ABSTRACT
After four decades of state monopoly over television Indian viewers got
their first taste of private television in the early 1990s. By 1998, the first of India’s private 24-hour news channels was on the airwaves and by 2007
more than 300 satellite channels were broadcasting into Indian homes. Of
these, 106 broadcast news in 14 languages and as many as 54 of these were
24-hour news channels in 11 languages.1 These are conservative figures that
do not include many foreign and local cable networks that also broadcast
news.2 Even so, the numbers are a stark illustration of how the Indian state
lost control over television broadcasting despite its best efforts to the con-
trary. No other country in the world has such a concentration of private news channels as India. The creation of a television public has significant
implications for democracy and this essay focuses on what 24-hour news
means for India. It argues that the emergence of television news networks
has greatly enhanced and strengthened deliberative Indian democracy.
Commercial mass media stands at the junction of politics and the economy,
enabling the entry of citizens onto the stage of politics, while simultaneously
seeking to appropriate that energy for its own commercial benefit (Rajago-
pal, 1999: 133). This is a claim that needs to be differentiated from the usual journalistic self-image of the fourth estate acting as vigilant defenders of
democratic ideals. That notion should not be romanticised too much
because news production itself is a cultural process that cannot be separated
from its social environment. News producers always function under certain
institutional constraints that are endemic to the news-gathering process.
Leftist and liberal scholars of the media differ in their emphasis but all
agree that news production is always circumscribed by institutional filters.3
News is ‘more a pawn of shared suppositions than the purveyor of selfconscious messages’ (Schudson, 1995: 15). Yet, the media are important,
and while it is difficult to draw direct causal linkages, there is no doubt that
they initiate and create a new sphere of political action.
