Rubble on Screen, Accountability Off Screen

Switch on the television news channels after any human tragedy, and you will find news anchors screaming at the top of their voices, citing figures, pinpointing blame on individuals and demanding the severest of punishments for the ‘guilty’ they have already pronounced even before the preliminary investigation has begun. With visuals of victims, grieving family and relatives, damaged infrastructure, bureaucrats and politicians making the rounds of the incident site, and rescue operations in full swing filling the TV screens, a pure spectacle unfolds after every tragedy.

The latest incident receiving such treatment has been the Satya Niketan PG building collapse in South Delhi, near Delhi University’s North campus, last week, killing seven students and injuring several others.

Earlier, a similar style of coverage had been witnessed in incidents like the flooding of the basement of a renowned civil services coaching institute in Old Rajinder Nagar, Central Delhi, in July 2024, in which 3 students lost their lives, and the tragic fire at a commercial building that housed a student library, a pet shop and an animation centre in Aliganj area of Lucknow, resulting in the deaths of 15 students in June this year only.

In all these incidents, the script has been the same: while the audience satiated their hunger for information by tuning to news channels, news television outlets provided the instant gratifications, and they even went beyond and pronounced instant sentences.

However, such episodic coverage of tragedies throws up questions with far-reaching implications requiring deep contemplation on the core principles of journalism, professional ethics as well the political economy of news business. Is this style of news coverage just a mundane journalistic ritual of informing the public minute-by-minute on the unfolding news events, or is there something more than meets the eyes? Is this proclaimed ‘diligent-factual-instant coverage of news as it happens’ true to the sacrosanct journalistic principles of objectivity and impartiality, or is it just a technique of garnering more eyeballs that translates into quick generation of revenue for the corporations controlling the news television outlets while not posing any discomforting questions to the powers that be?

Episodic Vs Thematic Journalistic Framework

In his seminal work Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues (1991), political scientist Shanto Iyengar has shown how television news architecture shapes public perception of accountability and impoverishes democratic discourse in the United States of America by emphasising episodic rather than thematic framing of news. The same framework can be applied to the PG building collapse in Delhi.

The television media architecture provides the public with two types of frames: episodic and thematic. The episodic news framing will treat political issues/events as specific, isolated and individual events. Iyengar argues that television news relies overwhelmingly on episodic framing, focusing on individual cases, individual victims and individuals responsible for it. Using such episodic framing, the television media leads the audience to blame individual choices or flaws rather than focus on systematic, governmental or structural failures.

Thematic framing, on the other hand, situates a political issue or an event within a broader context, focusing on structural and historical factors. Thematic framing, thus, prompts the public to hold public representatives, policies and institutions responsible for the issues.

In the cases of the Delhi PG collapse, the flooding of the Rajindra Nagar coaching centre, or the Lucknow library fire, Indian news television used episodic frames focusing on individuals and presenting the incidents as isolated ones. For instance, most television news channels converge on the individual victims, their families, and the ‘culprit’, the owner of the PG. At the same time, the Delhi Municipal Corporation Commissioner is also held responsible by television channels by airing his photographs and video clips.

Thematic Frames: Missing in TV, Present in Newspapers

Though the thematic frame of events was missing from television news media, it was present in the coverage by newspapers, online news portals and independent YouTube channels. The Indian Express and other English dailies focused on thematic frame by publishing detailed reports.

One such report says that the Delhi University Act, 1922 led to the establishment of Delhi University. Section 33 of this Act states that every student of the University (other than the student who pursues a course of study through correspondence) shall reside in a College Hall. The College Hall here refers to the student residence that the University provided, maintained or recognised. Over a century later, the University has expanded in scale with 90 colleges with over 6.5 lakhs enrolment but has only 20 hostels.

The report also noted that consolidated data of hostel accommodation available for the students in the university and its colleges is not available. However, as per a report of 2015, there were only 9,000 seats available in hostels for over 1.8 lakh undergraduate and postgraduate students enrolled at that time, which accounted for only 5 percent of students. Though it is an old figure, it offers an insight into the sorry state of affairs: it reveals that only 5 percent of the total students will get university hostel accommodation while the remaining 95 percent will depend on private paying guest accommodations like Satya Niketan.

The newspapers also reported about the space crunch in colleges for building hostels and cumbersome permission process as well as the lack of intent on the part of administration to make hostels, as a large inflow of money comes from the paying guests to various stakeholders.

Newspapers have also reported that the education budget of India has decreased sharply from 4.6 percent of the GDP in 2013-14 to 2.5 percent in 2025-26. The reduction in the education budget and the current education policy frameworks ultimately lead to more privatisation in the education sector and in such scenario hostel accommodation would surely not be a government priority. Moreover, the thematic reporting has also focused on the regulatory authorities allowing these unsafe buildings to continue operating without proper security checks.

Factors such as rampant corruption at each level in government machinery, complicity of the law enforcement agencies in allowing illegal constructions to continue, poor rule enforcements, lack of safety checks of material used in building constructions and number of floors made are also highlighted in the reports. If we compare it with news channels, they seldom emphasise on these systematic loopholes. They rather focus on episodic themes, in which the government’s reactive approach is highlighted wherein authorities only act and do safety audits once tragedies happen.

Sentence First and then the Verdict

Now the question arises: why does news television prefer the episodic frame and shun the thematic in-depth reporting of tragedies? By episodic framing, does it cater to the information needs of its audiences or capitulate to the existing power structures? Does it deliberately try to push beyond public scrutiny of the larger structural factors and systemic failures that produce such incidents time and again? In fact, whenever a tragedy of the scale of Satya Niketan occurs, it comes with a massive public outcry, demanding justice for the victims and their families, fixing responsibilities and punishing the guilty and news television comes forward with an instant satiation of the public outcry – find out visible causes, individuals, pinpoint the blame and deflect the attention from the real issues.

Such behaviour by the public and the response of the news television remind one of the Trial of the Knave of Hearts, who is accused of stealing the Queen’s tarts, in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. During the trial, when the King of Hearts suggests that the jury should consider its verdict, the Queen of Hearts demands that punishment should precede judgment: “Sentence first, verdict afterwards.” This scene exposes the absurdity of the whole judicial process: the Queen wants Knave punished before the jury has even properly reached a verdict. It is also an appropriate metaphor for how the media have framed the Delhi PG collapse.

The Queen’s demand reduces the judicial process to a spectacle that appears more important than evidence, deliberation, or procedure. The instant satiation of public outrage by the television news channels reflects the same pattern. Instead of probing the deeper causes and responsibilities and fixing structural failures, news television exonerates the state and the government by deflecting people’s attention from structural and systemic failures.

However, in the process, news television turns the tragedy into a spectacle. In the case of the PG building collapse, a preventable human tragedy was turned into a consumable media event while hiding the underlying structures and systemic neglect, which could be termed as spectacle in French philosopher and political scientist Guy Debord’s terminology.

Capital-Political Power Nexus Rules Life

It’s not a hidden fact that corporate powers control the entire television news industry, barring a few outlets, in India. Upon analysing the political economy of news media, no room for doubt is left that such episodic, repeat television broadcasting is not a natural outcome of the professional urgency to match the pace with the emerging information on an unfolding incident. The economic interests of the corporate houses that own these media houses and the political and ideological interests of the government that glut the screen with advertisements have to be, after all, protected, even at the cost of sacrificing the professional principles of the TV news profession.

Since the capital-intensive television news business operates in a system that has interdependent political-economic relationships, no news channel dares to risk its fortunes. One may find it ethically questionable, but this is the logic of television news operations: Turn a tragedy into a spectacle, pronounce an instant sentence, and thus deflect the people’s attention from the real issues which may destabilise the existing constellation of power and capital and cause discomfort for the ruling dispensations.

This is indeed a sorry state of affairs, but the message is unmistakable: when the nexus of capital and political power rules, the professional principles take a backseat and even human life becomes expendable!