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AROUND TEN EDITORS, their faces tense, gathered in a conference room in a swanky Noida office. Among them were the executive editor of CNN News18, the chief executive producer of IBN Network and the editors of various news websites, including Moneycontrol and Firstpost. Together they made up the top editorial leadership of Network18, often touted as one the largest media empires in Asia—CNN News18 boasts a higher viewership than its sister network, CNN International. On this crisp November day in 2015, they had a daunting problem at hand.
It was a day before Bihar’s month-long election season wound down to its last phase, with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party mounting its most expensive campaign yet. The party had led over six hundred rallies, with 30 led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself, fresh off his 2014 landslide. “No Indian prime minister had previously invested so much time in a state election,” CNBC commented. Arrayed against Modi was a motley alliance of the Congress, Rashtriya Janata Dal and Janata Dal (United). What had the editors troubled was the media conglomerate’s in-house exit poll. It had predicted a resounding loss for Modi.
In the conference room, one attendee told me, many editors, chiefly those in touch with their reporters in Bihar, saw no issue with publishing the exit poll, conducted by the polling agency Axis My India, whose clients included corporate companies as well as government ministries. A digital strategist who was also present added that nearly every other pollster was predicting a win for the BJP, but reports from the ground confirmed Axis’s findings. Two Network18 staffers who had reported on the party’s furious campaigning told me that they had informed their editors in clear terms that the alliance would be triumphant.