By Soroor Ahmed, TwoCircles.net,
When IBN-7 broke the story of allotment of Bihar Industrial Area Development authority (BIADA) land to sons and daughters of senior ministers, bureaucrats and elected representatives of the ruling Janata Dal (United)-BJP alliance in Bihar, many viewers were taken by complete surprise as it was only in December 2010 that the CNN-IBN, the sister channel, honored the Bihar chief minister with Indian of the Year 2010 award.
This was not the first time that he was praised or honored by this channel or other media houses. NDTV, the Times of India-Economic Times etc had done so earlier. Nitish Kumar has always been the darling of the national media, though a couple of television channels and news-portals of Bihar have always been critical of him.
Nitish Kumar
So when IBN-7 was highlighting the news of land scam a regional Hindi channel, Mahua News was not far behind. However, the regional newspapers had a different story to tell. They are in full control of the state government as they had to rely on the advertisement revenue on it. It remained a mystery as to why the national media have suddenly changed its attitude towards the Nitish Kumar government in Bihar. IBN-7 was followed by the sister channel CNN-IBN and other national dailies in exposing rampant irregularities in land allotment. The opposition parties, for the first time in six years, got a big stick to beat the Nitish Kumar government.
The issue of land has become very sensitive, be it in West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Orissa or Maharashtra, therefore, the BIADA story involving ministers and officials extremely close to Nitish Kumar was bound to be an instant hit. But this is not the first case of big scam which rocked Bihar in the last six years. Similarly some heinous crimes have been committed. But the national media ignored it or grossly underplayed it.
Only last year the Patna edition of Dainik Jagaran did a big first page news on what it said Rs 500 crore Excise Scam. The story was based on the letter written by the then Excise Minister, Jamshed Ashraf, who accused none else but the chief minister secretariat of large scale loot of public money. The minister was summarily dismissed and the senior journalist who did the story was sent packing to some other place outside Bihar.
None in the national media dared to follow the story. Similarly the story of DC Bills, highlighted by the CAG, involving thousands of crores was grossly underplayed by the national media so was the devastating deluge of August 2008 in the Kosi belt which swept thousands of people and rendered homeless 3.3 million.
The CAG reported large scale loot in the relief and rehabilitation fund, but the national media never raised these issues. This notwithstanding the fact that some local channels, and at times, even print media dared to do some stories. The national Press, especially the electronic media, which do not rely so much on government advertisements, also ignored some gory incidents of crime in Bihar in the last six years, for example, the chain of events which led to the killing of Purnea BJP MLA, Raj Kishore Kesri, by a middle-aged lady principal, Rupam Pathak. Seven months before stabbing the MLA in his house on January 4, 2011 Rupam lodged an FIR accusing Kesri and his aide of repeatedly raping her.
So if all these developments went unreported or underreported, what prompted the national media to change the gear? A TV discussion at 10:00 PM on CNN-IBN just a fortnight before IBN-7 broke the land scam on July 18 gives an idea about it. Ashutosh of IBN-7, while taking part in the discussion said that three very popular chief ministers of India, that is of Bihar, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh, have become extremely intolerant and indulges in arm-twisting of the media. He termed this as an unfortunate development.
The boundary wall of 33 acres of land given to BJP MLC Ashok Agarwal’s son in Forbesganj
The anchor Sagarika Ghose and editor, Outlook, Vinod Mehta, agreed with him and elaborated further. It was for the first time that anything was openly said against the present Bihar chief minister in any discussion in national channel. Media observers felt a gradual shift in the stand of the national press. The national media started realizing that something somewhere is grievously wrong in Bihar and that the state government machinery is taking undue advantage of this blind media support to it.
Constant pressure from some state media––regional channels, news portals, and even a few print journalists––compelled the national electronic channels to do a rethinking.
Of late there has been growing realization at the national level that Nitish is twisting the arm of the media too much. Though the Press, in general initially underplayed the Forbesganj police firing which led to the killing of four people on June 3 a couple of national channels realized that things are really serious and sent their reporters to Bhajanpua village, where the incident took place, more than a week later. Incidentally, the BJP MLC Ashok Agrawal, the owner of the glucose factory, whose land became a bone of contention in Forbesganj, is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the BIADA land allotment. He got over 15 lakh square feet of land.
All these were too much for the national media to ignore. As their credibility was at stake some of them deemed it fit to strike hot. Those at the helm of affairs at big media houses are canny people. They realized that it is now too much. So once they did a story against Nitish the TRP rating of IBN-7 shot up. This certainly means more business and more money.