Alternative News Media and Critique of Mainstream Journalism in India: The Case of OpIndia

Abstract

“Alternative news media,” that explicitly position themselves against mainstream media have emerged as an increasingly visible aspect of media systems globally including in India. And although such media can espouse left/right political positions, in the Indian context, such outlets are supportive of right-wing politics of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In this article—drawing on rhetorical approaches—we explore the efforts of OpIndia, the most-visited right-wing news site in India to critique and correct the country’s mainstream news outlets through a textual analysis of 576 articles contained in the site’s Media Fact Check section.

Keywords:

• Hindu-nationalism
• India
• OpIndia
• alternative news media
• media critique

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)..

Notes

1 The BJP has had an adversarial relationship with many mainstream English language outlets due to negative media coverage of the Gujarat riots in 2002 where the state government led by Narendra Modi was criticized for its failure to control the violence that resulted in the death of nearly a thousand people, largely belonging to the minority Muslim community. OpIndia is aligned with the right-wing politics espoused by the BJP. However, it is neither funded nor formally affiliated to the BJP in any other way.

2 While populism has both right and left-wing variants, each articulating a specific type of media critique, the bulk of recent attacks on professional journalism arguably stem from the right.

3 While OpIndia has a Hindi language version, the original English language site has a much larger Media Fact Check section that also includes the stories found on the Hindi language site. For this reason, we analyzed stories from English language portal only. Moreover, the audience for the English-language site is much broader since Hindi is only spoken by about 43% of the Indian population (Firaque 2022).

4 The RSS is a Hindu nationalist organization closely affiliated with the ruling BJP.

5 Communalism is a term used in India to denote attempts to construct religious or ethnic identity, incite strife between people identified as different communities, and to stimulate communal violence between those groups.

6 Jai Shri Ram refers to a popular Hindu religious chant.