Anatomy of a Media Event: Disinformation and Event Making in Television and Social Media

Abstract

Disinformation has become rampant in India (and many other parts of the world) with increasingly serious consequences. Increasing communal conflict and the rise of post-pandemic conspiracies clearly illustrate this problem. In this context, I argue that disinformation is only one component in a network of affective politics produced by different kinds of media events. In other words, media events are affective spaces with event-making forms that signify their politics to intended audiences across contexts. Disinformation, then, is not ‘inside’ the information but is distributed affectively as part of media. The assassination of Praveen Nettar, a district-level leader of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party in coastal Karnataka, illustrates how an unplanned event became a series of media events through television and social media’s event-making forms. It was these media events that circulated rumours, suspicion and other forms of hatred and discrimination against Muslims. The latter part of the article locates these forms in terms of the history and sociopolitical context of coastal Karnataka. I build on literature from cultural and political anthropology, religion and media studies with a focus on the construction of media events. The article concludes with an emphasis on the importance of media events for scholars who wish to study disinformation in the context of increasing right-wing populism.