The Indian financial dailies continue their attempts to remain relevant in an election season dominated by television. Trying to keep up with the minute to minute shenanigans of the campaigners is perhaps futile for economic dailies. Attempting to add value and particularly content of interest to business readers and the investing public is the prime concern of business dailies.
The biz dailies have tried to come up with charts, graphs, tables and economic forecasts related to the possible outcomes of the general election. Major financial papers are going all out to grab the attention of the reader. ‘Claim Check’ is Mint’s rolling feature that verifies the accuracy of claims made by political leaders campaigning for elections. A reader can send in any comment that is in the public domain and which she would like to be researched, by simply sending it to claimcheck@livemint.com.
Moreover, the CNBC-TV18 tie-up with Mint enables the reader to catch up with topical interviews and stories related to elections, for example, in the issue dated 29
April 2014, the interview of the chairman of the Adani Group, Gautam Adani, who says that he received no special favour from the Modi government.
The Economic Times devotes four pages of the issue to a ‘pure politics’ section each day covering election news. It attempts to inject some economic or financial analysis related to the general election. For instance, on 22 April it published an interesting statistic showing that while 41% of the candidates with property over Rs. 100 crores had criminal records, candidates with assets less than Rs. one lakh had only 8% with criminal cases.
Business Line brings out Pollscape on page 6 daily with an interesting blend of features, stories, a poll diary and a tweet meter. The Business Standard did some insightful coverage on, “Why millions of eligible voters are unable to vote.” Its 26 April report details how migrant workers other than a few elite top brass cannot vote because they cannot return to their homes in Bihar, Tamilnadu
or Kerala.
