ABSTRACT
Across a broad sweep of countries embracing the 1990s’ economic liberalization policies in the global south, a significant transformation of the media industries accompanied the changes in the economic-political spheres. State-controlled media gave way for intensely competitive private news fields. Commercial television news expanded with an array of regional players, just when the cable networks and satellite dishes brought home myriad images from around the world. Newspapers experienced an emphatic shift in these years. Politically partisan, yet professionally evolved print news organizations began to unabashedly talk the ‘market language,’ shunning the inhibitions of public service journalism guilty of flirting with the market.
India presents an important case to lay bare the cultures of private news aggressively introducing commercial models in the newsrooms, while simultaneously articulating economic reforms in the newly liberalizing nations of the South. But the Indian case does more than that: it reveals how reforms-friendly news media imagined a certain ‘new reader’ of the new millennium as aspirational subjects of the globalizing economy. This deeply gendered discourse was cast in the language of liberty – of sexual freedom and celebration of youth cultures. How did the ‘liberal discourse’ around Women's rights to fashion and sexual freedom become entangled with economic reforms? What newsroom cultures were underway that fashioned this entanglement and what culture wars did it provoke beyond the newsroom? I delve into the transition of the Times of India – the largest circulated English daily in India, which also owns regional language newspapers with large circulations in various subnational states. I hone in on “Page 3 journalism,” a new form of celebrity and lifestyle journalism promoted by the newspaper, to unpack the nexus between economic liberalization, urban modernity, and gender. This analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork at prominent newspapers in Bangalore, the southern Indian city that became the poster child of economic reforms in India.
