data analysis

Each interview was audio-recorded, translated and transcribed into English for analysis. Each interview’s transcribed data ran into three–four pages, thus generating more than 30 pages of transcribed interview data that were analysed in this study.

After transcribing the interviews, we conducted a thematic analysis of the interview text to identify the main themes that emerged from the data. Thematic analysis is a method for identifying, analysing and reporting themes and patterns emerging from data (Braun and Clarke, 2006). This is also a flexible method of analysis that suits both inductive and theoretical analysis well (Nowell et al., 2017). Ranji (2020) used thematic analysis methodology effectively to identify themes after conducting interviews with journalists in Iran.

We followed the following steps laid out by Braun and Clarke (2006) for thematic analysis of text:

Familiarization with data: In this step, two coders read and re-read the data several times to understand what each participant wanted to convey.

Assigning codes: After developing an initial understanding of the text, the two coders categorized the data into different categories and assigned codes.

Development of themes: Once the data were coded, we identified main broad themes that emerged out of these codes.

Labelling the themes: We identified four broad themes in the data and labelled these as: a) The influence of social media on setting the agenda for the mainstream media; b) The role of social media in the spread of fake news or misinformation; c) The rise of polarization on social media; and d) The mainstream media’s changing role and its relationship with social media: how do the mainstream news journalists use social media in their news gathering?.

The influence of social media on setting the agenda for the mainstream media

With rapid increase in adoption of social media platforms in India, the journalists state that social media platforms played a big role in setting agendas and political discourse in the run-up to the general elections in India in 2019. Veteran journalists feel that the role of social media platforms increased much more in 2019 as compared to even the 2014 general elections. The primary reasons for this change in trend are the increase in use of smartphones in the India, cheaper data plans, and political management by parties that aggressively pushed their agenda on social media. The role of WhatsApp, in particular, increased in the rural and semi-urban areas in India, they say, while Twitter continued to reach the urban elite in bigger cities.

Journalist 1, a senior assistant editor with Navbharat Times in New Delhi, stated, ‘These elections can be termed as hashtag elections. The agenda was completely set by social media. We saw that social media determined the narrative; this setting of agenda was successful in this election’. Elaborating on the way different social media platforms were used in the run-up to the elections, they stated:

There’s a difference in how these different platforms are used in India. Twitter was mainly used to build the atmosphere – to have the right mahaul [ambience], to set the narrative. Its reach is high in urban elite but does not reach masses. Facebook, which is a medium popular among masses, is mainly used to deliver the message to the urban audience: both young and old. WhatsApp, a very popular medium in semi-urban and rural areas, is where the content takes a shape. Whether it is video or audio, the whole political management was invested in creating the content on WhatsApp in these elections.

Journalist 4, a senior assistant editor in Kolkata, said the role of WhatsApp, in particular, increased during the elections in West Bengal, in eastern India. They said:

Political parties have tried to sway public opinion by using WhatsApp forwards and Facebook posts. Just before the elections, there were a lot of videos, small clips, that were circulated by all the parties that looked exactly like real news items. IT cells of political parties were hyperactive before the elections. Trinamool Congress (TMC), though a small regional party, hired professional and student interns to aggressively push their messages. WhatsApp emerged as their (political parties’) main platform this election. More than 1000 groups were formed in Bengal (West Bengal).

Journalist 4 added that the impact of social media could be particularly felt in West Bengal’s rural areas where WhatsApp messages were the main source of people’s information about political parties and their agendas. ‘Cheap or free data ensures that they have access to WhatsApp. Data revolution in India has helped political parties spread their messages to various communities – youth, in particular, are avid WhatsApp and Facebook users’.

Journalist 2, a senior assistant editor with The Economic Times, opined that the prominence of social media platforms on the Indian political scene increased after Narendra Modi’s win in the 2014 election. In the last 5 years, they said, the social media have changed the game for both journalists and politicians as old institutions have had to adapt to the changing media landscape. They added:

Rules have changed since the BJP came to power in 2014. Prime Minister Modi has following on all major platforms including on Chinese platform Yu. Since the Modi government was first formed in 2014, PM started tweeting all major decisions from his official handle. Twitter has changed how news is spread in India now as the PM and other ministers are directly putting important announcements on social media. It has become a one-way traffic. Press Information Bureau has more or less become redundant now.

The participants also pointed out how the agenda-setting power of social media was not limited to merely the national political scene.

Journalist 2 referred to the hashtags #chowkidar and #chowkidarchorhai trending before the elections to drive home the point about agenda-setting led by social media. ‘Hashtags played a huge role in setting the agenda. Mainstream media cannot ignore these hashtags. WhatsApp, for example, has dedicated groups so that the political parties can directly reach the public. Social media, in general, have become tools for political propaganda’, they added.

Journalist 4 added that while in the 2014 elections, social media use by political parties was in its infancy, the country is now witnessing the next stage of the power of social media.

Journalist 3, an assistant editor with The Times of India, stated: ‘Social media definitely has become very impactful. Readers do not have the time to read the stories in printed newspapers anymore, though in India people still like the feel of the newspaper. But the youth are following social media for all the trends and latest news. This happened in these elections as well. Social media discussions shaped the way certain politicians were and are perceived. Social media is more fun and more accessible to young people’.

Journalist 5, a fact check editor with India Today in New Delhi, reflected on the changing political landscape in the country as they compared the 2014 elections with the 2019 elections:

In 2014, the internet was slow, data plans were not very cheap. But in 2019, the internet is so much faster; data is so cheap now. Mobile penetration and smartphone penetration are quite high. Now, much more content can be shared online. This is exactly what we saw in this election. Of course, people with a certain agenda push their narrative online through videos, pictures, audio clips, etc.

Journalist 8, a senior journalist with The Print, an online publication, said, ‘Earlier, politicians would organize a press conference if they had to make an important point. In such a setting, mainstream media had more control over the narrative as we could question the speaker and derail his/her agenda. Now, we must report about a tweet first and then reach out to the politician for a further question, the answer to which may or may not come’.

Journalist 6, bureau chief of BBC World Service, partially agreed with the agenda-setting role of social media. They said that social media are necessary though they do not yet dictate a journalist’s choices and added:

Social media became very important during the elections. Every day, we look at the trending topics on social media to get a sense of what’s going on. But we don’t limit our stories to what the social media platforms are offering. We need to check the trends on social media. If something goes viral on WhatsApp, that needs to be checked. Often, the trending things are overlapping. During elections, we had so many political speeches going on. We looked at social media trends to understand how people are talking about the key points. I won’t say that social media are dictating the agenda. However, they have certainly become important in political discourse. They just cannot be ignored now.

Journalist 7, special correspondent, Punjab Kesari, stated that the difference between now and earlier years was that social media provide a platform for opinion leaders to share their views instantly with the public. ‘Earlier, people would wait to give a statement to the news media. Now, leaders directly go to social media, post their views, get instant feedback and tweak their responses. The mainstream media follows what these leaders say on social media platforms’.

Despite the power displayed by social media platforms in agenda-setting, the participants believed there was a need for mainstream media to reverse this trend. They also believed that it is possible for mainstream media to set a new direction for political discourse and be effective. Journalist 1 said that politicians tried desperately to control the discussion via social media in the run-up to the election, but mainstream media can still reverse this ‘one-way information traffic’. Mainstream media must take the lead in setting the agenda. Journalist 1 said:

There is still a need for good, in-depth and objective journalism. On social media, there is a one-sided flow of information. For example, before elections, the whole narrative on social media was about nationalism and national security after the Balakot strikes. But print media broke the news story about the historic high unemployment rates and the slowing down of the economy. This changed the discourse from nationalism to economy. This is how the mainstream media can put the government on the backfoot. Mainstream media should not get too caught up in the hashtag journalism. Politicians want to set the agenda on social media, and then they want the traditional media to follow. News media should go beyond this hashtag journalism and dig deeper. If we keep playing on their (government’s) pitch, we cannot tell the real stories.

Journalist 2 echoed these views: ‘Mainstream media must bring something extra now to change the narrative. They must dig deeper. If we simply keep repeating what the politicians have said on Twitter, we will become irrelevant. Mainstream media still have the power to set the agenda by bringing in stories that no one wants to tell on social media’.

The role of social media in increasing the spread of fake news or misinformation

Given the reach, power and extent of information shared on social media, dissemination of fake news and misinformation emerged as a serious concern during and before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Journalists opined that the semi-urban and illiterate populations are at severe risk of falling prey to misinformation. Fake news, they said, emerged as the single biggest problem in the elections.

Journalist 5, a fact check editor whose daily job at the India Today-Aaj Tak media group is to detect fake news before running reports on the TV channels, said: ‘Fake news is the real danger on social media. If you look at the results of this election, on many seats the margins of victory are narrow. These results can make or break a government. If we assume that even 5 per cent people fell for the fake news, that’s a big number to influence results’. Fake news is always targeted at the fence-sitters, people who can be influenced. That’s where the fake narrative might influence voters, they pointed out.

Journalist 5 said that in the coming years, journalists would need to be trained not just on how to collect information, but also how to detect fake news. ‘The fake news circulation is going to become a bigger problem in the coming years. In journalism schools, we should train budding journalists about the latest software and technologies to deal with fake news so that they can aggressively debunk false claims’.

Journalist 1 stated that during their visits to the rural hinterland in the Hindi belt of the politically volatile states of Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, people showed them information forwarded on WhatsApp that looked exactly like real news. They added:

First time in my career, I saw so many fake news clips that were in circulation in the hinterland. Communally sensitive content mostly was presented as if it were real news. Fake or morphed photos were in circulation. In several cases we saw doctored videos that people believed were true. People, mostly equipped with a smartphone and WhatsApp, countered every truth that we tried to explain to them because they would show us the ‘news’ that they have read. With the bombardment of information, people cannot distinguish between what is authentic and what is inauthentic.

Journalist 2 made similar observations when they travelled to Uttar Pradesh during the elections, adding that the problem with journalism in India was also that not enough resources were put into news gathering. They said:

Reporters many a times rely on second-hand information. Sometimes, for smaller papers, it is not possible to depute reporters everywhere. Local politicians take advantage of this and spread the wrong information to suit their political agenda. We witnessed a rampant spread of misinformation in rural and semi-urban areas during the elections. We believed what they read on WhatsApp.

Journalist 6 cited the recent elections as well as the Jat agitation earlier in Haryana (politically motivated protests by the Jat community in North India), during which a lot of WhatsApp forwards were used to spread wrong information. ‘Now, even before the information is authenticated, the “news” already reaches the masses. Though social media in itself is not a problem because it, in fact, helps in the spread of information quickly. But how it is used in a critical time can become a problem’, they added.

Journalist 6, who conducts workshops in various universities in North India to create awareness about fake news, said that media literacy and educating people about social media were the only way out of the problem: ‘Since India is a very diverse country where different political and religious ideologies are deeply rooted, fake news and misinformation has far-reaching consequences’.

Journalist 8 said that while there’s no restraint on social media, the real danger is in smaller cities and semi-urban areas. They said that even if a small percentage of people in India are on these platforms, if these are opinion leaders in the community, their opinion matters. ‘When something is discussed on social media, that is, when something goes viral, it just doesn’t reach those who use social media. It quickly reaches the masses as things can be shared offline as well. We saw a lot of that happening during these elections. Those people who weren’t even active on social media were aware of what is going on with these messages’.

The rise in polarization on social media

Journalists feel that social media discourse is distinctly divided along party lines while the mainstream media is not so heavily polarized in India.

Journalist 2 said:

Social media is completely polarized. In these elections, we saw that the nationalistic discourse was very high, especially after the air strikes. Right-wing slant of nationalism is clearly evident on social media. Trolling from the people from opposing ideologies is also very high. The political discourse on social media is currently divided between BJP’s nationalistic discourse and Congress’s left-liberal stance. In the news mainstream media, we do not see such clear polarized lines as yet.

Journalist 1 said that during the 2019 elections, the political parties used social media negatively and aggressively as compared to the 2014 elections. Messages of hate, fear and insecurity were rampantly spread, the journalist added.

Journalist 6 felt that though polarization was not new in Indian politics, the dividing lines are more easily visible on social media than in mainstream media: ‘With social media, these differences are now amplified as opposing groups start posting rapidly on different platforms. There is no restraint on social media, and that is the biggest challenge’.

Journalist 4 echoed Journalist 6’s views. Journalist 4 said that social media platforms have become effective weapons to further polarize the masses and many messages were aimed at provoking certain communities. ‘We saw a lot of such messages (WhatsApp forwards) in these elections where the clear intention was to provoke one community or to send messages against one particular community. With closed groups on WhatsApp, it is very easy now to tailor the messages as per your own propaganda’. Journalist 4 pointed out that each party has invested huge amounts of money to generate and disseminate content that suits the party’s interests. ‘Trinamool Congress (TMC) is a regional party, yet they employed so many techies and interns in their IT cells to disseminate their messages on various platforms. This was an unprecedented resource allocation to social media messages’.

Journalist 8 said that when tailored content is strategically distributed to the target audience on different platforms, it is the fence-sitters who are influenced the most. ‘Political managers clearly know which group should be sent the messages of hope (e.g. Modi as an aspirational leader) and which groups should be sent the messages of fear and insecurity (e.g. Modi will toughen his anti-Islam stance, e.g. Modi will secure India from terrorist attacks). Social media messages are very carefully drafted and managed by political workers’.

The women journalists reported that trolling, hate speech and aggressive posturing were rampant during the 2019 elections, much more than they had experienced earlier.

Journalist 4 said: ‘WhatsApp groups were used to spread hate messages. On Twitter, we experienced a lot of trolling, more so among women reporters. Ideological lines are neatly drawn on social media. All sides indulged in hate speech. There are few sane voices now on social media. There is no middle path on these platforms. And this polarization will only grow in the future’. Politicians seem to have harnessed the power of social media during these elections by using various platforms to reach the public directly. The role of mainstream news media as intermediaries between politicians and the public has certainly undergone a change, though many journalists consider this to be a sign of a healthy information-based society.

‘Politicians have to rely less on us. They can directly reach the public. Politicians are going live on Facebook to announce important decisions. Dependence on mainstream media is definitely reduced unlike earlier when the mainstream media was their only source of reaching out to people’, said Journalist 6, who follows all the major political leaders in the country on various social media platforms.

Journalist 2 and Journalist 8, after long journalism careers spanning more than two decades, however, do not think that there is anything wrong with this trend. ‘As long as the information shared is accurate and there are no hidden agendas, social media has tremendous use which is good for an information-based society’, said Journalist 8.

However, even as social media reduces the need of political leaders to use mainstream journalists as a via media to convey their messages, the credibility of journalists remain intact in India, opine veteran scribes, as they assert that their role as watchdogs continue to be relevant.

Journalist 2 said the buck still stops at the mainstream media:

In this era of social media, big news breaks are very important. Journalists now must bring something extra beyond the daily news. Because of social media, people have multiple sources of information. No one is waiting for the daily newspapers to know about the world. However, mainstream news media is still needed to validate all the information – to make sense of all the information that people are getting from multiple sources.

Journalist 3 felt that mainstream media need to remain relevant as they are quickly fading away among youth who are relying more on social media for their news. ‘Social media is fast and is a direct channel between the leaders and the people. Mainstream media has to adapt to remain relevant. We still enjoy credibility. But if our reach keeps shrinking, our role will also shrink’, they said.

Journalists, however, feel that the role of social media is only going to increase in India.

‘Social media is both a boon and a challenge for journalists today. Because this medium is totally different from the traditional media, the sources of news are multiple now. The scope of news gathering is tremendous. Of course, you have to recheck everything. We get clear instructions from our organizations that being active on social media is a must’, said Journalist 2.

Journalist 3 describes the relationship between journalists and social media as a mutually beneficial relationship: ‘Yes, I am a mainstream journalist, but I network through social media now. People can directly reach me and even question the quality of my sources’. They added that their presence on social media also features in their annual performance appraisals and they are expected to remain active to promote their stories. ‘We are not just promoting our own stories but also the organization’s brand name. Analytics are closely monitored’, they added.

Journalists 4 and 6 add that while the traditional broadsheet papers have maintained a social media presence, for an online paper, social media analytics have become a part of newsroom discussions. ‘The trend in India too is toward media convergence. We have to learn new skills to remain relevant’, said Journalist 6.

Discussion and conclusion

The proliferation of social media platforms in India has restructured its political discourse by connecting politicians directly with the masses. This connection was harnessed and leveraged in the 2019 election in India. While India re-elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his second five-year term in 2019, the country also witnessed hashtag wars and WhatsApp forwards that tried to set the agenda for the mainstream media and were very successful in doing so. The agenda-setting power of social media was not just limited to the political discussions in the urban areas and among educated masses. The increase spread of social media platforms, especially WhatsApp, has enabled politicians across party lines to use social media effectively in smaller rural pockets and reach out to lower literacy audiences.

The present study’s aim was to explore how social media platforms influenced mainstream media’s coverage of the 2019 elections. Our results indicate that the mainstream media, perhaps for the first time in modern India’s political history, felt its role redefined as new media presented a parallel platform for politicians to reach their voter base directly. As evidenced in the interview data, journalists asserted that the inter-media agenda setting was evident in this election as social media constantly fed the mainstream news media with information. In this study, political journalists with years of experience in the field reported how they could not afford to ignore the discussions on the social media platforms. These findings are similar to previous studies (Alejandro, 2010; Feezell, 2018; Graeff et al., 2014) in which social media’s role in setting the agenda for mainstream media is highlighted. In this study, however, journalists asserted that the power of legitimacy and control continued to be with the mainstream media as people still turn to them to validate information found online.

This study also aimed to understand how mainstream journalists in India have adjusted to the challenges posed by the new media and what they foresee in the future. The interview data reveal that mainstream journalists in India acknowledged the increasing role of social media and have adapted to the new media environment. While the journalists acknowledge that they are no longer the only source of disseminating information to the masses, they however believe that they remain credible and trustworthy sources in a dynamic and thriving media market. This leads them to believe that mainstream media should regain some of the power in directing political discourse as it can do a better job than social media in ensuring only quality news was provided to the people. Sonwalkar (2019), however, notes that Indian journalism suffers a trust deficit these days and that the blatant corporatization of media has gradually eroded ethical and professional journalistic standards. The findings in our study allude to these concerns as we find that journalists in India are aware of the shift in public perception towards the profession and are concerned about maintaining their credibility among the masses. This study reveals that professional veteran journalists, though they criticize social media platforms as unregulated spaces and cradles of hate speech, also view them as a potent competitor that can potentially undermine their significance in the Indian public sphere. Given the rapid increase in people’s reliance on social media for their news, future studies should examine people’s trust in the mainstream media in rapidly changing societies such as India as the public now has multiple sources from which to access information.

In this study, we also sought journalists’ opinions on whether the social media discourse has been polarizing in India. As demonstrated in the interviews, journalists opined that the online discourse during the 2019 election was polarizing and malicious. The use of hate speech and personal attacks was rampant across party lines. Many see this as a departure from how social media was effectively used by Modi in 2014 to mobilize favourable public opinion (Rodrigues and Niemann, 2017). The hashtag wars and online political discourse during the 2019 election cycle set the tone for political campaigning even as India grappled with the rapid spread of fake news and misinformation online. Journalists, who witnessed the rapid spread of unfiltered content on people’s personal devices, expressed concern about the spread of fake news and misinformation, especially in the semi-urban areas and among the semi-literate population in the country, as vulnerable populations can easily fall prey to online propaganda. In line with the findings of Banaji et al. (2019), journalists in this study too felt that digital communication takes place within the broader context of the society and newer technologies such as WhatsApp allow hatemongers to target a particular community by broadcasting targeted messages aimed at maligning a group. Journalists who had spent time in the hinterland before the elections stated that the communally charged content on WhatsApp was enough to trigger tensions and violence in vulnerable areas. Political parties and politicians, according to these journalists, used fake news and hate messages effectively to sway public opinion. Journalists, while acknowledging that social media was here to stay, stated in this study that diverse societies like India needed to invest in media literacy programmes to help its citizens identify fake information. Journalists expressed concerns about the rapid spread of misinformation via digital platforms and fears that, if unchecked, the spread of misinformation could undermine public safety.

Though journalists in this study termed the mainstream news media as less partisan or more neutral than the discourse on social media platforms, the existing literature suggests that lack of questioning of politicians’ hate speeches by mainstream media plays a role in the spread of disinformation or misinformation in society (Banaji et al., 2019). Since social media have the potential to influence mainstream news media coverage, it is plausible to think that the clearly divided ideological lines would also be clearly visible in the mainstream media. Future studies must explore this link between partisanship, social media and mainstream media to provide insights into how the new media will shape, or has been shaping, the mainstream media.

This study also aimed to explore the new media’s influence on journalistic practices. Participants in this study expressed the need to make professional journalists tech-savvy so that they are trained to detect inaccurate online content. In line with previous research (Brandtzaeg et al., 2016), journalists in this study revealed their increasing dependence on social media platforms in the performance of their jobs. They used social media to come up with story ideas, network, follow up on leads, market their content and examine public reactions to their work. This dependence can be expected to increase in the near future. Media convergence and the use of social media analytics have already become important factors in Indian newsroom discussions. Thus, while journalists need to embrace social media platforms as their sources, they also must have the technical know-how to differentiate between false information and accurate information and must question the veracity of the information coming from these platforms. The newsrooms, therefore, must invest in sophisticated software to establish the authenticity of information before broadcasting it to the larger audience. As journalists in this study said that people still come to the mainstream media to validate information, fact-checking by mainstream media outlets must grow in the future to lend credibility to the profession. The journalists in this study opined that fact-checking jobs will grow within the profession in India, and regular technical training will become a feature across newsrooms in the country.

Limitation

This study is based on a small sample of mainstream news journalists and the findings, though insightful, do not represent the views of the entire journalistic community in India. Furthermore, the sample does not truly reflect the diversity of multilingual media in India and does not capture the depth of the print, electronic and online media there. Hence, the results are not generalizable. However, this exploratory study is a start in investigating how the new media are changing the traditional practices of the mainstream media. Additionally, we also acknowledge that this paper does not go in depth in exploring the partisan nature of social media and mainstream media. Future studies can explore this important link between how polarized the mainstream news media in India has become in the last few years and what are its implications for public discourse in the country.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Neelam Sharma

Author biographies

Neelam Sharma is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Media and Persuasion, Idaho State University. Her research interests include journalism, new media, international communication and political communication. Her research is centred round investigating how new media technologies have impacted societies in South Asia.

Gayathri Sivakumar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Communication, Colorado State University. She has conducted research in the areas of health communication, political communication and children and media. Her research is centred round examining the cognitive, attitudinal and behavioural effects of mediated communication. She is interested in understanding how people use mediated communication to shape their beliefs, attitudes, opinions and even behaviour related to these issues.

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