Watching Barkha Dutt: turning on the news in television studies

Abstract

This essay examines Barkha Dutt, host of the popular NDTV news talk show ‘We the People’, as a symbolic portal into the rise of television news celebrity culture in India's altering mediascape. The essay first situates Dutt's work as a reporter and a talk show host within the context of Indian television journalism's role in the democratic public sphere and then explores the implications of Dutt's class and gender identities for the hierarchies of celebrity status in commercial television news. In the end, this case study of Barkha Dutt argues that greater attention to India's exploding journalism industry – its star personalities, political economy, critiques of news programmes' and talk shows' representations and audience responses – will revitalize and enrich the evolving trajectories of television studies.

Keywords:

• television news
• Barkha Dutt
• gender
• celebrity
• class
• India

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Ammina Kothari, PhD Candidate, School of Journalism, Indiana University, for her excellent research assistance.

Notes

1. Polgreen, ‘Journalist in India Ends Up in the Headlines’.

2. Mishra, ‘What Ails New India’.

3. Zelizer, ‘When Facts, Truth, and Reality Are God-Terms’.

4. Ibid.

5. Gaonkar and Povinelli, ‘Technologies of Public Forms’.

6. I am indebted to Goldie Osuri's analysis of the circulation of Aishwarya Rai for pointing me to Gaonkar and Povinelli's work on the technologies of public forms. See Osuri, ‘Ash-Coloured Whiteness’.

7. Lee and Lipuma, ‘Cultures of Circulation’, 192.

8. Gaonkar and Povinelli, ‘Technologies of Public Forms’, 387.

9. Mehta, ‘India Talking’.

10. Thussu, ‘Murdochization of News’.

11. Parameswaran, ‘Spectacles of Gender and Globalization’.

12. Rao, ‘Accountability, Democracy, and Globalization’.

13. Adajania, ‘Sand of the Coliseum’.

14. Chopra, ‘NDTV Seeks Loyal Viewers’.

15. Ibid.

16. Shepard, ‘Celebrity Journalists’.

17. Quoted in ibid.

18. Thussu, ‘Turning Terrorism into Soap Opera’.

19. Mannathukaren, ‘Media Terror!’.

20. Mitra, ‘New Commercial Media’, 442.

21. Dutt, ‘On the Record’.

22. Mehta, ‘India Talking’, 39.

23. Adajania, ‘Sand in the Coliseum’, 365.

24. Ibid., 366.

25. Mehta, ‘India Talking’, 43.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid., 55.

28. Dutt, ‘For God's Sake’.

29. Dutt, ‘In Reverse Gear’.

30. Varadarajan, ‘Fall of India's Katie Couric’.

31. Deheija, ‘India Journal Special’.

32. Dutt, ‘Dutt's Way to Blaze a Trail’.

33. Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World.

34. Dutt, ‘Dutt's Way to Blaze a Trail’.

35. Hinds and Stacey, ‘Imaging Feminism’, 156.