Anushka Shah (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Zeenab Aneez

Between March to July earlier this year, India saw an eruption of farmer protests in the state of Delhi, districts of Maharashtra and in Mandsaur, Madhya Pradesh. The protests were widespread in geography as well as in the political reactions they elicited, and soon came to be a national issue that briefly received significant attention from English and local language media.

The following study explores aspects of this coverage and the manner in which the farmers and causes and consequences of the farm crisis were presented in the English-language Indian press for the time duration of the protests, starting from mid-March when the Tamil Nadu Farmers began their strike, to mid July 2017.

Media Cloud, an open-source platform developed by the MIT Media Lab in collaboration with the Berkman Klein Centre at Harvard University, was used for the analysis of this study. Media Cloud uses a database of over 650+ English language news websites in India - the collection includes legacy newspapers such as the Times of India and The Hindu, broadcast sources such as NDTV and Times Now, digital-native websites like The Wire and Scroll.in as well small blogs and websites that carry news about India.

Media Cloud works both as a data collection and content analysis platform. It collects content from news sources that have a digital presence via RSS or ‘Rich Site Summary’ feeds on a regular basis, saving them to it’s internal database. This database can be queried using various search terms, news sources or source collections, and time spans. The system further performs a ‘web crawl’ or a process of exploring hyperlinks embedded within the articles to discover any related content (the crawl is performed with 15 iterations to ensure all content relevant to search is discovered over the web). The platform includes various features of text and link analysis such as overall word frequency, automatic theme detection, and network mapping.

Coverage of the agrarian crisis by the English-language press

Veteran journalists and researchers have expressed the concern that rural India and the agricultural sector is underrepresented in Indian media. An Al Jazeera feature on Indian media quoted a small, but recent study by the Centre for Media Studies which analyzed six English and Hindi newspapers including Dainik Bhaskar, Dainik Jagran, The Times of India and The Hindu for the course of two months in 2015 and found that the percentage of front page stories focusing on rural India was zero with the exception of 1.37% of stories by The Hindu in the second month. Looking at six broadcast news outlets including DD News, Zee News and NDTV showed that that rural news did not receive more than 7 minutes of primetime on any of the surveyed news channels.

“Our entire focus is on metropolitan India, what happens in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai - that makes the headlines. It’s almost as if we think viewers are not interested in rural India. So our entire hierarchy of news has very little space for rural India,” says journalist Rajdeep Sardesai, also featured in the article.

Media Cloud was used to investigate if the above trend is reflected in its database. On investigating the share of stories related to farming or agriculture (the search terms used were farm*, agri*, and agro) within this English-language Indian news collection in the year 2016, it was found that only 4.4% of all news stories were about topics relating to farming or agriculture.