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Abstract
This article examines the changing relationship between the elite English-language press and its interface with urban politics in India's best known high-tech centre, Bangalore. Print journalism remains a core feature of India's growing multi-media news field, and this article critically analyses the profound changes in the political role of news in the last two decades. The changing relationship between the dominant news media and the state in the context of the rapid expansion of private news channels reveals the ascendance of what we elaborate in this article as neoliberal newspeak, following transnational trends. We conclude by considering the ways in which contestations over the growing and visible inequalities of a city like Bangalore in the last decade – including the fissures inside the dominant English news media – signal the potential to disrupt the coherence of the definitional power of neoliberal newspeak.
Notes
1. Based on the recommendations of the Administrative Reforms Commission, Karnataka State Legislature enacted the Karnataka Lokayukta Act in 1984 to set up the institution of Lokayukta to check corruption in public offices. The Lokayukta became a popular institutional site for public grievances in the late 1990s when the then head ombudsman skilfully used the growing networks of television news to conduct raids on corrupt officials and admonish them before the television camera.
2. Joint House Committees probes were composed of select members from both the Upper and Lower houses of the State Parliament.
3. Schudson, ‘News Media’, 255.
4. Dasslghren, Media and Political Engagement.
5. Bourdieu and Wacquant, ‘Neoliberal Newspeak and the Planetary Vulgate’.
6. Chakravartty and Schiller, ‘Neoliberal Newspeak’.
7. The ethnographic component of the study is based on fieldwork conducted at the TOI and three other newspaper offices in Bangalore by Sahana Udupa between 2007 and 2009.
8. While much of this literature draws on the European (Couldry, 2003; Champagne, 2005; Hall et al., 1978) and US (Benson, Citation2005; Schudson, 2002) experiences, research on media and political transformation in Latin America (Martin-Barbero, 1993; Hughes, 2006; Waisbord, 2000) provides a compelling comparative framework to think through the current neoliberal media organizational shifts in relation to the post-colonial state.
9. Ninan, Headlines from the Heartland, 13.
10. Jeffrey, India's Newspaper Revolution and Rao, ‘Empowerment through Local News Making’.
11. The Times Group is owned by Bennett, Coleman and Co. Limited managed by the Jain family with interests both nationally and regionally in print, broadcasting and online media. For more specifically on the TOI's global print and online circulation see: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/NEWS-India-TOI-Online-is-worlds-No1-newspaper-website/articleshow/4769920.cms.
12. Menon and Nigam, Power and Contestation; Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed; and Laclau, On Populist Reason.
13. Bourdieu and Wacquant, ‘Neoliberal Newspeak and the Planetary Vulgate’.
14. Chakravartty and Schiller, ‘Neoliberal Newspeak’.
15. Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke; Rajagopal, Politics after Television; Thussu, ‘The Murdochization of News? The Case of Star TV’; and Thomas, Political Economy of Communications in India.
16. Ninan, Headlines from the Heartland; Rajagopal, Politics after Television; Rao, ‘Empowerment through Local News Making’; and Udupa, ‘Print Communalism’.
17. Mehta, ‘India Talking’, 6.
18. Thussu, ‘Murdochization of News’ and Sonwalker (2002).
19. Roy, ‘Television and Democratic Change in India’.
20. See Ninan, Headlines from the Heartland; Rajagopal, Politics after Television; Jeffrey, India's Newspaper Revolution; Parameshwaran, ‘Moral Dilemmas of an Immoral Nation’; Roy, ‘Television and Democratic Change in India’; Stahlberg, Lucknow Daily; and Udupa, ‘Print Communalism’.
21. Interview was reprinted in The Hoot, a web-based media watchdog group which pointed out factually incorrect statements presented by Mr Dariwal: http://www.thehoot.org/web/home/story.php?storyid=4910&pg=1&mod=1§ionId=5§ionname=MEDIA%20ETHICS&valid=true
22. Hughes, Newsrooms in Conflict, 21 and Thussu, ‘Murdochization of News’.
23. Ninan, Headlines from the Heartland, 18.
24. Schudson, ‘News Media as Political Institutions’, 257.
25. Waisbord, Watchdog Journalism in Latin America.
26. The recent Anna Hazare movement is among the more popular media-fuelled campaigns building on middle-class resentment against the ‘corrupt’ political class. While such campaigns hold out the promise of democratic participation building on a wider public anger over corruption, critics have rightly pointed out its unrepresentative nature and ‘draconian powers’ given to the proposed Lokpal. As a movement, its founding principles are based a distrust of the political class which resonated with news media discourse that we have been highlighting in this paper. In this sense, the Anna Hazare movement bears out the danger of abbreviated, yet intense forms of mediated political activism. For a thoughtful overview of the Anna Hazare movement see: Vinay Sitapati (2011) ‘What Anna Hazare Movement and India's New Middle Class Say About Each Other’.
27. Rajagopal, Politics after Television and Sonwalker (2002).
28. Chakravartty, ‘Telecom, National Development and the Post colonial State’.
29. Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke, 12 and 283.
30. Nair, Promise of Metropolis, 81.
31. Business Process Outsourcing Information Technology and Information Technology-Enabled Services. These include call centres, and the backoffices for outsourcing IT-enabled financial and other services.
32. Benjamin et al., ‘Bhoomi’, 4–5.
33. Chandrashekar, ICT in a Developing Country Context and Upadhya, ‘New Transnational Capitalist Class?’.
34. Ghosh, ‘Public-Private or a Private Public?’.
35. Parthasarathy, Benjamin et al., 2009.
36. Bangalore's much celebrated rise as a central node in the global network society has been the subject of a growing body of critical scholarship that has examined the contradictions and contestations of this deeply unequal process. As Nair (2005) by the mid-1990s, one-fifth of the city's population lived in slums and some 87% of its labour force was engaged in the informal economy.
37. The TOI's rebranding strategy and influence across the media field is critically assessed by scholars and journalists alike. See, for example, Sharma (2003).
38. Ninan, Headlines from the Heartland, 274.
39. Although generally seen as the most read English-language newspaper in the South, the Tamil Nadu based Hindu’s relevance in neighbouring Karnataka is limited despite its cultural capital as a paper known for its high standards of English, erudite columns and relatively more critical stance on inequality and economic and social marginalization in contemporary Indian society.
40. In 2008 alone, two large English dailies – Deccan Chronicle and DNA – launched their Bangalore editions. Within four years of re-launch, the TOI moved from fourth position to become the largest circulated English daily in Bangalore. In 2004, it overtook Deccan Herald in terms of readership volume. Today, The Times of India group (Bennett Coleman and Co. Ltd and Vijayanand Publishers Limited) owns the largest circulated English as well as Kannada newspaper in the city. According to Indian Readership Survey (2008 Round 2), estimated number of readers for the TOI in Bangalore is 395,000; Deccan Herald 240,000 and the Hindu 50,000.
41. Upadhya and Vasavi, Work, Culture and Sociality in the Indian IT Industry.
42. The cover price of the TOI was reduced to one rupee following the re-launch, forcing other papers to slash their prices. TOI had similarly started a price war in Delhi to challenge the market dominance of the Hindustan Times. Along with price cuts, the new management under Samir Jain also introduced different pricing for different days and cross-brand advertising packages. These changes were introduced in the early years of 1990 in Delhi (Kohli-Khandekar 2006).
43. These points are based on observations of editorial meetings at the TOI Bangalore office. In one of the meetings, a senior editorial member expressed her appreciation for the Chief Minister's decision to avoid garlands and other public tokens of respect. This sparked a discussion on the issue of garlands – how much it costs, how it pollutes public spaces and how the political class should be blamed for this extravaganza. For a broader discussion on how these practices within the English press and the divergent discourses in the Kannada news field frame urban conflicts, see Udupa, ‘Go Local’.
44. Hallin, We Keep America on Top of the World.
45. Deshpande, Contemporary India; Fernandes India's New Middle Class; Harriss, Power Matters; and Ray and Qayum, Cultures of Servitude.
46. Chakravartty, ‘Telecom, National Development and the Postcolonial State’.
47. Upadhya, ‘New Transnational Capitalist Class?’.
48. According to senior executives in the Bangalore office, the TOI had employed reputed marketing agencies to conduct nationwide readership surveys before introducing the new format. However, many of them admitted that these surveys provided only brief pointers and broad directions. The department heads exercised a lot of discretion in terms of defining the new reader, often based on their own experiences of living in the city and the feedback received by newspaper vendors and sales agents. A senior executive squarely brushed aside the importance of readership surveys and affirmed that the changes were an ‘internal decision’.
49. In Udupa (2010), the author examines this process in more detail based on extended interviews with key actors in the TOI between 2007 and 2009.
50. Anjali Puri ‘Our Paper Isn't for Editors, It's for People’.
51. Duval, ‘Economic Journalism in France’.
52. Dahlgren, Media and Political Engagement.
53. Alhassan and Chakravartty, ‘Global Media Policy under the Long Shadow of Empire’.
54. See www.janaagraha.org/resource/BATF_Developmnt_by_Design.pps for a quick glimpse into BATF's stated agenda and http://www.altlawforum.org/globalisation/research-publications/cyber-myths-and-the-rest-who-also-live-in-silicon-valley and Ghosh (2005) for a critical perspective.
55. For more on the current Lead India campaign see: http://leadindia.itimes.com/registration.php.
56. For more on the contest, see: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/2770139.cms. In 2009, Misra claiming he was representative of ‘educated professionals who were worried and concerned’ would go on to join the Hindu-nationalist BJP, currently in power in Karnataka. See: http://www.lkadvani.in/eng/content/view/816/209/.
57. For more see: http://mtmv.indiatimes.com/default.aspx.
58. The pivotal PPP project – Bangalore Agenda Task Force – was the first to be challenged by the newly empowered political groups from JDS and a section of Congress I in 2004. The post-S.M. Krishna government (JDS backed Congress I government) yielded to the pressure of these political leaders and city council members, ultimately dismantling the BATF in 2005.
59. This is based on analysis of Citizen Agenda campaign and Bangalore Bureau editor's column ‘To the Point’ published in 2008. Various private–public initiatives came up again under different names in the later years, drawing less media attention.
60. Various private–public initiatives came up again under different names in the later years, drawing less media attention than BATF. Under the BJP regime in 2009, a new task force involving private sector leaders was initiated. ‘ABIDe’, as it came to be called, had the mandate to aid comprehensive development planning and recommend governance reforms for the city. http://www.abidebengaluru.in/about.
61. Criticism of the liberalized news media's neglect of the urban and especially the rural poor, came from a variety of sources including the influential work of journalist P. Sainath, whose book ‘Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India's Poorest District’ (1998) created significant public debate on the issue.
62. Interview with reporter for TOI, October 2008.
63. See, for example, an interview with Narendra Jadav, ‘a Dalit professional who defies stereotypes’: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/425683.cms.
64. A social entrepreneur recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create and manage a venture to make social change.
65. This was one among many articles on the death of C.K. Prahalad, the author of the influential popular management best seller ‘Wealth at the Bottom of the Pyramid’ http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/5826804.cms. The two texts that are commonly referenced in this regard are: Collier, Bottom Billion and Prahalad, Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.
66. Vijayanagar is seen as a lower-middle-class locality in Bangalore. Although TOI circulates widely across the city, it does not target these localities as they lack the desired readership profile.
67. Appadurai, ‘Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing’, 637.
68. Hutnyk, Rumour of Calcutta.
69. Fernandes and Heller, ‘Hegemonic Aspirations’.
70. Kumar, ‘Media and Marginalization of Dalits’; Loynd, ‘Politics without Television’; and Uniyal, ‘In Search of a Dalit Journalist’.
71. The survey was carried out by CSDS in Delhi, and the results were published in The Hindu in 2006: http://www.hindu.com/2006/06/05/stories/2006060504981400.htm.
72. While the Indian constitution mandates that the state take measures to ensure the ‘advancement of the historically oppressed groups at the bottom’ of India's caste system, it was not until the 1990s that caste-based mobilizations pushed regional and national governments to expand reservation of seats in higher education, political office, etc. (Jafferlot, 2003).
73. As Ritty Lukose (2010) has shown recently, the political and cultural implications of ‘liberalization's children’ are complex, especially when we take into account the gendered dimension of these transformations.
74. This speaks to the fact that some 93% of India's workforce is estimated by the ILO (International Labor Organization) to be employed in the informal sector. http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/inst/download/india. For more on the media and the ‘taxpayers’ rights discourse see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3868073.stm.
75. Guha Thakurta and Kaushal, ‘Underbelly of the Great Indian Telecom Revolution’.
76. For more by journalists on impact of the ‘Radia-gate’ scandal see the series of articles published by Hoot as of November, 2010. For example: http://www.thehoot.org/web/home/story.php?storyid=4992&pg=1&mod=1§ionId=5&valid=true.
77. Nick Couldry in his discussion of Bourdieu's relevance to theories of media power argues that this is the first component of the media's ‘meta-capital’ similar to state's monopoly over symbolic power as theorized more explicitly by Bourdieu (Couldry, 2003: 668–9).
78. In the interviews, journalists admitted that there is a severe fall in the number of investigative stories in the last two decades.
79. Interview with a senior TOI journalist in Bangalore, February 19, 2009.
80. Out of 42 reporters interviewed in two large English dailies in Bangalore, 17 (around 40%) complained about the pro-private sector editorial policy and informal forms of censorship within the papers. Ethnographic observations at professional and socializing sites such as the Press Club also suggested that a section of journalists, including those working for English papers, strongly disapproved the editorial decisions to support and glamorize the corporate sector.
81. Udupa, ‘Print Communalism’.
82. Schudson, ‘News Media as Political Institutions’, 259.
83. We make this claim based on the larger ethnographic study conducted by Udupa (2010), which shows an overall increase in the number of non-elite journalists within the elite English-language media.
84. Laclau, On Populist Reason.
85. Upadhya, ‘Imagining India’ and Kamath and Vijaybhaskar, ‘Limits and Possibilities of Middle Class Associations’.
