By Shashidhar Nanjundaiah

The power to select is a privilege that we social media denizens have appropriated while airing opinions. The albatross around a mainstream media editor’s neck, though, is taking responsibility for that power to select in an age when content management beats that privilege. Content management is akin to what surveillance agencies do, listening to chatter between individuals and between groups to determine what content should go into mainstream media based on the popularity of words and phrases. In the world of content management, what’s unpopular is inconvenient, but even more so, what’s convenient must be made popular. I would like to cite three samples—retaining, of course, the privilege to be selective-from Indian media’s narrative of the US Presidential inauguration on January 20.

The inauguration of the Biden-Harris government in the United States was met with great celebration in the Indian media. Our raucous news television channels are the usual suspects, and much of this celebration may sound muted when you consider the biggest newspapers, but it is very much there. Let us not forget how content is the biggest rediscovery over the past decade, and the online news desks of newspapers and news channels have milked it impressively. Not story, not news, but content. Management of content entails much listening: Listening through spreadsheets of analytics and trends, that is. What runs these days as soft stories as the spokes of an umbrella “hub” story are those that gain virality. Soft stories have soft power.

The 1.38 billion of us Indians form a sixth of the whole world, so the strength in social media numbers is enough to make Indians win popularity surveys and to project Indians as the holders of the world. If social media is a leveller, the mainstream media is its amplifier. Our content management teams listen selectively and cover selectively, because selection is the privilege mainstream media would like to continue to exercise. When it does not come in the way of a media platform’s own political agendas, affiliations or compulsions, selection is obvious.

The Indian media’s coverage of Trump’s bumbling policies and even worse rhetoric caused much glee in the Indian media because they were picked up from the average Indian social media user’s schadenfraude—a word that is too commonplace for Shashi Tharoor, who must call it epicaricacy. Trump gave Indians great opportunity to claim one-upmanship over the White man. Brown and proud, one Indian Twitter user’s handle reads. It’s a running theme.

That is why Kamala Harris, the desi, came as a vindication for them. The media must join the mirth of the galleries in proving to each other that the US Vice President is Kamala Devi first before she is Harris.

Kamala’s saree

You can’t get more Indian than a saree. old picture of the Vice President in a saree with her Indian kinfolk. Television cameras reached Thulasendrapuram, a village in the coastal district of Thiruvarur in deep-south Tamil Nadu, where Kamala Harris’s relatives gathered around a public television set, reminiscent of the quaint Hum Log days, telling the reporter how excited the village was. Harris, on her part, had great fun with the Indian self-obsession, invoking chittis and her Indian tradition, knowing behind her full-throated laugh she was setting the Indian media on fire with those statements. “Will Kamala wear a saree to the inauguration?” was a serious question doing the rounds.

The Indian Express, Lifestyle, 19 Jan