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  • After four decades of state monopoly over television Indian viewers gottheir 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 2007more than 300 satellite channels were broadcasting into Indian homes. Ofthese, 106 broadcast news in 14 languages and as many as 54 of these were24-hour news channels in 11 languages.1 These are conservative figures thatdo not include many foreign and local cable networks that also broadcastnews.2 Even so, the numbers are a stark illustration of how the Indian statelost 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 significantimplications for democracy and this essay focuses on what 24-hour newsmeans for India. It argues that the emergence of television news networkshas 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 simultaneouslyseeking 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 ofdemocratic ideals. That notion should not be romanticised too muchbecause news production itself is a cultural process that cannot be separatedfrom its social environment. News producers always function under certaininstitutional constraints that are endemic to the news-gathering process.Leftist and liberal scholars of the media differ in their emphasis but allagree that news production is always circumscribed by institutional filters.3News 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 thatthey initiate and create a new sphere of political action.

  • The changing relationship between cricket and satellite television in thecontext of the Indian sub-continent has been a subject of considerablescholarly inquiry. That one nourishes the other is well known. However,what is relatively little known is the degree to which this interdependence hasgrown in recent times. So much so that cricket tournaments, or ratherdesignated TV tournaments, are being planned with alacrity by the Board ofControl for Cricket in India (BCCI). Television rights for these overseastournaments/matches spread over the next 4 years had initially generated $219.5 million for the BCCI.1 On the other hand, satellite channels too havestarted planning cricket programming around these tournaments, program-ming expected to generate millions in advertising revenue.2 While theorganization of such big-money events well encapsulates the symbiotic rela-tionship between cricket and satellite television within a burgeoning Indianeconomy, other local/regional dimensions of this relationship are often noless fascinating. Tele-visual hype generated on the occasion of a regionalcricket body election in July 2006 in West Bengal, especially by the multiple 24-hour Bengali news channels, drew attention to the local variant of thestory involving big-money television and even bigger-money sport. Thischapter, on the basis of two distinct case studies – the implications of the tri-nation 1-day series played in Malaysia in September 2006 involving Aus-tralia, West Indies and India, and Television coverage of the Cricket Asso-ciation of Bengal Elections in July 2006 – will comment on the complex andever-changing relationship between cricket and television in India. At thesame time it will attempt to question the rationale behind this growing interdependence and probe what this means for the Indian nation at large.

  • Growing up in England, it never really occurred to me to wonder why Inever saw cricket from India on television. Indian cricket was always insight; we had Bishen Singh Bedi in his mysterious headgear wheeling in forNorthamptonshire, Srinivas Venkatraghavan wrapped in sweaters at Derby,Madan Lal playing in front of handfuls of old men in the Yorkshire leagues.Yet the Packer ‘circus’ largely left India alone, and in England the touringIndian side became an unglamorous pause between the glorious tours bythe West Indies and Australia. Little was I to guess that once I started working in television, India would become central to the world cricketeconomy and crucial to the technological improvements in the coverage ofthe game.

  • A unique confluence of technological, political and economic factors in the 1990s drove the transformative process that led to the battering down of the government’s monopoly over television. By the end of the 1990s, the growing strength of Indian capitalism after the liberalization of the Indian economy and the forces of what Thomas Friedman has called ‘Globalisation 3.0’ allowed Indian entrepreneurs to level the playing field. The Indian state, having embarked on economic liberalization, was forced to adapt to satellite television as an agent of global capitalism it certainly did not give up control over television easily or voluntarily. Operating at the junction of public culture, capitalism and globalization, satellite news networks have had profound implications for the state, politics, democracy and identity formation. Despite all their shortcomings and sensationalism, the emergence of satellite television news networks has enhanced and strengthened deliberative Indian democracy.

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