The fact and fiction of news demand

Of all the myths about Indian media, probably the most pervasive is the one that concerns a supposed golden era of Indian journalism. You can read or hear the learned citizenry (journalists included) across political beliefs reminiscing about a time when the coverage and presentation of news was honest and objective; and how it's all been irretrievably lost! According to this narrative, the Indian media is now besieged by a dangerous mix of shadowy capitalists and politicians leading to paid news, mediatisation of politics, and generally a gaudy sensationalism that passes every day in print and TV channels as news.

To be sure, the fears are genuine: with a growing concentration of ownership in the country's already oligopolistic media markets, information risks being treated as if it is a private good, available only to the high and mighty. What must not be forgotten, though, is that the Indian media owes its growth to an advertisement-driven capitalist model: both Ramakrishna Dalmia, who acquired the Times of India in 1945 from its European owners, and Ramnath Goenka, who started the Indian Express in the 1930s, were primarily Marwari entrepreneurs who detected a growing hunger for information among people who were potential consumers as well as newspaper readers. Similarly, as Robin Jeffrey's seminal book India's Newspaper Revolution (2000) showed, towards the end of the Emergency, political awareness and a quest for information among the ordinary citizen, coupled with improved technology and a search for new consumers by advertisers, helped Indian-language newspapers, almost all of a sudden, take off.