The unexpected is long expected is an ironical truth in politics. The irreversible casualty of the Cockroach Janata Party’s unexpectedly successful campaign is not the BJP. It was an institution that once regarded itself and was respected as indispensable to Indian democracy in the 1990s: the television news media. For decades, what every Indian political party saw as its top priority was camera coverage that brought intimacy and recall with voters and the accompanying talking heads who became pompous, much desired guests in private drawing rooms. Protest leaders and party spokesmen waited anxiously for OB vans at every venue to give their byte of the pie. A prime-time debate represented validation of a position. But not anymore. The most striking images from Jantar Mantar were not the Gen Z crowds, the slogans, the abuse, the songs or dances. They were the moments when television reporters were booed, mocked, and, in some places, chased away by young demonstrators who regarded them as hostile participants from godi media. That transformation did not happen overnight.
India once had a press that angered governments with undesirable coverage and exposes of corruption in high places. Newspapers unearthed scandals, TV correspondents questioned ministers, and editors regarded proximity to power as a necessary evil. The typical response of governments that the media was unfair was considered a compliment. Somewhere along the way, after the dawn of hyper-competitive news television, journalism mutated into political theatre. The arrival of shouting prime-time anchors changed the rules. Mainstream media became Main Scream media. Neutrality was no longer considered a virtue. The anchor was not a moderator but a partisan gladiator. The irony is that when television claimed to be speaking for “the nation”, the youngest voters of the nation had stopped listening.
Generation Z has grown up differently. It did not learn politics from the 9 pm debate. Its political education came from livestreams, WhatsApp forwards, Telegram channels, Instagram reels, YouTube documentaries, Discord servers, and thousands of citizen journalists with mobile phones. For them, every protester is a potential broadcaster, every spectator a fact-checker and every smartphone an OB van. When television channels used selective camera angles that minimised the size of protest gatherings, social media was simultaneously flooded with drone footage showing mammoth crowds. Whether every social-media claim was accurate is beside the point. The crucial fact is that television news lost its monopoly over what people believed they had seen. The news anchor’s authority became a spoof because the audience compared competing versions instantly. After the CJP protests, phone screens overflowed with satirical edits portraying well-known television personalities as boot lickers, comically dancing half-naked to caustic songs. Perhaps the greatest strategic blunder committed by television news was abandoning the appearance of independence and objectivity. Instead of interrogating power, partisan anchors interrogated the Opposition. Government failures became debates about Opposition incompetence; economic questions became nationalism quizzes; administrative lapses became culture wars, and political accountability became personality contests. Gen Z has realised the TV anchor was a ventriloquist. Once that perception took root, trust became extraordinarily difficult to recover. India’s political class still courts the electorate as it existed in 2014.
Those who enthusiastically consumed television during Narendra Modi’s campaigns in 2014 and 2019 are now middle-aged or older, their media habits formed when television enjoyed enormous authority. But today’s 18-year-olds have never lived in that media ecosystem. To them, the anchor is not an oracle but simply another content creator competing with thousands of others. He is judged by the same brutal algorithm: be interesting, be authentic; or risk being at best ignored, at worst jeered. Many politicians inhabit the same ecosystem. The CJP protests have exposed this disconnect. One India watched edited television bulletins and another India watched thousands of first-person videos. They were not consuming the same reality. That divergence may prove to be one of the most consequential political developments of this decade. Social media is chaotic, manipulative, and frequently dishonest. Rumours spread faster than corrections, algorithms reward outrage, and conspiracy theories flourish, unchecked. But credibility cannot be demanded simply because a channel possesses a satellite licence. For years, television news insisted that it shaped public opinion. To a large extent, it did. The recent protests showed a significant change: the camera that once manufactured political legitimacy is treated with scepticism by the very generation whose future it claims to describe. History is choked with the debris of institutions that mistook habit for loyalty. India’s television news industry may have made the same mistake. All TVs have a remote control. That, with Gen Z, is the problem.
