Indian politicians and the journalists they prefer

Dibyendu Mishra, Joyojeet Pal

(suggested citation: Mishra, D. and Pal, J. (2020) Indian politicians and the journalists they prefer https://joyojeet.people.si.umich.edu/indian-politicians-and-the-journalists-they-prefer/)

We plotted Indian politicians based on the number of times they retweeted a member of the press. The goal of this was to understand politicians’ engagement with the press, and their use of various news sources in informing their constituents. We used data from 2019 to understand press engagement during the election season.
Findings
Our results show that the vast majority of engagement with the press happens with politicians who are explicitly charged with IT cell or outreach activities, and that politicians who stand for elections, especially for Lok Sabha seats, do not retweet members of the press. The one exception of a highly followed parliamentarian with very significant press engagement is Asad Owaisi of AIMIM. Rajya Sabha members most actively engaging with the press include Rajeev Chandrasekhar of BJP, Misa Bharti and Manoj Jha of RJD. Some of the most followed politicians including Rahul Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi have no press interactions, Narendra Modi and Amit Shah clocked single-digit numbers in terms of their tweets that involved a news item.

The second trend is that politicians in parties that do not have significant legislative representation are among the most engaged with mainstream media. These include Yogendra Yadav, Kavita Krishnan, and Shehla Rashid, all of whom have engaged with stories from over 150 journalists each during the election season. As we see in figure 1, the AAP and BJP are the parties that most frequently engage with stories from the mainstream media, while the INC significantly lags.

The third finding is a dramatic polarization in the journalists engaged by politicians. As we see in figure 2, Manak Gupta is engaged by the most politicians followed by Rajdeep Sardesai and Rahul Kanwal. However, in terms of influence in the network, Rohit Sardana, Rohini Singh and Aditya Raj Kaul are each significant for the extent and frequency to which they get retweeted. We also find that several non-mainstream commentators/influencers who may not be traditionally understood as journalists, but command large online following including Dhruv Rathee, Ibne Sena (screen name for anonymous individual), Akash Banerjee have significant purchase among politicians. An outlier in figure 2 is Prashant Patel, who is the most retweeted journalist by politicians in 2019, but the retweets tend to be from fewer and less followed politicians.

The fourth and most significant finding is the extent of polarization. We find limited intersection between the politicians in terms of the sources they choose to retweet. As we see in figure 3 scaled on a spectrum of BJP and non-BJP politicians, with the exception of Rahul Kanwal and Nistula Hebbar, all the politicians have a polarity score of over 0.5, meaning at least 2/3rds of their retweets come from one side or another.

(Figure 3: Polarization of journalists based on preference by parties – x-axis positive score = BJP-leaning, negative score=non-BJP leaning)

The dominance of IT cell and outreach coordinators of parties in press engagements on Twitter underlines their importance as gatekeepers. For instance, Amit Malviya and Suresh Nakhua of BJP, Pankhuri Pathak and Khsuh Sundar of INC, A Saravanan and P Thiagarajan of DMK, Preeti Chobey for Samajwadi Party, Amit Pandit of Shiv Sena, Singai G Ramachandran of AIADMK all played leading roles in retweeting the press.

Table 1 shows us some of the key politician>journalist intersections. Aditya Raj Kaul is a consistently important source retweeted by BJP politicians, while Pankaj Jain is the most frequently used source for key AAP leaders. We also see that journalists from the same organizations may be tweeted by different parties. For instance Shiv Aroor is heavily retweeted by BJP leaders, particularly Rajeev Chandrasekhar, while Rajdeep Sardesai tends to be preferred by non-BJP leaders.

Table 1: Highly followed politicians and MPs and the journalists they retweet most (min 15 interactions)

Key Interactions

We mapped key relationships between politicians and journalists to help visualize the concentration of the political discourse. It also helps understand the overlap between the journalists preferred by certain politicians. The politicians selected for this mapping were those that had significant following (over 200,000) and we only visualized the connections where the politician had retweeted a journalist at least 15 times.

Sample / Methodology