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ABSTRACT
The initiation of economic reforms in the 1990s led to major recastings in the media-state-market relationship in India. Looking specifically at the television news media space, the age-old monopoly of the state broadcaster Doordarshan was challenged by the mushrooming of a host of private television news media. Private participation in the television news sector was in sync with the logic of market capitalism. Market-based news model radically altered the nature of production, representation and consumption of news. This paper makes an inquiry into one such predominant aspect of news production, the ascendancy of views/opinion based prime time programming in television news media, in contemporary India. Through a series of semi-structured interviews with journalists, the paper attempts to make sense of the reasons, the nature and significance and the likely impact of such programming on the nature of public discourse in India.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank my supervisor Prof. Maitrayee Chaudhuri for her unwavering support and guidance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 For more on the report, read, https://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/EY-a-billion-screens-of-opportunity/$FILE/EY-a-billion-screens-of-opportunity.pdf, accessed 27th May, 2019.
2 The latest Annual Report available on the website of Ministry of Information and Broadcasting website is for the year 2017–2018. For more on report, read https://mib.gov.in/sites/default/files/Annual%20Report_2017-18%20%28English%29.pdf, accessed 21st February, 2018.
3 These terms have been used interchangeably in the paper. Albeit, their meaning remains the same throughout.
4 The episode was aired on the news channel Times Now on 11th February, 2016. In this episode, the anchor Arnab Goswami invited a PhD student Umar Khalid from the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi and targeted and tarnished the image of being an anti-national (the episode is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e569xmuPUjs, accessed 26th August, 2018). This on-screen showdown was followed by an incident where a television channel aired a doctored video of students at JNU shouting slogans against India. The students were branded anti-nationals. A few days, three students including Umar Khalid were arrested by Delhi Police on charges of sedition.
5 On 29th September 2016, the Indian army launched a surgical strike on the terror launch pads across the Line of control in retaliation to the Uri Attack by facilitated by the Pakistan army on 18th of the same month
6 The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) II was a coalition government of the national political party Congress and other like minded parties who in power at the centre from 2009 to 2014.
7 Prince was a five-year-old boy who fell into an open borewell in a village in the Kurukshetra district in the state of Harayana. He was eventually rescued after a marathon 48 h rescue operation was put in place.
8 The Anna Movement was an anti-corruption movement spearheaded by the social activist Anna Hazare. The movement aimed at enacting a stringent anti-corruption law, the Jan Lok Pal Bill, for the formation of an Ombudsman to deal with corruption cases.
9 India’s Daughter documentary directed by Leslee Udwin is based on the Delhi Gang Rape case of December 2012. It was to be aired by television channels across the world on the occasion of the International Women’s Day. However, its telecast in India was stopped by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Times Now news channel ran a relentless campaign against the Director of the documentary, calling for its ban as it portrayed India in a negative light.