MEDIA IN PANDEMIC TIMES: FEAR, DISCIPLINE AND COMMERCIAL BREAKS

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by Saravanan Velusamy*

Source: Facebook


Source: Facebook

COVID-19 is a contagious, life-threatening disease with a global spread. It has crossed borders as effortlessly as the global flow of capital. Travel on business or pleasure became dangerous and soon came to a grinding stop. The growth of transport facilities and communication technologies are important markers of development. But also risk-laden. The stories of tragic events that television brings home confirm the dangers of the risk society[i] we live in. While the rich have the resources to insulate themselves from such risks, the poor have little to protect themselves, not even the luxury of social distancing. 

The fear of likely infection is real. It may or may not hit us. But for many the loss of livelihood is real. In India COVID-19 has impacted the already existing persisting agrarian distress, unprecedented unemployment, declining labor force participation rate, and slowing down of the economy. As we debate and discuss our way out of this crisis, we have to ask whether we have the reflexive capacity to understand the structural conditions that produce risks and thereby can alter them. 

People have realized that these are no ordinary times thanks to the pervasive presence of media. We are witness to a certain ‘spectacle of disaster’ (to borrow Baudrillard’s phrase[ii]), that makes us experience fear - simulated and real. For instance, the spectacle of cops disciplining the citizens is telecast every day to instill fear among people and keep them indoors. However, the decision to impose lockdown without adequate preparation has made the most vulnerable amongst us stranded, unable to reach home. The tragic story of Indian migrants is still unfolding. The desperate decision to protest in such times and resists reveal not ignorance of the pandemic but helplessness. It lays bare the discrepancy in governance, inadequacy of measures taken, and exposes the fault lines in the system. The steps to build an authoritarian state with excessive surveillance mechanisms have marked the last few years. In a macabre way, COVID-19 strengthens this and even worse legitimizes it as a ‘safety’ measure. Television media is arbitrating this process of manufacturing consent among the governed. 

Source: Brand Equity, Economic Times
While we view these with grief and anguish, the same television distracts us with the glamour of reality shows, award functions, and seductive commercial ads. It is a schizophrenic moment. Looking at the advertisements one could see how the crisis is being appropriated: Vicks candies could kill germs, Dominoes promises safe distance delivery of Pizzas and other brands that tell us how much they care[iii]. Not that they are not true. But was wondering how much of it is marketing prudence and how much of it is sheer opportunistic persuasion. Business reports suggest that ‘in the midst of a lockdown, with screen time at its highest point, advertisers have been looking for the best way to jump into the conversation without coming off as insensitive to the times’.[iv]

Another advertisement where Virat Kohli and K L Rahul are asking us to download a gaming app[v]- Mobile Premier League (MPL) - so unemployed youngsters[vi] can earn cash prizes by playing games online. Can we expect celebrities to understand the seriousness of the country’s unemployment crisis? Here is a snippet. The total unemployed youth grew from 9 million from 2011-12 to 25.1 million by 2017-18, says Mehrotra and Parida (2019). By 2018, more graduates (35.8%) and postgraduates (36.2%) were unemployed[vii]. By March 2020, the total employment figure fell to 396 million (2% drop) from its average 404 million during 2019-2020. This also fell to 144 million by April 2020 (30% drop) according to Consumer Pyramids Household Survey. The total unemployment rate has risen from 8% in March 2020 to 27.1% in May 2020[viii]. Companies have already communicated their decisions over cuts in salary and even job layoffs. The bottom of the pyramid - wage laborers, migrant workers, contract staff are the worst affected. The ad looked like an inadvertent joke on India’s jobless growth story.

The moral limits of the market[ix] are easily blurred by corporate brands in a society marked by conspicuous consumption.[x] Advertisements nudge us into a consumerist worldview. In such a view, it is okay to see everything as a product as long as it satisfies a certain demand: from education to healthcare, everything is for sale. There is a giant advertisement industry that helps do just that. That is a lot of power we give them to influence and control our lives. 

An old South Indian Film fare award function was being telecasted again on a TV channel. The anchor read out a series of sponsors, among other corporate brands, was a private university - as an educational partner. Like you, I also wondered, what an ‘educational’ partner is contributing to an award function. We must be worried just how much education has become a marketable commodity or a commercial service that requires promotion. Is there a better time than now to organize a full-blown commercial campaign to open up the market for online education and digital certification? COVID-19 has provided these platforms an excellent opportunity to proactively push for app-based educational products and services. India has over 3000+ edutech companies- the creamy layer of them all have high profile investors and their combined finance capital would certainly want to build a massive consumer base. The daily advertisements that feed our minds are a result of such investments. If this is not disaster capitalism, then what is? Naomi Klein who has reported from disaster zones in the US, warns us how corporate firms find ways to profit from the disaster. Her shock doctrine portends how authorities and industrialists use ‘public’s disorientation following a collective shock…to push through radical pro-corporate measures[xi]’. 

As COVID-19 has brought the world to a standstill and forced us to introspect in isolation, there is also another battle that is going on. The battle to occupy our minds. Governments want citizens to approve of the ‘tough-yet-required’ measures during and after lockdown. Likewise, advertisers want consumers to make purchase decisions over products that they might not need. A pandemic is conducive to induce such ‘false needs[xii]’ among the citizen-consumers. The paradox of consumerism is that it requires a certain level of literacy among consumers and at the same time thrives on their disorientation. Thanks to television, we are devastated but are also distracted. Pandemic-like situations throw new challenges to a weakening democracy like India. How can one effectively protest against the government while in isolation? How do we ensure its timely response to the disaster? How does one remain sensitive during crisis amidst callous commercialism? I will leave them to your collective capacity to reflect. 
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[i] According to Ulrich Beck, the systematic accumulation of risk an industrial society produces in the process of wealth creation often affects the vulnerable sections the most and causes irreversible harm to the society as a whole (Beck 1986, p55).For more discussions on Beck’s idea of ‘risk society’ see https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/risk-society.

[ii] Baudrillard (1983) uses the phrase ‘spectacle of disaster’ as a media-simulated reality that dilutes its meaning where individuals lose their capacity to respond appropriately, leading to the ‘the end of the social’ and hence ‘events’ end up being mere signs, images and a spectacle.



[v] MPL ad (April 2019). Accessible at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU5jKwnZ6lE.

[vi] MPL ad (April 2019). Accessible at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a38kP9YR4AY.

[vii] Mehrotra, S and Parida J K. (2019). India’s Employment Crisis: Rising Education Levels and Falling Non-agricultural Job Growth. Center of Sustainable Employment. Azim Premji University.

[viii] Vyas, M. (May 2020). The Jobs Bloodbath of April 2020.Center for Monitoring Economy Website. Accessible at https://www.cmie.com/kommon/bin/sr.php?kall=warticle&dt=2020-05-05%2008:22:21&msec=776 .

[ix] See Sandel, M. J. (2012). What Money Can’t Buy? The Moral Limits of Markets. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

[x] Chaudhuri Maitrayee 2017 Refashioning India: Gender, Media and a Transformed Public Discourse (Hyderabad, Oreint Blackswan)

[xi] Klein, N. (2017). Naomi Klein: how power profits from disaster. The Guardian. Accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/06/naomi-klein-how-power-profits-from-disaster.

[xii] Marcuse defines false needs ‘are those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice.’
See Marcuse, H. (2013). One Dimensional Man, Marxist Internet Archive. Pp 4-5. Accessible at https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/marcuse/one-dimensional-man.htm#s1.


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*Saravanan Velusamy is an MPhil research scholar in the Centre for the Study of Social Systems (CSSS), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi.

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