THIRUVANATHAPURAM: An increasing share of the prime time and space of major national news channels and newspapers is flooded with corruption-related stories, especially involving the UPA-II regime, finds a survey by the Centre for Media Studies (CMS).
In the prime time between 7 p m and 11 p m, the news channels have devoted 7.87 percent of their time for corruption-related stories in the period between January and March in 2011, while it was 4.13 percent in 2010, the survey has found.
The time devoted was comparatively much lower in the previous years. While it was one percent of the prime time in 2009, it was just 0.29 percent in 2008, 0.44 percent in 2007, 0.30 pc in 2006 and 0.7 pc in 2005. The trend in the national newspapers is no different story. While 10.62 percent of space was devoted for corruption-related stories in the period between January and March in 2011, it was 4.22 percent in 2010.
‘’This shows that despite getting a clear mandate for governance for a second term, it is not able to control corruption. Instead, the better mandate it has is being taken as a licence for corruption,’’ says Prabhakar, the head of the Media Lab of the CMS. In the preceding years, the space occupied by graft stories was comparatively low -1.37 percent in 2009 and 0.94 percent in 2008. The report finds that while Hindi news channels focused more on institutional-level corruption, English news channels focused on corruption involving individuals.
The study also says that most of the prime time coverage of corruption was of routine nature (bribery, raids by CBI/IT, land scams, fraud etc) and very little time was devoted to special drive such as corruption in politics and laws to protect whistle blowers. In covering corruption, channels devoted most of their time to independent (one-time) news stories (Sukhna land scam, CBI probing 2G Spectrum, etc) and barely carried special or a follow-up series to expose corruption, the report finds further.
The states which gave least opportunity for the news channels for corruption coverage in their prime time were just three – Bihar, which contributed only 0.01 percent, Chaattisgarh (0.05 percent) and Kerala (0.09 percent). The report finds that as most of the channels are based in Delhi, the coverage of corruption was confined mostly to the state or NCR region, followed by Maharashtra.