Media spotlights leaders, but misses stories of those affected by their decisions

While Trump and tariffs continue to dominate our headlines, there is an important difference between why he is in the news, and why our leader, Narendra Modi, also continues to dominate the news. 

That the actions of the US President are headline news, not just in the US, but around the world is partly because of his open desire to be the centre of attention. He lets the media watch cabinet meetings, interactions with international leaders, and even going out to a seafood restaurant in Washington DC. As a result, he ensures that he is always in the news. You could argue that this demonstrates his commitment to transparency and democracy. Or that he is simply narcissistic and wants to stay in the limelight. Either way, no news organisation can avoid reporting on Trump. 

In India, in contrast, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has successfully avoided any unscripted interaction with mainstream media after 11 years in office. Yet, he dominates the news in India, much like Trump. Every action, every reaction, every statement, all of them carefully scripted, are faithfully reported prominently by mainstream media. 

What’s more, op-ed articles, quite obviously written by his chosen speech writers, are sent out to all publications. Yet despite them being no more than press releases, several newspapers give these perorations pride of place on their edit pages, a space meant for exclusive contributions that are not offered elsewhere. This has become so routine that it fails to draw any comment. It is what it is, we are told. No point getting worked up.

But moving away from these attention-seeking political personas, the media can, and must, make space for the less prominent, the almost invisible, whose lives are being permanently affected by the policies propounded by the powerful.

Take the controversy surrounding the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on Indian exports to the US. The news has dominated our front pages. Economists and experts have analysed the fallout. There are explainers with charts and figures spelling out the impact. 

Yet, the price for these policies is being paid not by those who find space in our media, but the voiceless, the millions of workers in the industries that have been hit by these policies.  The women who shell prawns for export, the women who work in the garment industry, the men who polish diamonds in Surat, the smaller home-based workers who do a part of the finished products. 

There have been some detailed reports in the English language media such as this one in The Hindu on the garment industry in Tamil Nadu. Many such articles focus on the owners of these industries without enough on the impact on workers, often women as in the case of the garment industry.

International media including the BBC, Al Jazeera and DW have also carried detailed reports on export industries such as the diamond cutters in Surat. This detailed report in an independent digital platform, Behanbox, is one of the few that has focused on the impact of these tariffs on women workers. The reporter points out: “In the frozen shrimp industry, women constitute over 70% of the 8 million workforce, and they perform low-end processing jobs such as deheading, peeling and sorting shrimp in cold processing plants. In apparel and textiles, they make up almost 70% of the 45 million workers, while the electronics industry is known to largely hire young women because electronics manufacturing needs ‘small and soft hands for small pieces’.” 

But by and large, such reports are few and far in between in Indian mainstream media. As a result, the majority of readers of print media probably have not understood this human angle to the tariff controversy. 

An explanation for the paucity of such reporting is the perennial challenge facing the media: even as you cover an event, how do you also ensure that you report the process that resulted in the event. The former has immediacy, is often dramatic, and draws attention. The latter requires an understanding of history, politics, and society to ensure that there is context in the reportage. It can be done. It has been done. Yet, we see little space devoted to such reporting in mainstream media today.

Another example of the importance of understanding process even as you report an event is the coverage of the horrific death of a young woman in Greater Noida on August 21. Nikki Bhati was allegedly set ablaze in her kitchen, in the presence of her three-year-old son, because she failed to meet demands for more dowry in her marital home. Her death would have been one more statistic had it not occurred in a place within easy reach of so-called “national” media and that it was also spread via social media platforms. 

But what above all her tragic death illustrated was how even the most effective laws are ineffective in changing societal mindsets. Dowry was banned by law in 1961. The law was further amended, following widespread protests and demands by women’s rights groups across India, in 1984. Yet today, in 2025, the reported deaths of young women linked with the amount of dowry they did or did not bring into their marital homes is still shockingly high.  

Remember, that for everyone reported death, there are many more that go by unreported. And as this worrying piece in Hindustan Times points out: “Dowry is perhaps India’s most normalised illegal activity, going by anecdotal evidence, but credible data on the prevalence of this menace is hard to come by. Yet there is enough evidence to flag this as a major problem.”

It is the “process” story leading to these deaths of young women that needs telling not just when there is a dramatic incident that draws media attention, but at all times. Why, when there have been decades of programmes by the government and by non-profits, to “empower” women and the “girl-child” are we still at a place where women can be murdered with impunity even in our major cities for dowry demands? Why is it that even today, parents who know their daughters are victims of extreme violence in their marital homes, still send them back and ask them to “adjust”? 

At the height of the protests by women’s groups demanding changes in the dowry law in the 1980s, the print media – and at that time there was only print – did respond by conducting its own investigations. For instance, in 1983, Indian Express carried a front-page series by two senior reporters under the banner “Why women burn” where they followed up on the so-called accidental deaths of young newly married women in Delhi.  

Although the death of Nikki Bhati did provoke some media houses to do follow-up reports such as these in The Hindu, Times of India, and Mid-day, we are now back to reading what we used to call “crime briefs”, small items spread across a newspaper reporting horrific incidents of violence against women.  

Yet, as the article in Hindustan Times quoted above points out, dowry is perhaps the most “normalised illegal activity” in India today. It calls for more focus and more investigation, to remind Indian citizens that behind the bombast about how this country is progressing, the fact that women can still be killed for dowry is a necessary reality check. This is the story behind the headline that the media needs to pursue.

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