Mass media in India
Mass media in India consists of several different means of communication: television, radio, internet, cinema, newspapers and magazines.
[1][2] Today much of the media is controlled by large, corporations, which reap revenue from advertising, subscriptions, and sale of copyrighted material.
[3] The French NGO Reporters Without Borders compiles and publishes an annual ranking of countries based upon the organisation's assessment of its Press Freedom Index.
It stated its reason saying "The violence against journalists, the politically partisan media and the concentration of media ownership all demonstrate that press freedom is in crisis in “the world’s largest democracy”, ruled since 2014 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the embodiment of the Hindu nationalist right.
It stated that this was due to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party and their followers of Hindutva having greater exertion of control of the media.
[5] Freedom House, a US-based NGO stated in its 2021 report that harassment of journalists increased under Modi's administration.
[6] The English-language media of India are described as traditionally left-leaning liberal, which has been a point of friction recently due to an upsurge in popularity of Hindu nationalist politics.
Auguste and Louis Lumière moving pictures were screened in Bombay during July 1895, and radio broadcasting began in 1927.
Therefore, the best way is to let the peers of the profession, assisted by a few discerning laymen, regulate it through a properly structured, representative, and impartial machinery.
The telegraphic circuits of news agencies used the Roman Alphabet and the Morse code, giving the English press an advantage in speed.
The Hindustan Times was founded in 1924 during the Indian Independence Movement ('Hindustan' being the historical name of India), it is published by HT Media Ltd.
[21] The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting owned and maintained the audio-visual apparatus—including the television channel Doordarshan—in the country prior to the economic reforms of 1991.
[23] 47 million households with television sets emerged in 1993, which was also the year when Rupert Murdoch entered the Indian market.
[25] The Indian Government acquired ES EVM computers from the Soviet Union, which were used in large companies and research laboratories.
[36] The history of film in India begins with the screening of Auguste and Louis Lumière moving pictures in Bombay during the July 1895.
[39] Expatriates throughout the United Kingdom and in the United States continued to give rise to an international audiences to Indian movies, which, according to The Encyclopædia Britannica (2008) entry on Bollywood, "continued to be formulaic story lines, expertly choreographed fight scenes, spectacular song-and-dance routines, emotion-charged melodrama, and larger-than-life heroes".
Most of these productions are funded by investors since there are limited banking and credit facilities maturity in India for the motion picture industry.
Many international corporations, such as Disney (formerly UTV) and Viacom (Network18 Studios) have entered the nation's media industry on a large scale.
However a majority of readers still do not pay for the content they read, causing the media houses to rely on other means of funding.
[53] Disturbed by corruption, Delhi chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal suggested on 3 May 2015 to have a public trial of Indian media.
[57][58] Of late, a lot of mainstream media channels have been accused of printing and telecasting unverified and biased news which they retracted later.
[59] In March 2018, the then Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra said that, "journalists cannot write anything they imagine and behave as if they are sitting in some pulpit".
[61] A report by Oxfam and Newslaundry found out that employees from general category constitute around 90% of leadership positions in the Indian media, which means that the marginalized communities like Dalits, Adivasis and Bahujans do not have adequate representation.
