Former NDTV and Headlines Today reporter Sandeep Bhushan, now an academic at the Jamia Millia Islamia, in the Economic & Political Weekly:
“The news studio has become the site for “manufacturing” news and consent on behalf of the beleaguered state. This is largely the product of an unprecedented financial crisis which has threatened media’s advertisement-based revenue model, forcing it to cut costs and increase dependence on the state, the financial market, and other cash-rich promoters who are jostling to move into, arguably, India’s most powerful medium.
“Taken together, these have ended up making the owners/promoters, rather than editors, the prime drivers of television news content….
“Post the economic meltdown, the most grievous blow has been suffered by two key institutions that are lynchpins of news systems anywhere in the world, the editor and the reporter. Increasingly, the locus of power in news operations has shifted to the studios – the promoters and their hand-picked editors. This has resulted in a near complete centralisation of news-gathering operations….
“Studios have increasingly become a metaphor for “state”. A studio is the site where “consent” is manufactured on behalf of the existing power relations. Herman and Chomsky term this the “propaganda model”, though their context is different. The model has inbuilt filters that ensure marginalisation of “dissent” and allows the “government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public”. They enumerate five filters, the most relevant for us include wealth and profit orientation of the dominant media, advertising revenues as their incomes, and reliance on government, corporate sector and sundry “experts” for information.”
Read the full article: Manufacturing news
Also read: How promoters killed the TV news reporter
IJR 