Media Pluralism Redux: Towards New Frameworks of Comparative Media Studies “Beyond the West”

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Political Communication, 30:349–370, 2013Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1058-4609 print / 1091-7675 onlineDOI: 10.1080/10584609.2012.737429

Media Pluralism Redux: Towards New Frameworksof Comparative Media Studies “Beyond the West”

PAULA CHAKRAVARTTY and SRIRUPA ROY

A new form of “entertaining news,” accessed by most through television, has becomea privileged domain of politics for the first time in countries “beyond the West” in theMiddle East, Africa, and Asia. What are the political consequences of this develop-ment: What is the relationship between media and politics in these regions? We answerthese questions through a case study of India, the world’s largest democracy, where twodecades of media expansion and liberalization have yielded the largest number of com-mercial television news outlets in the world. We show why prevailing theories of mediaprivatization and commercialization cannot account for the distinctive architecture ofmedia systems in places like India. In this article, we first provide an overview of the his-torical and contemporary dynamics of media liberalization in India and the challengesthat this poses to existing models and typologies of the media-politics relationship.We then present a new typology of media systems and a theoretical framework for study-ing the relationship between television news and democratic politics in India, and byextension in the global South. In the concluding section, we reflect on the broader com-parative insights of the essay and discuss directions for future research. We believe thatour alternative comparative framework captures more meaningfully the diversity andcomplexity of emerging media systems and their relationships to democratic practice inthese regions.

Keywords liberalization, India media, comparative media studies, informal politics,media and democracy, Global South

Across much of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East in the last decade of the 20th century,government-monopolized architectures of television were replaced by a dramatic expansionin the numbers of commercial television news outlets and the reality of television finallyliving up to its mass nomenclature in terms of reach and access. In the intervening years, anew form of “entertaining news” (Dahlgren, 2009) accessed by most through television hasbecome a privileged domain of politics for the first time in countries “beyond the West.”1

What are the political consequences of this development? What is the relationship betweenmedia and politics in these regions? We answer these questions through a case study ofIndia, the world’s largest democracy, where two decades of media expansion and liberal-ization have yielded the largest number of commercial television news outlets in the world.

Paula Chakravartty is Associate Professor at the Gallatin School and the Department ofMedia, Culture, and Communications, New York University. Srirupa Roy is Professor of State andDemocracy, Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen.

The authors wish to thank Dan Hallin, Vipul Mudgal, and Michael Schudson for their commentsand helpful feedback on this research.

Address correspondence to Paula Chakravartty via e-mail: [email protected]

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350 Paula Chakravartty and Srirupa Roy

At first glance, the relationship between television news and democratic politicsappears to be an anachronistic and even flawed line of inquiry: Why study “old media”and its relation to democratic politics at a time of Twitter revolutions? However contraryto popular perception, television is in fact the most significant “new media” of the lasttwo decades.2 While expansion of access to the Internet continues to be impressive andtransformative in its own right, most of the world’s population relies almost exclusively onbroadcast media, especially television, for both entertainment and information. Moreover,television news media have played a key role in the profound social and political trans-formations that have recently swept the countries of the Middle East. The activation ofsocial media networks through sites such as Twitter and Facebook undoubtedly enabledlarge-scale national mobilization. But the transnational character of public protest—thephenomenon of an “Arab wave” of protest that is arguably one of the most distinctiveaspects of the current conjuncture—can be directly linked to the centrality of Al Jazeeraalong with other television networks (Hirshkind, 2011).3 In sum, the question of televi-sion news and democracy remains as important and timely today as it was 30 years ago,when the hegemony of network news in the United States followed by the emergence ofsatellite news television (the “CNN effect”) attracted considerable scholarly attention to thetopic.

Most existing studies of the news media–democracy relationship examine the expe-riences of post-industrial democracies in North America and Europe. The focus of themajority of these studies has been on content analyses and surveys, tracking how television,print, and now online media influence electoral politics through shaping public opinionand voter attitudes and behavior (Bennett & Iyengar, 2008; Blumler & Gurevitch, 1995;Couldry, Livingston, & Markham, 2010; Curran, Iyengar, Lund, & Salovara-Moring, 2009;Van Kempen, 2007). A much smaller body of scholarship departs from this approach andexamines instead the institutional impact of various news media organizations on the orga-nized process of democratic politics (Schudson, 2002). Here the focus is on how newsmedia organizations and actors interact with the different components of the democraticpolitical system, such as elected representatives, bureaucracies, courts, political parties,and civil society organizations (Bennett & Entman, 2001; Cook, 1998; Gans, 1979; Hallin& Mancini, 2004; Schudson, 2003, 2008; Tuchman, 1978).

However, and as the authors of such studies themselves admit, the theoreticalinsights are often of limited utility when it comes to explaining the political influenceof news beyond what some might identify as the “exceptionalism” (McCargo, 2011)or “provincialism” (Chakravartty & Zhao, 2008) of Eurocentric models of comparison.Addressing this gap, recent scholarly attention has focused on the need to encourage“greater comparative work within regions of the global South” (Curran & Park, 2000;Hackett & Zhao, 2005; Hallin & Mancini, 2012; Sen & Lee, 2008; Wasserman, 2011).In different ways, these case studies of media transformation in societies “beyond the West”where democracy might take markedly different forms provide more than additional empir-ical context (or content) for prevailing theories about the media (Alhassan, 2007; Hughes,2006; McCargo, 2003; Nyamnjoh, 2005; Waisbord, 2000; Wasserman, 2011; Zhao, 2012).Instead, they focus attention on the normative presuppositions of these theories, and chal-lenge the status of the Euro-American example as the model or benchmark against whichall other “deviations” or “exceptions” are measured. While the origins of modernity wereEuropean, its subsequent expansion in non-European societies cannot be extrapolated fromtrends based on the European (or American) experiences (Chakrabarty, 2000).

We add to this discussion by drawing from our own research on the changing role of theIndian state in relation to media, information, and cultural industries in the last two decades

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Media Pluralism Redux 351

(Chakravartty, 2004, 2007, 2012; Roy, 2007, 2011). Our essay takes up this challenge ofexplaining the television news–democracy relationship in the differently democratic con-texts in the global South, where in fact the majority of the world’s population resides. In thisarticle, we are primarily interested in the emerging Indian media system as it relates to therelatively recent dominance of television news channels, recognizing that the expansion ofthe commercial print news media is also an allied but distinct phenomenon (Jeffrey, 2000;Udupa, 2011).4

We argue that the relationship between television news and democratic politics in Indiacannot be captured by prevailing models based on the concept of “political parallelism”whereby the political salience of media systems is about the extent to which they replicateor parallel existing political cleavages, primarily understood through the partisan com-petition between political parties (Blumler & Gurevitch, 1995; Hallin & Mancini, 2004;Patterson & Donsbach, 1996). Specifically, political parallelism refers to the proximitybetween press and political party systems in terms of ideological persuasion, organizationalaffiliation, and the loyalties of audiences (Seymore-Ure, 1974).

In developing their models of how media systems relate to and interact with politicalsystems, discussions of political parallelism make three assumptions about the nature ofdemocratic politics. The first is the formal constitution of politics, or the fact that legiti-mate political contestation and participation primarily takes institutionalized and organizedforms, with political parties and organized civil society and corporatist formations (tradeunions, business associations) dominating and even constituting the arena of democraticpolitics. The second is the national scale of politics, or the fact that each nation-state has asingle and integrated political system organized around a set of apex national institutions.The third is the settled or established character of political democracy, or, as the term “par-allelism” itself implies, the fact that media systems mostly mirror existing, given patternsof political cleavage and order.5 In the contemporary Indian case, however, none of theassumptions are tenable. As we will argue below, politics in the world’s largest democ-racy in fact manifests the opposite attributes and is constituted as informal, multiscalar, andflexible or evolving.

In such a differently democratic context, the media-politics relationship is not so muchabout paralleling formal, national, and given political cleavages through the forging of“party ties.” Instead, the Indian news media actively produce and consolidate new struc-tures and relations of power and privilege in national, regional, and local arenas, throughformal as well as informal means. In this sense, the media in India and elsewhere in theglobal South might be better described as agents and enablers rather than mirrors of pol-itics, defined as the conflict and contestation over the distribution of power resources in asociety (Lasswell, 1936).

The remainder of the essay elaborates on this argument. The first section explainswhy the media-politics relationship in India has taken this particular form whereby mediado not so much parallel as produce or constitute political contestation, and identifies twomain reasons having to do with the particular historical trajectory of Indian television newsexpansion and the unique scale and form of democratic political activities. The secondsection provides further nuance for this view of the media’s productive or constitutive rolein politics by examining its divergent manifestations in contemporary India. We show thatthere at least two different articulations of the media-politics relationship in the country andpropose a new typology of media systems on the basis of this intranational variation. In theconcluding section, we reflect on the broader comparative insights of the essay and discussdirections for future research.

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Liberalization Pathways and Democratic Difference in India

While there have been a range of studies comparing the relationship between politi-cal systems and media systems across national political cultures, Hallin and Mancini’s(2004) influential account of media systems across the Euro-American hemisphere offersthe most salient point of departure for our argument. They distinguish between three idealtypes: the liberal media system of Anglo America, the democratic corporatist media systemof northern Europe, and the polarized pluralist media system of Mediterranean or southernEurope. As a plethora of studies on the Euro-American context have shown, the sequence,pace, and scale of media growth and the transition from one to many, state-owned to com-mercial, media vary substantially across different national contexts as well as across formsof media. Research on media systems “beyond the West” in relation to this framework, how-ever, has consistently demonstrated a lack of commensurability of core concepts of mediaautonomy and political parallelism, posing challenges for modular comparisons in placeslike India (McCargo, 2003, 2011; Nyamnjoh, 2005; Waisbord, 2000; Zhao, 1998, 2012).6

Along these lines, we argue that the historical trajectories of Indian media expansion andthe distinctive character of Indian democratic politics have yielded a media system thatpresents a distinct variation from the Anglo-European model, and that its specific architec-ture shares some commonalities with media systems across countries in Africa, Asia, andLatin America where politics, economic contexts, and historical legacies are structured insimilar, though of course not identical, ways (see Table 1).

Table 1Euro-American versus Indian media and political systems

Euro-American Indian

Media ownershiptrends

• Consolidation andconvergence

• Initial signs of verticalintegration along withlinguistic and regionalfragmentation

• Dominance of transnationalcorporate capital

• Presence of variegated formsof capital (transnational anddomestic corporate andnon-corporate)

Spatial structure ofmedia system

• “Nested”: national mediasystem as apex orencompassing media system

• Polycentric: multiple(national and regional)media systems of equivalentweight

Characteristics ofpolitical systems

• Preponderance of formalorganizations

• Informal as well as formalpolitics

• Nationally integratedpolitical systems

• Subnationally variegatedpolitical systems

• Relatively consolidated,settled, or establishedpatterns of political cleavageand order

• Evolving, flexible, orcontingent patterns ofpolitical cleavage and order

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The Distinctive Legacies of “Patchwork Reform”

The dramatic privatization of India’s television news media and what this means in termsof the media’s “autonomy” from state versus market forces has to be seen in the largercontext of economic liberalization, which began in the early 1990s with little public debateor knowledge and a very “narrow support base” (Kohli, 2006, p. 1354). As political scien-tist Rob Jenkins (1999) describes it, the process has largely been of “reform by stealth,”with key decisions taken outside the frameworks of deliberative democracy by executivepolicy fiat. In India in the 1980s and 1990s, as in many third world countries, the policyconsensus for neoliberal reforms that emerged across World Bank consultants, ministriesof finance, and the private sector had virtually no public support outside of a very smallurban elite. This is significant given that some 70% of India’s citizens live and work inrural areas and that some 40%, by conservative estimates, live below the poverty line.7

In a deeply unequal democracy, free market expansion has thus proceeded in an ad hoc,arbitrary manner, with capitalists lobbying state officials for favorable policy decisions andindividualized concessions.

The process of media liberalization has unfolded in similar ad hoc terms, shaped bylobbying efforts by media owners and individualized concessions made by state officials.The discretionary authority of the state to grant specialized, one-off “deals” to individualmedia owners to establish and operate news channels has fueled the remarkable expansionof India’s news media in recent years, rather than a singular, uniform, and deliberate pol-icy decision to liberalize the media. India’s commercial media does not so much exhibit“autonomy” vis-à-vis the state and “heteronomy” vis-à-vis the market (Bensen & Neveu,2005) as it brings together and literally mediates between state and market forces, thusenabling and supporting the “state-market” alliance in contemporary India (Chakravartty,2012; Mehta, 2008; Roy, 2011).

The growth of India’s television news industry has been dubbed a “revolutionary”development on account of both the scale of growth and the short time period in which thisexpansion has taken place (Table 2). Up until the early 1990s there was only one news chan-nel in the country, the state-owned Doordarshan. Over the next two decades, a staggeringtotal of 268 news and current affairs channels were licensed by the Ministry of Informationand Broadcasting (see Table 1), with 122 of these active and operational as of March2011 (Kohli-Khandekar, 2011). India currently has more news channels than anywhereelse in the world and in fact has more news channels than all European Union countriescombined; “India is the only country in the world with over three dozen 24-hour televi-sion channels that broadcast news and current affairs programs” (Guha Thakurta, 2012,p. vii). Although there is also a transnational dimension worthy of inquiry (Sankaran &Pillai, 2011), we focus on the national, regional, and local arenas, where television is todayestimated to reach 134 million households or 500 million individuals (i.e., approximately60% of the country’s population) (Kohli-Khandekar, 2011). Correspondingly, televisionhas become a very lucrative national business. Generating annual revenues of 265.5 billionrupees (approximately $6 billion) in 2009, the television industry comprises almost half(46%) of the “Indian entertainment and media market,” which is the fourth largest in theworld (Pricewaterhouse Coopers, 2010).

Clearly, the untapped market potential of India’s lucrative cultural industries mobi-lized corporate interest, especially from the financial sector and vocal and influentialpro-reform policy advocates pushing for deregulation and economic liberalization (Kumar,2003; Pushupati, Sun, & McDowell, 2003). However, the shift was enabled by a seriesof small, incremental, and mostly unplanned shifts in policy frameworks. In practice, thereform of the television news sector has been a gradual or even an ad hoc process that is

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Table 2Growth of Indian television news channels

No. of newschannels

Total no. ofchannels

% of totalchannels

2000 1 1 1002001 39 44 892002 15 24 622003 12 24 502004 10 28 362005 10 15 672006 28 39 722007 39 74 532008 59 152 392009 33 79 422010 22 47 47Consolidated

(2000–2010)268 527 51

Note. Data were derived from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting,Government of India.

most accurately described as “strategic neglect” while de facto a process of re-regulationfavoring specific private interests (Das & Parthasarathi, 2011). This is evident in the factthat instead of crafting a singular policy marking a clear break from the state’s monopolyon broadcast news or dismantling existing regulatory frameworks dating back to the era ofBritish colonial rule, the Indian state in its fragmented form and across various bureaucraticbodies has responded piecemeal to both technological and financial transformations (GuhaThakurta, 2012; Mehta, 2008; Ninan, 2007; Rajagopal, 2001; Sonwalker, 2008).

Famously, even the initial emergence of private television channels happened in anunplanned way. During the Gulf war of 1991, several luxury hotels in the city of Bombaypurchased satellite dishes so that their guests could watch CNN’s live coverage of the war.After the televised war, hotel owners began a lucrative side-business based on these initialsatellites. In return for a share of the proceedings, relatively small entrepreneurs collo-quially known as cablewalas (cable men in Hindi) were allowed to run overland/coaxialcables from the hotel satellite dishes to neighboring apartment buildings and charge amonthly subscription fee from residents for the much-coveted access to international televi-sion programs.8 Soon, cablewalas were pooling resources to purchase their own satellites(“retired” models that were available at an affordable price), and the profitability of thisbusiness coupled with the popularity of CNN’s televised war formed the initial basis for thebusiness of privately distributed satellite television in India as a counterpart to the state’smonopoly through its terrestrial broadcast network, Doordarshan.

The Indian media system has evolved out of this incremental and improvisationalmedia reform process over the course of two decades. Making a similar point, PrasunSonwalker (2008) notes that the growing influence of market forces in shaping content anddistribution in the television sector is explained by a “regulatory vacuum” created (“whetherwillingly or unwillingly”) by the Indian government (p. 116). In this sense, the state hasgenerally reacted to competing societal interests as opposed to spelling out an explicit

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agenda for liberalization, and the commercial news media have generally acted as van-guards of media liberalization. In this context, we can identify distinctive structural featuresof the current television news industry in terms of ownership, distribution, and regulation.

The first is the non-consolidated structure of the commercial news media landscape.The Indian news industry is characterized by “fierce competition” as opposed to theconsolidation evident in other Indian cultural industries, most notably the increasinglyexport-oriented and corporatized film industry (Lorenzen & Taube, 2008). Multinationalmedia conglomerates like Disney, News Corp, and Viacom along with Indian corporategiants like Reliance, among others, are certainly powerful players in the Indian televisionnews market, and there are signs of vertical integration within this sector, as pointed out byVibodh Parthasarathi (2011) and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and Subi Chaturvedi (2012). 9

However, the sheer numbers of emerging private players along with the diversity in terms oflanguage and region indicate that the television news industry is unlikely to follow patternsof consolidation and convergence established in U.S. or European markets (Bagdikian,2004; Curran et al., 2009; McChesney, 2008).

Second, and related directly to the question of ownership, is the manifest presence ofextra-economic logics in the Indian television news industry, or those that exceed market-based criteria of efficiency and profit maximization. As in other industries like commercialfilm, owners and backers of news channels, while certainly driven by commercial interests,are also embedded in non-market social relations and networks such as those constitutedaround political power, caste and kinship networks, and regional identity. Families own andmaintain dominant control (by, for example, limiting membership on boards of directors) ofa range of prominent as well as fledgling news channels, and strong caste-based ties alongwith the important dimension of linguistic regional identity shape commercial decisionsacross many regions.

Third is the “mixed capitalist” constitution of the news media industry, or the factthat organized and traceable corporate capital comprises if not a minority, then certainly asmaller relative share of the overall investment portfolio. Indian television news is shapedby and responds to what some in the news industry refer to as “dubious capital,” or the diffi-cult to trace presence of new investors from parallel booming industries such as real estatepromoters and newly minted tycoons in the service economy seeking political influence.It becomes crucial then, to understand the linkages between the formal and informal econ-omy, the latter area likely accounting for a significant proportion of both employment andrevenue associated with this new, booming sector.10 This interplay of formal and informalcapital is discussed in further detail below.

Fourth, in India there is a preponderance of speculative forms of capital in thenews industry. Similarly, and in contrast to trends in ownership patterns in Europe andLatin America, foreign direct investments by media multinationals have played a lessimportant role in driving television news expansion in India. Instead, as Parthasarathi hasdocumented, considerable investment in the private television news industry in India camefrom financial services giants like JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, and Jardine Fleming, linkingthis specific subsector in broadcasting to the volatile swings of the booms and busts of thestock market.11 Throughout the 2000s, the complex corporate organizational structure thatevolved in the emerging television news industry remained highly “financialized,” drawinginvestment from global private equity firms like Warburg Pincus as well as from thefinancial arms of India’s three leading business houses: Reliance, Tata, and Birla. This hasseveral consequential effects, not the least of which is the economic salience of financialnews produced by television news organizations. As Duncan McCargo (2011) notes in ananalysis of media systems of several fast-growing Asia-Pacific economies like Thailand,

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“owning newspapers allows proprietors to promote shares in companies in which they havean interest” (p. 6). This appears to be the case in India as well. When “high stock prices areimportant not only for a news broadcaster to raise money but for the personal wealth of itspromoters and for their employees’ overall remunerations” (Parthasarathy, 2011, p. 35), itis not surprising that news organizations might be tempted to promote favored stock pricesor back investigative efforts against one company while overlooking the crimes of another,for instance.

In sum, then, the distinctive “patchwork” or improvisational trajectory of Indian mediaexpansion has enabled a variety of different actors to enter the field of capital accumu-lation and seek to establish themselves as “power elites.” Simply put, the media industryin India today is open to the claims and aspirations of “new capital,” a fact that is notof inconsiderable consequence in a country where a tiny percentage of urban upper-casteeconomic elites maintained a tight grip over the production of news both nationally andregionally in the postcolonial era. Instead today the ownership of private news channels,while clearly restricted to those with significant economic resources from booming sectorslike real estate, is open to a relatively wider set of new elites from classes and castes thatare often new players in the arena of news media. The Indian news media industry is thusa site where in fact new patterns of dominance and power are being forged, and new kindsof entrepreneurial subjects are amassing economic, social, and political power.

The Distinctive Contexts of Democratic Politics

Thus far we have described how the distinctive trajectory of India’s media reform processhas yielded a landscape in which new elites have been able to stake their claims, suggestingthat media produces new (rather than parallels) existing power relations and structures. Letus now turn to another set of theoretical disjunctures posed by the prevailing media-politicsrelationship in India, which has to do with the distinctive character of political activity inthe country, or the prevalence of “political dualism” and “political regionalism.”

The term “political dualism” refers to the fact that the practice and pursuit of demo-cratic politics takes place within as well as outside the formal political system. In India,agents who are located outside the formal political arena and are vested with social andeconomic but not formal legal authority frequently play a leading role in determining theallocation of public resources or “who gets what, when, and how,” the classic definitionof politics (Lasswell, 1936). And the central democratic goal of power-sharing (Keane,2009) is often addressed through a range of informal, personalistic, and quasi-legal (or evenoutright illegal) mechanisms and practices (Chatterjee, 2006), and via the activation of kin-ship, ethnicity, and other “primordial” networks structuring India’s “patronage democracy”(Chandra, 2006). This immediately complicates the concept of “political parallelism” basedon the proximity of the press and formal political parties (Seymore-Ure, 1974). While thisversion of formal proximity certainly exists in a few Indian states with long-established par-tisan media systems that we will discuss in greater detail below, the vast majority of statesshow clear patterns of ties between media organizations and non-formal networks of polit-ical, social, and economic power. Moreover, in India as in many parts of Asia, Africa, andthe Middle East, these increasingly dominant political formations are difficult to capture interms of traditional “left-right” vectors of power.

Significantly, the prevalence of political dualism does not appear to be a function ofdemocratic durability or longevity. Contrary to the expectations of modernization theory,informal politics in India has neither “withered away” with the increasing rationalizationof a once incompletely modern society, nor has it impinged upon the stability of the

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democratic political system (Chatterjee, 1993; Harrison, 1960; Huntington, 1968). Instead,the course of post-independence Indian history suggests a compatible, and perhaps evenan enabling relationship, between informal and formal structures, norms, and practices ofpolitics. Moreover, the trend toward political informalization appears to have become evenmore pronounced in the present context of economic liberalization, where policy formationand political decision making increasingly takes place through non-accountable, opaquesets of “backroom” deals rather than through the institutional structures of democracy.In such a situation, examining the news media–democracy relationship requires adoptinga capacious and flexible definition of the political system and going beyond the domainof the formal and the procedural to grasp the workings of “actually existing” power andpolitics.12 Both the de jure and the de facto dimensions of political authority require ouranalytical attention.13

Like political dualism, the phenomenon of contemporary Indian political regionalismalso fits uneasily within existing paradigms of the media-politics relationship. The term“political regionalism” refers to the fact that the subnational unit of the state (also termedthe region in India) has emerged as a meaningful site of politics in the Indian federation. Forordinary citizens, issues that are of direct and pressing significance, including contestationover the privatization of land and accessing public works programs for employment, edu-cation, or social security, are increasingly being decided at the regional rather than nationallevel as a result of an ongoing process of political segmentation that has been underway forthe last 30 years (Jenkins, 2004; Sinha, 2005). We describe this as a process of segmentationrather than devolution since the central government continues to command considerableauthority over key policy and legislative domains. The increase in regional decision-makingagency does not occur at the expense of central governmental power as a theory of devolu-tion would hold, but is instead a product of the proliferation (and consequent segmentation)of policy domains in the era of economic liberalization.14

Together, these contextual attributes of political dualism and regionalism have shapedthe trajectory of media system expansion in India. Thus, in place of a singular nationalmedia system, regionalism has led to the emergence of multiple televisual news mediasystems in the country, each embedded within a distinctive linguistic15 and regional uni-verse (Figure 1). Even the news television systems that are commonly described as nationalbecause of their pan-Indian reach and the fact that they broadcast in Hindi or English—thetwo national languages of India—are in fact spatially circumscribed, with unique featuresthat cannot be found in news television broadcasting in other Indian languages or in otherparts of the country. English language news television is embedded in the particular politi-cal, socioeconomic, and cultural context of New Delhi, the capital city, and to some extentin Mumbai, the financial center of the country (Mehta, 2008; Roy, 2011). Hindi languagenews is shaped by the contextual specificities of the “Hindi heartland,” a territorial expansethat includes northern and western India (see Figure 2).

In such a context, the relationship between media and politics exhibits significant intra-national divergences. The differing architectures of political dualism that prevail in differentparts of the country (the relative balance of formal and informal mechanisms of politicalaccess and control) mean that the interaction between television news systems and politicalsystems is equally variegated. In order to assess the democratic salience of India’s television“news revolution,” we thus require an approach that can move beyond the “methodologicalnationalism” (Smith, 1983; Wimmer & Glick-Schiller, 2002) of political communicationsresearch, whereby each nation-state is deemed to have a single media system. The follow-ing section takes up this challenge of developing a comparative analysis of media systems(and of their political salience) within rather than across a single nation-state. Although

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Figure 1. News channels by language (2010). Several channels in the Hindi category broadcast inHindi dialects, and hence can also be classified under regional languages. Data were derived from theMinistry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India.

the present example is confined to India, where historical and contextual specificities haveled to the development of multiple media systems (and hence multiple forms of media-politics relations), intranational comparisons can productively be carried out in many othercountries as well. In fact, such a rescaling of comparative political research, from the inter-national to the intranational level, may well be a necessary epistemological maneuver in thecontemporary historical conjuncture of fragmented sovereignty and multi-scalar politics(Brenner, 2004; Hansen & Stepputat, 1998).

Towards a New Typology of Media Systems

In our intranational comparative framework, the unit of analysis is the subnational unit ofthe region or the state. Regionalization is also integral to our explanatory logic. The varyingcharacter of the regional political field—the fact that politics is structured and practiced indifferent ways in different Indian states—serves as a first-order explanation for the mainobject of analysis in our study: the character and dynamics of liberalized media systemsin India. By political field, we mean a “structured, unequal, and socially constructed envi-ronment within which organizations are embedded and to which organizations and activistscontinually respond” (Ray, 1999, p. 6). To adapt the conceptualization of Pierre Bourdieu,from whom the root concept of a “political field” has been borrowed, these include therelative balance of different social, economic, and political agents and institutions; the dis-tribution of various forms of symbolic and material capital; the pattern of regulatory andlegal frameworks; and cultural-historical norms and legacies (Bourdieu, 1991).

We are working with Nick Couldry’s extension of Bourdieu’s framework in assum-ing that the relationship between the media and all other fields is subject to close scrutinyprecisely because of its “definitional power across the whole of social space” (Couldry,2003, p. 669). We also draw from relational sociologists extending Bourdieu’s frameworkto better understand the logic of political action (Auyero, 2007; Baiocchi, Heller, & Silva,

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Figure 2. Map of India (from http://www.mapsofindia.com/maps/india/india-political-map.gif; colorfigure available online).

2011; Sommers, 1993). Of greatest salience for our project is that this work examines rela-tionships between social actors emphasizing that practices are enabled or constrained byconstantly changing “rules of the game” defined by the local terms of competition.

In our framework, two specific dimensions of the regional political field are singledout for shaping the architecture of regional media systems: political form and the characterof media ownership. By political form, we mean the prevailing mix of formal and informalpolitical mechanisms, including the character of state power (capacity and autonomy) inthe region and the regional pattern of direct and indirect relationships between formal andinformal political agents. Thus, to what extent does institutionalized partisan contestation—competitive party politics—shape regional political praxis? Are there other, non-party

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forms and mechanisms of accessing, allocating, and demanding political, economic, andsocial-cultural resources in the state, and what might these be? The second significantdimension is the particular regional character of media ownership. What is the relationbetween regional governments and media organizations? To what extent are regional mediaownership patterns transparent or opaque in terms of public knowledge? To put this sim-plistically: Do citizens know “who is behind” a particular news channel? The transparencyversus opacity of media ownership mirrors broader structures of regional capitalism, orthe extent to which declared “murky” or “gray” capital dominates economic investmentand profit-making activities in non-media sectors as well. This in turn is shaped by theparticular regional history of economic liberalization, as assessed through the followingquestions: To what extent is the state an “early” or “late,” “triumphant” or “reluctant” liber-alizer? What is the particular history of private enterprise in the state and the nature (as wellas perception) of the regional “investment climate” for domestic as well as foreign capital?Do political elites and economic elites have an antagonistic or collusive relationship?

Embedded within regional fields with variegated political forms and media owner-ship patterns (and liberalization trajectories), regional media systems exhibit at least twokey structural divergences that we identify in order to explain the proposed typology (seeFigure 3). First, instead of gauging proximity between political parties and media institu-tions to distinguish between partisanship and autonomy, we distinguish between traditionalpartisan political fields dominated by formal political parties in contrast to “polyvalent”(McCargo, 2011) political fields, where there exist strategically changing alliances betweenpolitical and media actors. Second, instead of contrasting public versus private news mediaarchitectures, we draw distinctions in terms of the “character of media ownership” in eachstate. Here we refer to our previous discussion of the specific regional experiences of eco-nomic liberalization, which have led to variations in terms of publicly listed or at leastpublicly known information about ownership of news media versus more opaque public

Figure 3. Regional media systems in India. We have only listed 12 states that we reference (some inpassing) directly in the article (color figure available online).

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understandings of media ownership patterns. Based on these distinctions, we propose thefollowing as the constituent ideal types of our regional-level comparison: (a) (direct andindirect) partisan media systems and (b) network media systems that by the nature of theirshifting alliances have reinforced opaque public awareness about media ownership.16 Letus elaborate by discussing a few specific examples along with a general overview of statesthat fall into these distinct categories.

Partisan Media Systems

The category of partisan media systems may be disaggregated into direct partisan and indi-rect partisan media systems. The former is found in states such as Tamil Nadu, Kerala, andWest Bengal. In each of these states, the postcolonial context of a strong partisan print newsculture extended almost organically into the institutional makeup of the cable news chan-nels. In these states, news media are directly owned by the dominant political parties and/orjournalists, editors, and owners have explicit, publicly recognized and acknowledged partyaffiliations to media institutions. The direct ownership of television news channels by polit-ical parties is at a hyper-developed level in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, where thetwo main political parties in the state have carved up between themselves all of the existingregional channel space and distribution space. In other words, in Tamil Nadu there is practi-cally no channel that is not part of a polarized partisan political field, and the news businessis explicitly and directly shaped by political party rivalry and competition. Partisan ties areoften prioritized over commercial gain; for instance, it was recently revealed in Tamil Naduthat during election campaign season, news channels do not feature advertisements by rivalparties on their networks (Ramesh, 2011), even though these would earn them revenue.

In Kerala and West Bengal, both states where Communist and Left parties have had astrong electoral and social presence for several decades, the situation is somewhat differ-ent. In Kerala as in Tamil Nadu, there are several channels that are directly linked to thedominant political parties: Both the Communist party of India (Marxist) and the Congressparty are known to control Kairali TV and Jai Hind TV, respectively. However, there areseveral news channels that are owned by other, non-party actors, with most targeting thelarge Malayali diasporic communities originating in the state who are currently based in theGulf regions and North America. Thus, the direct partisanship of the Kerala media systemis more tempered than that of Tamil Nadu.

In West Bengal, direct partisanship has generally taken the form of ideologicalaffiliation on the part of journalists and owners rather than direct, formal ownership.

For example, Star Ananda was one of the first 24-hour Bengali news networks to launchin 2005, as a co-production between Star TV (a subsidiary of News Corp) and the AnandaBazar Patrika newspaper, an organization with a long-standing “left-skeptic” stand towardsthe ideology of the ruling Communist party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), in the state (thatsubsequently morphed into more definitive opposition by the late 2000s). Although it isnot directly tied to either of the state’s two dominant political parties, the Star Anandanews channel has, since its inception, had a conflicted if not directly hostile relationshipto the CPI(M) and has increasingly cultivated greater ties with the main opposition partyin the state, the Trinamool Congress (TMC). Star Ananda’s main competitor is 24 Ghonta,launched in 2006, with strong support from the CPI(M) and direct ties in terms of editorialleadership shared between the channel and the party’s newspaper, Ganashakti.

Out of the eight Bengali news channels that are currently operational, these two dom-inant channels are estimated to account for some 70% to 80% of the overall audiencereach.17 Additionally, Kolkata TV (launched in 2006 with approximately 15% audience

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reach) and Channel 10 (launched in 2010 with under 5% audience reach) have direct ties tothe TMC, with the latter sharing editorial leadership with an explicitly anti-CPI(M) news-paper, Sambad Pratidin. In sum, then, the West Bengal media field is encompassed almostentirely by the structures of political partisanship as measured by explicit affiliations to theexisting, dominant regional political parties.18

Partisanship is also expressed and exercised in indirect ways. Indirect partisan mediasystems are found in states where dominant political parties exert control and influenceover news media by means outside of either direct ownership or the explicit ideologi-cal ties and partisan commitments of journalists and editors. These include states such asPunjab, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra. Forms of indirect partisanship include influenceexerted by parties in power through the key vehicles of resource allocation and patronagein the form of state-funded advertising revenues (important in both print and television),the informal control of cable and satellite distribution networks, and finally the increas-ingly common and controversial practice of “paid news,” or news produced by politicalparties or corporate actors for a fee for private news organizations that do not readily dis-tinguish this content from their regular news coverage. In all of these cases, partisanship orthe competition among established political parties shapes both the structure and the every-day practice of media production. However, in contrast to the direct partisan models, theshadow of partisanship in indirect partisan states is considerably more diffused.

This has implications for public knowledge and ultimately for formal democraticaccountability. For instance, media professionals from the state of Punjab describe theirmedia system in terms of how “everyone knows” how the Shiromani Akali Dal party in thestate controls news channels through its ownership of Fastway, the monopoly cable distri-bution company in the state.19 When a news channel broadcasts content that is perceivedto be negative towards the party, the channel is effectively shut down through ingenioustechnical means such as the sudden disruption of the electric supply to the head-end office,or even through near-surreal interventions such as dubbing cartoon character voices overthe regular news bulletin. As journalists from the state have noted, the fact that they areunable to provide any concrete proof of their allegations is precisely the modus operandiof political influence in their state. Thus, while it is well known that political parties censorand manipulate television news, this cannot be brought to official notice since the mech-anisms and pathways of censorship and manipulation are invariably “below the radar” ofofficial, institutionalized, or public detection. Thus, while in the direct partisan systems ofTamil Nadu, West Bengal, and Kerala, an ordinary citizen has the ability to know about thepolitical ideology of the news that she or he watches every evening, in the indirect partisansystem of Punjabi news television, she or he can at best only surmise and suspect.

This distinction has clear regulatory and policy implications. For instance, in WestBengal and Tamil Nadu, the recent state assembly elections (2011) saw the filing of multiplecomplaints to the Election Commission and other regulatory authorities about alleged parti-san biases in news media coverage. In contrast, indirect partisan media systems do not yieldthe minimal acceptable levels of documentary proof that such institutional redress demands.In Punjab, complaints about the partisan biases of Fastway have not met with institu-tional and regulatory recognition, as the complainant has no proof to counter Fastway’sexplanation about unfortunate technological glitches.

Network Media Systems

While there is clear evidence of partisan media systems across a handful of important statesin India, far more common are what we have termed network media systems, as found in

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states such as Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Bihar, Assam, Uttar Pradesh, and Orissa. Heremedia are owned and influenced not by discrete and legally recognized entities such aspolitical parties or listed corporations, but instead by differentially formalized networksof business, political, and social actors. Public knowledge about the ties between variousactors within these networks varies, however, across states. Most problematic for manyconcerned with media ethics within the industry is therefore not the proximity of corpo-rate or political interests to media organizations, but rather the “opaque” nature of theseties. To quote the reflexive overview provided by leading representatives of a nationalprofessional association of journalists and media owners, there is a “veil of secrecy” andambiguity that surrounds the ownership and operation of these channels, and a significantproportion of the capital invested is “dubious,” “gray” if not outright “black” (i.e., derivedfrom extra-legal sources).20

A recent study of the social-economic profile of commercial media owners in AndhraPradesh corroborates this thesis of “dubious capital,” observing that the media boom in thestate has been propelled primarily by real estate and private education entrepreneurs (Shaw,2009). Both of these sectors have significant proportions of undeclared or legally unac-counted for surplus, which is “soaked up” through establishing a media business. Whilethese surplus-investment goals can technically be met through investing in any sector of theeconomy, the specific choice of the news media sector attests to the additional compulsionof political influence-seeking that motivates real estate and private educational businesses,both of which are heavily dependent on regulatory exceptions and concessions from thestate. In sum, a news media business in the state of Andhra Pradesh represents the com-ing together—hence the term network—of different sets of political and economic agents,and its activities reflect the interweaving of these at once profit-seeking and power-seekinginterests.

This has three interesting implications for the media-politics relationship. First, thepolitical affiliations of media organizations and journalists in network media systems arehighly dynamic and contingent, characterized more by “shifting alliances” than by durableand stable allegiances, as Duncan McCargo (2011) notes in his related discussion of “poly-valent” media systems in other parts of Southeast Asia. For instance, while there is certainlyevidence of formal and informal ties between news organizations and political parties inAndhra Pradesh, these are pragmatic or instrumental, fluid, and highly dynamic. The news-paper Enadu, started by film-production media mogul Ramoji Rao, was launched as apopular tabloid-oriented newspaper in 1974, with a partisan mandate of challenging thedominance of the Congress party’s hold on state politics (Jeffrey, 2000). In 2003, Enadulaunched the television news channel ETV2, which has relatively strong ties with the TeleguDesam Party (TDP). However, this channel only commands around 10% of the marketshare. The leading news channel is TV9 (established in 2004 by entrepreneurs in soft-ware and real estate), which cannot be located within a classically partisan field as definedby liberal theories of political pluralism. Instead, TV9’s alliance-shifting behavior (Shaw,2009) exemplifies the definition of political “polyvalence” where media are “speaking withforked or multiple tongues, and given to acting in contradictory ways” (McCargo, 2011,p. 2). In fact, out of the nine 24-hour Telugu language news channels currently operationalin Andhra Pradesh, five have altered their partisanship since their establishment, attestingto the prevalence of pragmatic as opposed to ideologically driven allegiances in the regionalmedia.21

Second and related, in comparison with the partisan media systems, the more murkyand unpredictable media-politics relationships that characterize the network media systemmight be seen to pose greater ethical challenges for journalistic praxis. For instance, our

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initial review of reported cases of “paid news” suggests that this phenomenon involving anexchange of resources and favors between media and politicians occurs more frequently innetwork media systems. It appears that media allegiances and institutional arrangements aremore fluid and therefore more amenable to external inducements. Thus, while paid news isnot a phenomenon in West Bengal, it has been a politically charged issue in Andhra Pradeshsince 2004 and has even been challenged in courts by a local journalists’ union (Raman,2009).

Finally, in network media systems the political affiliation, ideology, and general politi-cal behavior of news media are not confined to a party-based spectrum of political behavioralone. Instead, other non-partisan and extra-partisan political goals are also found todrive the media, such as the quest for social mobility and caste power. Here the distinc-tive social-economic composition of media ownership appears to make a difference—forinstance, the fact that the demographic profile of television channel owners in AndhraPradesh, in contrast to their Bengali counterparts, almost uniformly comprises the “newentrepreneurial class that has emerged from the real estate and finance companies” (Shaw,2009). Aspirational politics would thus appear to have more of a role in the Andhra mediasystem, although a more definitive answer awaits comparative ethnographic and socio-logical research on the demographic composition of media owners and workers and theeveryday practices of news production.

Conclusion

Through a case study of India, the largest democracy and one of the fastest growing mediasystems in the world, this essay has investigated the political origins and implications oftelevised news for democracies of the global South. We have shown that the contextualspecificities of Indian media and politics—the unfolding of a “patchwork” process of medialiberalization within a “differently democratic” polity—have produced a distinctive archi-tecture of Indian media systems whose political salience cannot adequately be captured bymodels based on the concept of “political parallelism.” We have proposed an alternativeanalytical framework that draws upon but also departs from the typology of Hallin andMancini (2004) and that we believe captures more meaningfully the diversity and com-plexity of emerging media systems and their relationships to democratic practice in theseregions.22

In conclusion, let us review what we consider to be the four main theoretical interven-tions of this essay. First we have argued that evaluations of the media-politics relationshipmust take into account the variegated mix of formal and informal politics that prevailsin different parts of the globe (and in our case, in different parts of a single country).Significantly, the trend toward political informalization appears to have become even morepronounced in the era of economic reforms, where political decision making increasinglytakes place through “backroom” deals. A comprehensive understanding of media sys-tems and their interactions with political systems should therefore encompass the manynon-institutional, extra-legal, and even outright illegal ways in which the reproduction,transformation, and subversion of power takes place. The “stuff” of politics is rarely con-fined to procedural arenas and forms, and the application of liberal-pluralist models ofpolitical behavior will, we believe, obscure much more than it will reveal.

The recognition of informal modes and practices of politics in turn calls for a reconcep-tualization of the media’s political salience. In contrast to existing scholarship on politicalparallelism where political cleavages and the broader architecture of democratic politicsare considered to be more “stable” or “completed” than contingent or evolving, we have

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drawn attention to the ways in which Indian media expansion has generated new relationsand contestations of power. This is the second proposal of our essay, that understandings ofmedia-politics relations be expanded beyond reflexive models of the media as mirroring orparalleling politics to include as well “generative models” of the media as an active shaperof political power. For instance, India’s news revolution has facilitated the emergence ofnew economic elites, an outcome that has in turn restructured existing hierarchies of polit-ical and cultural power in the country. To take another example discussed in this essay,news media produce and sustain political networks between state and a variety of non-stateactors. Particularly in network media systems, news media organizations literally mediatebetween the various kinds of “gray capitalists” who own media organizations and formalpolitical actors such as state bureaucracies and political parties, and in the process generatenew practices and venues of “backchannel politics.”23

Third, we have advocated an intranational approach to the study of comparative mediasystems, where the unit of comparative analysis is the subnational region or state rather thanthe nation-state as a whole. In India today, instead of a singular and unified arena of nationalpolitics, there are diverse state-level regional political arenas populated by multiple publics.As Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar have pithily summarized, “states have emerged asthe effective arena of political choice” (2008). Our advocacy of such an approach is basedon the empirical recognition of the importance, and distinctiveness, of state-level politicsin contemporary India: It is an inductive choice based on the specificities of our case study.While recent research suggests that media systems also exhibit considerable intranationalvariance in countries such as Nigeria (Yusha’u, 2010), an intranational approach might notbe valid for other countries where some other analytical level (transnational or translocalmedia, or local versus national or transnational media) might capture better the contex-tual nuances of media and politics. The broader point that we want to make here is notfor the adoption of intranational comparative approaches per se but for a “context-drivenmethodology” or “place-based knowledge formation” where analytical choices—such asthe choice of the comparative unit for analysis—are driven not by modular templates orparadigm wars but instead by contextual considerations.

Fourth, we have proposed a new typology of media systems in India, of partisan andnetwork media systems. Network media systems are clearly unique formations that reflectthe preponderance of paralegal “gray zones” of power and politics. India’s partisan mediasystems are more commensurable. They share several commonalities with the partisanmedia systems of Mediterranean Europe (Hallin & Mancini, 2004), thus bearing out therecent observation of Hallin and Mancini (2012) that if there is one ideal type to whichmedia systems beyond the West conform, it is the partisan Mediterranean rather than theliberal pluralist type. However, despite these similarities, Indian partisan media systemsalso have several distinctive features, most notably the salience of informal mechanismsand modalities of party-media ties and the high degree of “openness” or flexibility andcontingency of the media’s partisan alliances.

Embedded in distinctive regional political fields, India’s media systems have differenteffects and implications for democratic politics. Our research thus far leads us to speculatethat partisan media systems are normatively preferable on certain counts, not the least ofwhich is the greater degree of public knowledge that they afford about who the mediaare in terms of political affiliation (and therefore bias): an ironic twist on the notion ofan “informed public.” However, by affording greater opportunities for the rise of a newentrepreneurial class and the making of a new “vernacular elite,” network media systemsappear to be contributing to the democratization of some existing power hierarchies. In sum,while a definitive assessment of the comparative political advantages of each media system

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awaits further research, both partisan and network media systems appear to be structuringthe media-democracy relationship in unpredicted and counterintuitive ways.

Notes

1. To indicate that our focus on a particular set of countries has geographical, historical, andalso social-political coordinates, throughout the essay we use the following terms interchangeably:“global South,” “non-Western/beyond the West,” “developing countries,” and “former third world.”

2. According to the most recent ITU data, 77.7% of households in the “developed world” haveaccess to the Internet at home, as opposed to 28% in the “developing world.” In India, despitethe fastest growing telecommunications industry in the world, Internet access remains extremelyskewed at 3% in terms of access at home and under 12% in terms of overall access. For more, seehttp://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/stat/default.aspx.

3. In a related contemporaneous example that underscores the relevance of mainstream, “oldmedia” today, Wikileaks relied on traditional news media platforms to get out its message into thepublic sphere, thereby suggesting the continued importance of news media as agents and sites ofpublic knowledge even in the digital age.

4. Research on the “vernacular news revolution” in India’s thriving print news media has drawnimportant distinctions between the relatively rarefied elite field of English-language journalism ver-sus the popular and often populist news cultures embodied in vernacular journalistic fields targetingless privileged readers (Batabyal, 2012; Ninan, 2007; Rajagopal, 2001; Rao, 2010; Sonwalkar, 2002,2008; Stahlberg, 2006; Thussu, 2007; Udupa, 2011; Udupa & Chakravartty, 2012). We build on thesestudies by moving the comparison from English versus vernacular news to comparisons between thedifferent vernacular or regional news media systems within India, where television channels have overthe past five years become significant institutional players in the everyday as well as extraordinarypolitics of Indian democracy.

5. While there is of course substantial scholarship on the historical constitution of these cleav-ages and the considerable societal contestation over the “rules of the game” that occurred in Europeandemocracies, the literature on political parallelism and the relations between media systems and polit-ical systems deals with a later time period, when these issues (and the consequent political order) hadbeen settled and democracy was consolidated rather than transitional or emergent. We are grateful toan anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

6. We are referencing both the 2004 volume and the new edited 2012 volume of Hallin andMancini.

7. World Bank estimates put the percentage of India’s 1.15 billion citizens living below thepoverty line at 42%, while a range of studies have found that the real figure falls somewherebetween 50% and 77% of the overall population. For more, see http://www.im4change.org/articles.php?articleId=40&pgno=2.

8. This practice emulated another contemporaneous entrepreneurial innovation in Bombay,namely the “video cable” business. This involved the cabling of individual apartments in an apartmentblock to a central video cassette player, on which a set number of Hindi films and foreign sitcomswould be played for a fixed monthly fee (see Mehta, 2008; Naregal, 2000).

9. Parthasarathi (2011) states that “of the six cable distributers who together provide access toabout a quarter of cable & satellite TV homes in India, the leading two are owned by media housesthat also own news channels—viz Zee’s WWIL and SUN TV’s Sumangali Cable Vision.”

10. Although there is disagreement over exact numbers, the International Labor Organizationestimates that 70% of India’s urban workforce is engaged in informal economic activity (in contrastto approximately 90% of the largely agricultural rural workforce). For more, see http://www.ilo.org/dyn/lfsurvey/lfsurvey.list?p_lang=en&p_country=IN.

11. Parthasarathi (2011) notes that the high relative valuation of news broadcasters’ stocks inrelation to actual revenue or profit can be explained by their strategy of “developing multiple revenuestreams”: “This led . . . most broadcasters, including news channels, to create multiple ‘properties’that could be separately valued [and] that derived synergies from shared costs and offered advertisers. . . wider opportunities for outreach” (pp. 33–34).

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12. McCargo (2011) makes a similar point about the importance of “informal power-holders andactors” (p. 8) as well as the larger arena of informal negotiation that accounts for the media-politicsrelationship across most of the Asia-Pacific nations in his study.

13. Our argument here is about paying analytical and empirical attention to both the formal andinformal dimensions and practices of democratic politics, and to the relationships between these twodomains that are observed in all democracies, rather than proposing a new definition of democracy innonprocedural terms. We are grateful to a perceptive reviewer for pointing out this distinction.

14. Competition between states to attract private investment, whether in terms of specific sectoralgrowth (IT zones in specific urban or peri-urban areas such as Bangalore) or the development ofspecial economic zones, has occurred simultaneously with attempts by the national government tomanage quite stark regional inequalities.

15. India is a linguistic federation where each of the constituent state units or regions encompassdistinct language communities. In other words, unlike the states of the American federation, eachIndian state is both a territorially and a linguistically discrete unit (Stepan, 2001).

16. These classifications reflect preponderance. In other words, most channels in Bengal aredirectly and openly affiliated to political parties, and West Bengal can consequently be classified as a“direct partisan” media system. This does not mean that “indirect partisan” or “gray” forms of mediaownership are entirely absent in West Bengal.

17. We are basing these estimates on available and mostly self-reported data from the channels aswell as from Television Audience Measurement (TAM) data that are publicly available. We recognizethat these data are unreliable, and the numbers are meant only to give a general sense of the overallpicture of news television reach in each state.

18. There are a few channels in the state that have no clear ties to either dominant political party:for example, Tara Newz (launched in 2005), targeting the neighboring Bangladeshi market; NewsTime (launched in 2010 by a real estate conglomerate), with no clear political affiliations; and NEBangla (established in 2004 by an entrepreneur politician from Assam), targeting Bengali audiencesliving outside West Bengal, specifically in the northeastern regions of the country. However, theyare by far the “minority players” in terms of their market share and also in terms of their social andpolitical influence and reach.

19. Presentation by Kanwal Sandhu, owner-editor of Day and Night Television (Punjab), April8, 2011.

20. Presentation at the Forum of Media Professionals, Delhi, April 2011.21. In addition to TV9, this includes NTV (launched in 2007 with under 10% of the audience),

which has networks with both the Congress and the right-wing BJP (Bharata Janata party); SakshiTV (launched in 2009 with less than 10% of audience reach), which has shifted its alliance fromthe Congress party; Zee 24 Ghantalu (launched in 2008 with approximately 7% of audience reach),which has shifted its networks between TDP and Congress; and I-News (launched in 2010 with lessthan 5% audience reach), also with networks across both Congress and TDP.

22. Our proposed typology of “media systems” uses the familiar terminology in existing compar-ative political communication scholarship. However, it should be clear from the preceding discussionthat we are not implying a systematic coherence or institutional boundedness to the various regionalmedia systems we have described.

23. Since we completed research for this article in 2010, Guha Thakurta and Chaturvedi (2012)have traced the growing trends of conglomeration within the Indian news media industry, especiallyin terms of the largest national players. However, as they point out in this work, while the regulatorylessons of media consolidation might be universal (greater regulation against cross-media ownership;protection of media diversity), the relationship between politics and media organizations and actorsfollow distinct logics in the Indian case that we have elucidated in this article.

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Media Pluralism Redux: Towards New Frameworks of Comparative Media Studies “Beyond the West”

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