For, that day, influential \u2013 and, for many, controversial \u2013 Indian businessman Gautam Adani, then the world\u2019s third richest man, took nearly full control of the much-respected and revered NDTV after his Adani Enterprises acquired 27.26% additional shares, taking his total holdings to 64.71%.
A few months before delivering this coup de grace, Adani\u2019s media company, AMG Media Networks, had hired a new CEO and a retinue of government-friendly journalists.
His tail up, Adani\u2019s next target was The Quint which, like NDTV, wore its anti-establishment badge with pride. On March 27, 2023, AMG Media Networks acquired 49% stake in Quintillion Business Media Pvt Ltd, The Quint\u2019s holding company. This happened five years after central tax authorities raided The Quint\u2019s offices in Noida, Uttar Pradesh.
Over the last 15 years or so, large and powerful corporate houses such as Mukesh Ambani\u2019s Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) and Adani Enterprises have exercised diverse strategies to acquire several well-established media companies.
What has arguably worked to favour the Ambanis and the Adanis is their closeness to Narendra Modi\u2019s government. While one 2019 report said that Reliance \u201ccontrolled\u201d 72 television channels across India, the company does not shy away from claiming that it has an \u201comni-channel presence\u201d. This brings to sharp relief the issue of diversity, or the lack of it, in Indian media.
The government has made no secret of its intent to control the media narrative. India leads the world in government-ordered takedowns of social media posts across platforms like YouTube, micro-blogging platform X (formerly Twitter) etc.
Recently, X blocked dozens of accounts backing farmers protesting government policy on agricultural prices, while journalists and media outlets perceived as being \u201cunfriendly\u201d to the Modi government have faced arrests, tax raids and other coercive action by government agencies.
On paper, India is one of the world\u2019s largest and most diverse media markets. There are more than 140,000 registered newspapers and periodicals, of which more than 22,000 are daily newspapers. These are published in an astonishing 189 languages and dialects, covering not only all the multiplicity of tongues, but many foreign languages as well.
There are more than 900 television channels, of which more than 350 are news channels, with a majority of them broadcasting 24\/7. India also has more than 850 FM radio channels, of which only the state-owned All India Radio is officially allowed to broadcast news.
Rapid expansion in broadband internet access has also led to an explosion of digital news media outlets.
While there are no estimates of the number of digital news media sites in India, many of the legacy print publications and TV news channels also have a digital presence, while the number of digital only news sites continues to soar with rising internet penetration. At last count, India had more than 820 million active internet users.
There is, however, another yardstick which is of more fundamental importance to plurality of news and opinion \u2013 media ownership.
Organised mass media is no longer the purvey of journalist-entrepreneurs. It is a large scale business requiring heavy capital investment and lots of working capital.
This has increasingly led to a growing corporatisation of media \u2013 in India and elsewhere \u2013 bringing large business conglomerates into play as media owners.
One estimate pegs the Indian media and entertainment sector\u2019s revenues to hit about Rs 2.6 trillion ($31.15 billion) this year. Another estimate states that by 2026, India will be the world\u2019s fifth largest media market by value, in both print and broadcast television. Such mammoth numbers make media a legitimate focus of interest for businesses.
However, a consequence of this growing corporatisation has been the dominance of business interests in the decision-making processes in media houses, which has hampered editorial independence.Heavy reliance on advertising revenues is the other threat to genuine media independence.
In 2022, while Indian print media generated Rs 165.95 billion ($1.9 billion) in advertising revenues, circulation revenues were only a fraction of this at an estimated Rs 76.30 billion ($0.9 billion). This means that advertising \u2013 and as a corollary, the need to keep advertisers happy \u2013 is of prime importance, further weakening the freedom of editors and journalists. This is true for broadcast television, which has seen advertising revenues rise while subscription revenues have fallen.
No less significant is the rise of publicly listed media enterprises, with a large number of public shareholders. With managements under pressure to deliver dividends to shareholders, the pursuit of profit is the paramount objective. Increasingly blurred lines across channels \u2013 both newspapers and TV channels also run websites, which compete with similar digital-only websites \u2013 has meant that news is no longer news \u2013 it is content.
And what content is produced and presented is driven more by algorithms than the informed decisions of editors. This has changed the reader\/viewer from a citizen and a key stakeholder in the democratic process to a consumer and a target for advertisers.
But perhaps the most singular threat to a diversity of voices in the media is posed by the growing concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few.
R. Srinivasan
Professor, O P Jindal Global University, Haryana<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For, that day, influential \u2013 and, for many, controversial \u2013 Indian businessman Gautam Adani, then the world\u2019s third richest man, took nearly full control of the much-respected and revered NDTV after his Adani Enterprises acquired 27.26% additional shares, taking his total holdings to 64.71%.A few months before delivering this coup de grace, Adani\u2019s media company, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-422248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=422248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422248\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=422248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=422248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=422248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}