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 do...
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...
