P. Sainath | The Profound Divergence Between Media and Journalism

In the era of corporate consolidation—what we might call “Corporate Raj”—media and journalism are two distinct, often antagonistic entities locked in a loveless marriage. Media are rent-seeking, profit-making corporations that cannot be expected to live up to liberal shibboleths such as freedom of the press. Journalism, in contrast, is what reporters do for a living—or at least used to before recent technologies gave rise to self-questioning around not just what it is reporters should be doing, but why and for whom. Yet journalism still needs “the media” as a platform and media still need journalism to, as Lord Thomson of Fleet (past owner of The Times, London) once said, “fill the spaces between the ads” while fulfilling their commercial interests and those of the governments that media corporations are beholden to.

In this talk, award-winning journalist P. Sainath draws upon his long career in India to explore media and journalism’s loveless marriage. Sainath argues that corporate consolidation and ownership of media—now a pressing reality almost everywhere—has a tremendous effect on society across issues of law, social justice and economic exploitation. With particular reference to more contemporary issues around COVID-19 coverage, the Gen Z protests and the rise of AI, the talk explores how structural and social inequality is reflected in and reinforced by today’s media in India and beyond.

Palagummi Sainath is an Indian journalist who focuses on inequality, deprivation and poverty, particularly in rural India. He is the recipient of over 75 national and global awards for journalism. A journalist since 1980, Sainath became a full-time rural reporter in 1993 and has since spent, on average, around 270 days a year in India’s poorest regions writing from there for India’s largest newspapers.

More recently, his path-breaking reporting placed India’s ongoing agrarian crisis and farmers’ suicides—over 400,000 in two decades since 1995—on the national agenda. In 2014, Sainath launched the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), a unique online project on rural India, with its 833 million people, speaking 780 living languages and a bewildering array of stories, occupations, arts, music, culture and more. PARI has won 106 journalism awards and honors. Sainath is now the A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.