IANS/New Delhi
With Prime Minister Manmohan Singh set to lay down office in about a month, his communication adviser made a belated attempt to redeem his battered image, suggesting that even the media, especially television, did not take enough note about the all-round progress of the country and the prime minister’s thrust on development.
The UPA-II government has not been as successful as UPA-I because of the global economic slowdown, the prime minister’s communications adviser, Pankaj Pachauri said yesterday, even as he rolled out statistics about “unprecedented” development over the last 10 years which he said were not being picked up by the media “as its priorities are different”.
Pachauri was speaking at a meet-the-press programme at the Press Club of India here. Pachauri said the prime minister has always preferred to talk about politics on the floor of the House but in the last two years “parliament has not given him enough chances to speak”.
Referring to a study by the Centre for Media Studies, Pachauri said media coverage of prime minister’s messages on development issues has been “2.1% in television news channels.”
He said it has been 4.5% in English print media and 5% in the Hindi print media. “Most of the things the prime minister talked about is not registered,” he said, adding that most of the topics touched on by the prime minister have not been covered by the news channels.
“Because of media mix, his message is not as strong as should have been,” Pachauri said. He said an analysis of leading news channels over the past few years revealed that 25% of the news time was devoted to politics, 10% to entertainment and almost similar time to sports.
“On these topics, he (the prime minister) did not talk too much,” Pachauri said.
Pachauri added that Manmohan Singh had in the last decade given 1,158 speeches - almost one every three days - and there were over 1,600 press releases on the PMO website.
“The kind of economic progress in the last 10 years has not been witnessed in any country which is democratic. (This kind of) fight against poverty has not been seen in the history of mankind.
“The GDP has risen three times as is the per capita income. Students in universities have almost doubled. Rural wages have increased three times,” he said. “The government is working. Its achievements are not reaching you as for the media, the priorities are different. If you reflect coolly on what the PM has done, the results evident will be good,” he said.