Plus, an announcement.
Rohan Venkataramakrishnan
Nov 1
The Big Story: Pressing charges
This is the final edition of the Political Fix.
Don’t worry, you will still be able to get your weekly dose of analysis on Indian politics and policy and more from next week. We’re just making some changes, which we’ve announced at the bottom of this newsletter.
For today’s edition, we decided to turn the lens inward on the media industry, given that understanding Indian politics also requires understanding Indian journalism. The Indian media world has undergone tremendous changes over the last decade, and many of the trends that have taken root directly impact the way the country’s politics, and indeed, democracy functions:
The right-wing lurch continues
Starting in 2013, a big churn began in Indian newsrooms, as proprietors replaced top editorial leadership with names more acceptable to the Bharatiya Janata Party. Faced with the first majority government in four decades, and one that cares deeply about headline management, the news media by and large fell in line.
The most telling of moves came when a news channel was founded by a Member of Parliament who is now a BJP minister, and whose head, Arnab Goswami, does not even make a pretence of being anything but an attack dog for the government. And the coverage has been so partisan that, across the media industry particularly in North India, the tone of reporting on Muslims is now drawing justified comparisons to the infamous hate speech propagated by Radio Rwanda.
But that doesn’t mean we are getting insight
The paradox here is that, despite a widespread lurch to the right across the mainstream media, actual insight into the workings of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or even the broader Hindutva ecosystem, is limited. At the political level, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah prefer to keep their cards close and spring surprises, which is why the BJP was able to replace practically the entire government in Gujarat earlier this year, with no hint in the national press that this was coming.
That is not to say there aren’t journalists in the mainstream who have insight into politics. Some are able to point to the complex machinations at play or the underlying trends. But because Indian political journalism almost entirely depends on access, they have little choice but to toe the official line if they want to get interviews – or more importantly be in a position for their organisations to bring a big political name to conclaves and summits, which are major money-makers for media companies. This isn’t limited to Delhi. The trends repeat themselves in smaller fashion in state capitals across the country.
Exceptions exist – but they face danger
Those who are willing to question the consensus are at risk of severe retribution from the authorities. For example, an editor at a Gujarati news portal who hinted at the rumblings within the state government in 2020 was charged with sedition and had to spend two weeks in jail. Dainik Bhaskar, the Hindi newspaper group that surprisingly set out to hold the government accountable during India’s devastating Covid-19 second wave, faced income tax raids soon after.
And we don’t need to recount the FIRs, arrests, raids, mob aggression and more targeted at news organisations and journalists for simply reporting facts. After all, in the middle of the first wave, ministers took time aside to sit in meetings in which they discussed how to ‘neutralise’ independent media…
The reader revenue era is here
Indian readers never really paid for news in print. Thanks in part to the aggressive and often ethically questionable practices of the industry leading Times Group, Indian print journalism over time came to rely almost entirely on advertising for revenue. The actual price of a newspaper barely covered the cost of the ink and distribution, never mind the journalism printed on it. Such a tremendous reliance on advertising, much of it from governments, meant that news organisations were also susceptible to arm-twisting.
As Indian news consumers moved online, organisations were reluctant to ask them to pay – knowing the audience was not accustomed to it, and could easily jump ship. But over the past few years, paywalls have begun popping up across mainstream news websites and subscription-only products have started to build audiences. That doesn’t mean the model has been cracked or the switch to reader revenue has taken root. But it does raise the question: What might it mean for an industry to move away from the corporate and government advertising that has sustained revenues for so long?
More on this below.
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