Making News in India by Somnath Batabyal

Author:Somnath Batabyal [Batabyal, Somnath]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies, Popular Culture, General
ISBN: 9781317809715
Google: 5FETAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-03-14T04:58:04+00:00

CONCLUSION: EXCLUSIVE INDIA

Turn on the television news and, more often than not, Bollywood reigns supreme: C-grade actors fall out with each other and the story is snapped up and shown in an exclusive programme, the actors’ abuses quoted and re-quoted on primetime television. If it is not Bollywood, then cricketers take centre-stage with their feats on the playing field, latest advertisement deals or escapades with film celebrities. Stories on petty crime are blown out of all proportion and make screaming headlines.

Recently, in a conversation in Delhi, one of the more astute media commentators I know spoke to me about the interconnectedness of these ‘crime, cinema, cricket’ discourses on news channels. The entry of Bollywood into cricket is now firmly established with the Indian Premiere League (IPL) tournament, where politicians, criminality, charges of bribery and corruption make their sensational appearances without fail. Together, a concoction of glamour and politics, sports and criminality, becomes our national obsession, naturalised in our daily lives as news.

According to the national survey systems that rule the Indian news world, this is the kind of content that audiences want. Or rather, these are the stories that advertisers want in between their advertisements, because they think it is what keeps the Indian middle class hooked.

It is not surprising that they want to woo this class. It is the demographic group that has sponsored India’s consumer revolution for over 20 years. There was a 47.5 per cent rise in consumption expenditure in the 1980s, which figure received a further boost following the opening up of the economy in the 1990s (Dubey 1992: 150). This confident new class, animated by the vision of setting India on a newly liberated path of progress and economic prominence on the world stage,

assumed for themselves the role of the makers of the nation in new ways. In the emerging middle class political vision, the nation is a community of citizens who are enfranchised by freedom of choice, consumption and material gratification and a lifestyle of pleasure. (Chakravorty and Gooptu 2000: 91)

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