While it has become quite fashionable to talk of The Times of India’s Medianet and Private Treaties when referring to paid-news in India, another large media group is largely undocumented or not documented enough in this context.
It’s the Sun Group, down south. Sun owns some of the most influential media vehicles across the 4 southern Indian states – Tamil Nadu (where it is headquartered), Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. It also has a leading daily Tamil (spoken in Tamil Nadu) newspaper called Dinakaran.
Sometime back the Sun Group started to get into the film distribution business and has since released a lot of films. Now, I do not want to go behind the story about how the Sun Group, enjoying the power accorded by the ruling party in Tamil Nadu (DMK), ‘negotiates’ with film producers, but what is more glaring to the common man is how they’re using media vehicles to promote the films they distribute with absolutely no disclaimer about the conflict of interest.
The films that Sun distributes are promoted heavily on Sun TV – the Tamil channel with maximum viewership and has been so for over a decade now. Sometimes, the ads for the films are aired every 5 minutes and this is more visible during prime time or during other popular programs. All of them start with the prominent proclamation – ‘Sun Pictures…Kalanidhi Maran presents’.
Yes, these are paid spots akin to how Private Treaties takes a stake in say, Future Group, and lends massive advertisement support in Times of India, in return. But dig this – the said films enjoy considerable attention in Sun’s weekly film countdown, however mauled they’re universally by other media and print reviewers. The songs from the films are always on top in the weekly countdown shows, regardless of they’re being heard by people or not.
Wait, there’s more. These films are cross-promoted in many other creative and interesting ways. The audio is launched with great fanfare and a televised show. The actors from these films participate in game shows in Sun TV. A special contest is announced during other popular shows like Deal or No Deal where the questions are about these films alone.
Next on line – print. Dinakaran usually accords a glowing review with not a single negative for these films. Not just that – they also add a half-page feature with photos on how people are clamoring over each other in theaters to watch these films. These are reserved for only those films they distribute – and there is no disclaimer on why these films are being given so much importance anywhere in the paper.
While I do not have any issue with a movie being promoted in mainstream media – after all, its just advertising – films being distributed by Sun Group seem to enjoy special attention across the media vehicles they own. And that is exactly like how Times Group operates Private Treaties.
Films are big business across India, particularly down south. If a leading media player is misusing mainstream media vehicles they own to promote their own films, sometimes even with severe bias, it means big monetary returns to the distributor who has purchased the film from the producer. So, why is nobody talking about Sun Group’s media misuse as much as they are doing about Private Treaties? Just because it doesn’t affect national media and is relegated to one state?
Are there any more instances of vernacular media being misused in any other state? I know that Zee Talkies produces films and even produced the recent Marathi hit, Natrang, starring Atul Kulkarni (I loved the film and the music by Ajay-Atul – this year’s national award winners for best composers – by the way!). And Zee owns a slew of TV channels and has a stake in DNA. Have they used media vehicles the way Sun Group is doing? I’m not aware of any such misuse, at least yet.
A minor digression that sets the context: It’s a different issue that mainstream media in Tamil Nadu is starkly divided between political parties – almost all of them own a TV channel and make full use of that vehicle to convey their political propaganda. One can easily make out which channel has ‘bought’ the rights to air which film by just taking note of the new film scenes/ songs they air – the rival channels do not get those footage. Sycophancy in Tamil Nadu can be absolutely nauseating to an outsider – it is disgusting beyond imagination and only a few people have survived criticizing the terrible state of affairs consistently – like Cho Ramaswamy, who uses satire to incredibly devastating effect to highlight them.