Jimmy Kimmel to Kunal Kamra: Trump’s US follows a familiar playbook from Modi’s India

What do the current government of the United States, headed by Donald Trump, and the government in India, led by Narendra Modi, have in common?

I would suggest at least three aspects, although there are many more. One, an inability to tolerate criticism from the media, even as they declare that they head democracies, and second, a very thin skin that cannot tolerate humour.

The third, and in many ways far more insidious, is the attempt to control, regulate and even capture the media without making any changes in the Constitutional provisions that underwrite media freedom.

How do we define what has happened to India’s mainstream media, especially in the last decade? There have been various discussions whether we are living through an “undeclared emergency”, referring to the emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in 1975. Such a comparison serves no purpose in trying to understand the process that has resulted in a flattened mediascape, where even the normal questioning that is integral to journalism in a democracy, is virtually absent in mainstream media. 

I think the term “media capture” explains best the situation of the media in India. This is a term that is being used by media scholars to explain recent events in the US under the Trump regime where we have witnessed a combination of defamation suits and pressure on media owners to fall in line.  

The most recent incident was the decision of the ABC television channel to suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s popular late-night show. Although within a week, Kimmel has been reinstated, the very fact that the channel felt compelled to take this step led to much discussion about what this represents in terms of the future of the freedom of the press in the US. 

In an article in the Columbia Journalism Review, under the headline “Is the US media captured?” Joel Simon quotes several media scholars who have used the term to explain the state of the media in authoritarian regimes such as in Hungary, Turkey, or Mexico. It entails “government strategies ranging from manipulation of advertising to economic and regulatory pressure to the exploitation of informal relationships with media owners”, he writes. 

The article discusses whether such an eventuality of “media capture” is a possibility under the Trump regime, if it hasn’t already happened to some extent. Simon paraphrases a media scholar thus: “What’s unprecedented in the US … is the willingness of media companies to so transparently put their business interests ahead of their public interest obligations. When one corporation does it, another might pull back on critical coverage to avoid regulatory pressure—a kind of anticipatory obedience or capture in advance.”

Senator Bernie Sanders provides us with a useful illustration of what is meant by the term “media capture” in the context of the US.

In a post on X, he writes: “This is what American media looks like today: The wealthiest person in the world, Elon Musk, owns X. The second-wealthiest person in the world, Larry Ellison, owns Paramount, including CBS, and will possibly now be taking over TikTok and CNN. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post and Twitch. Mark Zuckerberg owns both Facebook and Instagram. In fact, the five richest men in the world are ALL media owners or executives. When we talk about oligarchy in America, it’s not only income and wealth inequality. It’s control over the media and what the American people are able to see, hear and read.”

In India, the richest man owns NDTV, the second richest owns Network 18 Group, and the dominant media houses are all owned by businesses that must remain on the right side of the government, a “kind of anticipatory obedience” as mentioned by Simon in the article quoted above. The dividing line between editorial and management was erased well before this last decade but the results of that erasure are more evident today in India’s mediascape than earlier.

Just look at the print media on September 17, when the prime minister turned 75. Newspapers were replete with page after page of advertisements and signed articles praising Modi. As if this was not enough, a few days later, the government’s decision to lower GST rates, after the country had lived through eight years of much higher rates brought in by the same government, was also greeted with page after page of ads by businesses and corporate houses thanking Modi for taking this step. Such a display of obsequiousness to “the leader” would be considered an embarrassment in any country that claims it is a democracy and has a free press.  

In India, we’ve also had our Jimmy Kimmel equivalents. They do not appear on mainstream television but have a notable following. For instance, the stand-up comic Kunal Kamra has had multiple cases filed against him because someone, somewhere, was offended by his jokes. Or Munawar Faruqui, who was hauled off to jail during a performance in Madhya Pradesh in 2021 and finally acquitted after spending 37 days in jail.

In addition to all this, in my view, the central government’s September 16 order asking 12 independent journalists and news platforms to take down allegedly defamatory content, which included 138 YouTube links and 83 Instagram posts, on Adani Enterprises Limited (AEL) removes even the chimera of pretence that it has any respect for the concept of freedom of the press. This order followed the September 6 ruling by a Delhi court, in response to a defamation suit by AEL against several journalists, asking them to take down content on AEL. The line between the government, and India’s richest man and a close ally of the prime minister, was erased by that one action.  

Although the matter continues to be heard in another court, the very fact that the government intervened on behalf of a private business, without allowing the matter to be assessed by a court of law, illustrates vividly the extent to which even the pretence of media freedom has been abandoned by this government. 

This has happened gradually over the last decade in a way that people have become used to a media that generally echoes the government’s line, questions only mildly, and stays away from any issue that could result in censure or loss of revenue.

The trajectory is now familiar. Get friendly industrial houses to buy media conglomerates. Then apply formal and informal pressure on those media houses that are still being critical. In time, mainstream media will be tamed.  

As for the pinpricks that constitute independent media, those not dependent on government advertising, or big business, you first ignore them because you think they don’t matter. Then you wake up to the fact that they do. You realise that technology has enhanced their reach. And the dwindling credibility of mainstream has further given the combined strength of many small platforms a reach that should not be ignored.

That is when you move against them. First, by protecting your main supporters, big business openly aligned with you. Then, by encouraging your loyal supporters spread across India to file cases against individual journalists or independent platforms under existing laws. These cases are filed in states where the party in power is the BJP. Hence, the police do not wait to even consider whether the complaint has any validity before they move. 

And all the while you keep assuring the rest of the world, and your followers in India, that this country is indeed the “mother of democracy” and that you are deeply committed to the Constitution and all the freedoms guaranteed in it.

The Modi government has provided a blueprint to other countries claiming to be democracies on how they can manage and capture the media.

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