By Kunal Taggar
Sometime in the spring of 2020, as a respiratory pandemic was quietly spreading through Indian cities, the primetime anchors of the country’s most-watched Hindi news channels were busy with something else entirely. Republic TV, Times Now, Zee News, and Aaj Tak, channels that together command hundreds of millions of viewers, devoted the majority of their airtime to debating the Islamic faith of the Tablighi Jamaat, a Muslim missionary group whose congregation had become a COVID cluster. The framing was not epidemiological. It was civilisational. Hashtags like #CoronaJihad trended nationally. Doctors reported a measurable rise in Muslim patients being turned away from hospitals. The pandemic had become, in the hands of Indian television news, a religious indictment. This was not an aberration. It was a feature.
India today has one of the most sprawling media ecosystems on earth, over 900 satellite TV channels, more than 17,000 registered newspapers, and a digital news audience that, at over 425 million users, exceeds the entire population of the United States. Yet by nearly every independent measure of quality, independence, press freedom, and public service, that ecosystem is in a state of profound, multi-dimensional failure. The consequences, cognitive, democratic, sectarian, and epistemic, are being absorbed daily by a civil society that is increasingly unable to distinguish between news and performance, between fact and patriotic fiction. This is an attempt to deduce that
failure, in its full breadth.
The Ownership Architecture
To understand Indian media’s structural distortions, begin at the beginning: who owns it. The concentration of Indian media ownership in the hands of large industrial conglomerates is not a secret. It is, rather, a normalised notoriety. Reliance Industries, helmed by Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man and among the world’s wealthiest, controls Network18, which in turn owns CNN-News18, CNBC-TV18, News18 India, and over two dozen regional news channels. It also holds a majority stake in Viacom18. Through its acquisition of a controlling interest in Network18 in 2022, Reliance consolidated what analysts estimate to be an audience reach of approximately 800 million viewers
across platforms, a figure without parallel in any democracy.
The Adani Group, controlled by Gautam Adani, whose industrial empire has a symbiotic dependence on government policy approvals, acquired a majority stake in NDTV, for decades, vouched by the country’s opposition as the last credible pillar of adversarial television journalism in India, in December 2022, following a hostile takeover that NDTV’s founders publicly called coercive. The founders, Prannoy Roy and Radhika Roy, subsequently resigned from the board. NDTV’s editorial tone has visibly softened in the years since.
The Washington-based Freedom House downgraded India’s press freedom status to “Partly Free” in 2021, where it has since remained. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranked India 151st out of 180 countries in its 2023 World Press Freedom Index, and 159th in 2024, lower than Afghanistan at the time of that ranking, lower than Myanmar, lower than Russia. RSF cited “media ownership concentration, political pressure, and the use of criminal law against journalists” as primary factors.
What makes this ownership structure particularly pernicious is the conflict of interest it generates. Reliance Industries’ businesses ranging from petrochemicals, telecom, including the famed Jio network, retail, and renewable energy, are intimately dependent on regulatory decisions made by central and state governments. The Adani Group’s infrastructure empire, which ranges from ports, airports, power plants, and green hydrogen, is similarly governmentadjacent. Media, in this configuration, may cease to be a watchdog and rather become a hedge or an insurance policy against hostile coverage, a lobbying tool dressed in journalistic clothing.
A 2022 analysis by The Wire and the Caravan found that across 14 major TV news channels, not a single primetime show in a 30-day monitoring period ran a sustained investigative segment critical of either the Reliance or Adani Group’s business interests. The same period saw multiple extended segments on the business wrongdoings of rival conglomerates and opposition-linked businessmen. This some contend to be the foundational architecture defined by an ecosystem in which the owners of information have structural incentives to suppress certain categories of truth.
How Ratings Corrupted the Newsroom
If ownership provides the motive, the Television Rating Point (TRP) system provides the mechanism. Indian news television’s business model is almost entirely dependent on advertising revenue, which flows toward high-rated programmes. The result is a feedback loop between sensation, sectarianism, and survival. A 2019 study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford found that 67% of Indian news consumers cited television as their primary news source, and that emotional, conflict-driven content consistently outperformed policy, economics, or investigative coverage in engagement metrics.
The distortions this creates are structural and cumulative. A content analysis of primetime news across 12 major Indian
news channels conducted by researchers at Hyderabad’s NALSAR University of Law in 2021 found that:
- Crime news accounted for 31% of total primetime airtime.
- Political conflict and statements, as opposed to policy, accounted for 27%.
- Business, economics, and financial news accounted for less than 4%.
- Agriculture and rural affairs, concerning the livelihoods of approximately 46% of India’s workforce, accounted
for less than 2% of airtime.
The discrepancy between what affects the most Indians and what Indian news channels cover is a chasm. India’s farmer suicide crisis, in which the National Crime Records Bureau records roughly 10,000 agrarian deaths per year, receives, by multiple content analyses, a small fraction of the airtime devoted to celebrity gossip or urban crime. Environmental degradation, public health infrastructure, labour law violations, nutritional poverty, the unglamorous material of most Indians’ actual lives, is structurally excluded by a TRP calculus that rewards drama over consequence.
The TRP system itself became a scandal in 2020, when the Mumbai Police arrested executives at Republic TV, India’s highest-rated English news channel, owned by Arnab Goswami, on charges of manipulating ratings data by paying households to keep their TV tuned to Republic. The Broadcast Audience Research Council of India (BARC) suspended the publication of news channel ratings entirely for nearly two years as a result. The incident was remarkable not simply because it alleged fraud, but because it revealed the degree to which the entire edifice of Indian news television had been built atop a single, corruptible data point.
Punditry as Performance
Central to the primetime model is the figure of the anchor-as-performer, wherein, a host whose role is not to facilitate information but to provide emotional catharsis for a predetermined audience posture. This is an internationally recognised phenomenon, and not just limited to India, Fox News in the United States pioneered it, but the world’s largest democracy has taken it to structural extremes. A 2021 study in the Journal of Communication that analysed 2,400 primetime news segments across Indian channels found that anchor opinion including editorial commentary, rhetorical questions, and direct advocacy, accounted for 58% of total segment duration, compared to 21% for factual
reporting and 12% for guest testimony. The figure is extraordinary, Indian television journalism, at its most-watched hours, is less than a quarter journalism.
Arnab Goswami of Republic TV has become the paradigmatic figure here. His programme The Debate, a nightly spectacle of shouted interruption, nationalistic invective, and prosecutorial monologue, regularly draws more viewers than any other English-language news programme in the country. His format, widely imitated across Hindi and regional channels, involves inviting panellists not to debate but to be dominated, guests are routinely talked over, cut off, and shouted down. The production function of the guest is to provide the anchor’s outrage with an object.
Goswami’s style, and its imitators, has measurable cognitive effects. A 2020 experimental study by researchers at IIT Delhi exposed two groups of participants to identical policy topics, one through print-format summaries, and one through primetime TV segments on the same topic. Those exposed to TV segments showed significantly lower factual recall of policy specifics, higher emotional arousal, and, critically, greater confidence in their, often incorrect, understanding of the issue. The study concluded that the format of Indian primetime news actively degrades epistemological quality while increasing the subjective sense of being informed. Viewers leave feeling educated but are, in measurable terms, less so.
Narrative Framing
Perhaps the most consequential distortion produced by Indian mainstream media is its systematic framing of domestic issues through a communal and nationalistic lens, a tendency that is neither accidental nor episodic, but structural and incentivised. The breadth of the academic and journalistic evidence here is substantial.
A 2022 content analysis by the Factchecker platform and researchers at Ashoka University evaluated coverage of crime news on five major Hindi news channels over a 90-day period. It found that when the accused in a crime story was identifiably Muslim, the religion of the accused was mentioned in the headline or breaking-news ticker in 76% of cases. When the accused was Hindu, religious identity was mentioned in less than 3% of cases. The asymmetry is not a journalistic choice; it is a framing policy.
This selective attribution of religious identity operates as a form of statistical manipulation, creating the impression, deeply lodged in the minds of daily news consumers, that crime and religious identity are correlated in a way that aggregate data does not support. Studies in cognitive psychology consistently show that repeated exposure to religiously-coded crime reporting increases “illusory correlation,” the perception of a relationship between two variables, here, Muslim identity and criminality, that does not exist at the population level. The framing extends systematically across domains.
On terrorism, a Global Terrorism Database analysis cited in a 2022 Carnegie India report found that right-wing extremist violence, including cow vigilante killings, targeted communal violence, and anti-minority attacks, was systematically undercovered relative to incidents attributable to Islamist actors, even in periods when the former outnumbered the latter in frequency.
On Pakistan, The word “Pakistan,” a country whose economy is smaller than the Indian state of Maharashtra by a staggering margin of 35%, functions in Indian news television as a near-universal framing device for opposition delegitimisation. A 2023 analysis of six months of primetime coverage found the country named in connection with the Indian National Congress, Aam Aadmi Party, or student protest movements in over 40% of political debate segments, often without factual substantiation. The rhetorical function is to attach the stigma of national betrayal to domestic political dissent.
On civil society, journalists, academics, and activists critical of government policy are routinely labelled “antinational,” “urban Naxals,” or “tukde-tukde gang,” a reference to a 2016 JNU student controversy, in primetime coverage. The effect, documented in a 2021 PEN International report, is to create a “permission structure” for state action by the time an activist is arrested or a journalist’s press credentials revoked, the audience has been preprimed to interpret the action as national security, not political persecution.
The Misinformation Infrastructure
Indian news channels have one of the world’s highest documented rates of factual inaccuracy among the peerreviewed media systems that have been studied.
AltNews, India’s most left-leaning media organisation, documented over 1,200 misinformation incidents attributable to mainstream television and print outlets between 2019 and 2023, an average of roughly one significant factual falsehood per mainstream outlet per week. These are not minor errors; they include fabricated quotes attributed to opposition politicians, digitally altered images presented as news photographs, false casualty figures in military contexts, and entirely invented “viral videos” from foreign conflicts presented as Indian events.
A few examples illuminating the pattern. In February 2019, following the Pulwama terror attack and the subsequent Balakot airstrikes, multiple major channels, including Republic TV and Zee News, reported Pakistani casualties in the hundreds. The Indian Air Force subsequently confirmed zero confirmed Pakistani military fatalities. The original figures, once embedded in the public mind, were never formally retracted; the corrections reached a tiny fraction of the original audience. During the Delhi riots of 2020, multiple channels aired manipulated video content depicting the violence in ways that misrepresented the sequence and instigators of violence. A subsequent investigation by MIT Media Lab’s civic media project found that channel-amplified misinformation about the Delhi riots spread at three
times the velocity of later fact-checks. In 2023, during the Manipur ethnic violence crisis, one of the gravest internal security failures of the incumbent Modi government’s tenure, a horrifying video of two Kuki women being paraded and assaulted went viral for 77 days before any mainstream Hindi news channel broadcast it. The story, which implicated state-level governance failure, was effectively blacklisted from primetime; it broke through public consciousness only after international media coverage forced it into the news cycle.
The asymmetry between the Manipur case and the blanket coverage of, say, a single mob attack framed as “love jihad,” is itself data. The former implicated ruling-party-governed state machinery; the latter fit the dominant communal narrative frame. This selectivity is not random. It follows a logic.
The accountability structures for this misinformation are essentially non-existent. The Press Council of India (PCI), the statutory body notionally charged with media oversight, has no punitive powers, it can censure, but it cannot fine or suspend. The News Broadcasters & Digital Association (NBDA) is an industry self-regulatory body with no independence from its member channels. In the decade between 2014 and 2024, no major Indian news channel faced a financial penalty or licence revocation as a result of broadcasting demonstrably false information.
The Sedition of Silence
A full account of Indian media’s distortions requires attention not only to what is covered, and how, but to what is systematically not covered. The structure of avoidance converges neatly onto political vulnerability. An analysis of primetime coverage by the Caravan magazine, tracking 18 months between 2021 and 2022, found the following stories received minimal or no sustained primetime coverage across major Hindi and English news channels. The Pegasus Project, a global investigative consortium’s revelation that Indian journalists, opposition politicians, and civil society figures had been surveilled using Israeli spyware allegedly procured by the Indian government. The story was front-page news in every major Western democracy; in India, it was either ignored or most coverage framed the story
as “foreign interference.”
The Electoral Bonds scheme, later struck down by the Supreme Court of India in February 2024 as unconstitutional, through which corporations and individuals could make anonymous donations to political parties, with the ruling BJP receiving, by the Election Commission’s own disclosure, over 55% of all bonds issued. Before the Supreme Court ruling compelled disclosure, the scheme received near-zero investigative scrutiny on mainstream TV. The economic data controversy, persistent questions raised by former Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian and multiple independent economists about the methodology of India’s GDP calculations, which Subramanian estimated may have overstated growth by 2.5 percentage points per year, received extensive coverage in the Financial Times and Economist but was largely absent from Indian primetime. The story is once again in focus in international media as India’s economic performance comes under scrutiny due to the spill overs of the Iran war.
The Mass farmer protests of 2020–21, one of the largest sustained protest movements in recorded human history, involving an estimated 250 million participants at its peak by some estimates, were initially framed by mainstream media as a “Khalistani,” a term for Sikh separatist conspiracy, a characterisation for which no credible evidence existed. International coverage was extensive; domestic primetime was, for months, effectively in the other direction.
This architecture of silence is as consequential as the architecture of noise. The issues that shape long-term national trajectories such as institutional independence, fiscal policy, environmental limits, minority rights are structurally excluded from the medium through which most Indians receive information about the world.
Jingoism as Epistemology
Indian mainstream media’s relationship with nationalism has moved beyond bias into something more epistemologically troubling, the substitution of national pride for empirical inquiry as the standard for evaluating claims.
The pattern is clearest in the coverage of India-Pakistan military confrontations, where the demand for reassuring national narrative systematically overrides factual verification. During the 2019 Balakot crisis, multiple Indian channels, citing unnamed “defence sources,” reported the destruction of a Pakistani F-16 fighter jet, Pakistani body counts in the hundreds, and an Indian aerial “victory” of decisive scale. Independent assessments by international defence analysts, the Stanford-based Aviation Safety Network, and Pakistani military disclosures suggested a substantially more ambiguous outcome, including the loss of an Indian MiG-21.
The social function of this jingoistic coverage is not primarily informational. It is more ritual as it performs national strength and unity for an audience that derives emotional satisfaction from the performance. This is not unique to India, rally-around-the-flag media distortions are documented globally, but the Indian version is notable for its duration and structural entrenchment. The demand for patriotic affirmation has been institutionalised into editorial norms, such that anchors who question official military claims risk being accused, on competing channels, and on social media swarms with suspiciously rapid coordination, of “supporting Pakistan.”
The cognitive effect is significant. A 2022 survey by the Lokniti-CSDS programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies found that among regular TV news viewers as opposed to those who primarily consume digital news, self-reported trust in official military statements was 84%, compared to 61% among non-TV news consumers, a cavity too large to be explained by demographic variables alone. The same study found that TV news viewers were substantially more likely to believe India had “won” the Balakot confrontation and less able to recall factual uncertainties about the episode.
The weaponisation of patriotism also has a direct chilling effect on journalism. At least four journalists were charged under sedition law, Section 124A, now replaced but functionally replicated under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita passed last year, between 2019 and 2023 for reporting that contradicted official military or public health narratives. The sedition law, the Supreme Court observed in a 2022 ruling, was being used in ways that recalled colonial-era censorship. The mainstream media’s response to these arrests was, in most cases, alternate framing of tackling anti-nationals.
How Social Media Accelerates the Failure
The pathologies of Indian television news do not stay within the television set. They are systematically amplified and cross-contaminated through social media ecosystems, most significantly WhatsApp, which has over 500 million users in India, more than in any other country, and also YouTube.
The interaction effect is alarming. A 2020 study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that misleading health information during the COVID-19 pandemic in India was primarily seeded by mainstream news channels and then distributed virally through WhatsApp family groups, where it reached non-TV-consuming populations. The news channel provided credibility; social media provided reach. Together they created a misinformation infrastructure with penetration that no single medium could have achieved.
YouTube’s algorithm has been separately implicated. A 2022 audit by the Internet Freedom Foundation found that for users whose YouTube history included a single viewing of a major Hindi news channel’s primetime political segment, subsequent algorithmic recommendations within four clicks consistently led to content substantially more extreme in communal framing, obscure channels with smaller but highly mobilised audiences that function as a radicalisation gradient beyond the TV set’s reach.
The consequences of this digital amplification are not merely informational. They have been directly linked, by researchers and by post-incident government committees, to episodes of communal violence. A 2018 MIT Media Lab study found that in 14 instances of mob lynching in India between 2017 and 2018, in which victims were identified by Human Rights Watch as predominantly Muslim, the violence was preceded in each case by the local circulation of WhatsApp content misidentifying the victims as kidnappers or cattle smugglers, content that, in 9 of the 14 cases, was traceable to original framing by mainstream news channels.
Advertising, Government, and the Revenue Model
The structural alignment between Indian mainstream media and political power has an additional financial dimension that is often overlooked, the overwhelming dependence of Indian news channels on government advertising.
The Central Bureau of Communication (CBC), the Indian government’s advertising arm, spent approximately ₹1,378 crore, roughly $165 million, on media advertising in the financial year 2022–23 alone. State governments spend comparable additional sums. For regional and Hindi-language news channels operating on thin margins, government ad expenditure can represent a quintessential 30-45% of total revenue, according to industry estimates cited by the Editors Guild of India in a 2022 report.
This creates an obvious and documented conflict of interest. Channels that pursue adversarial coverage of government policy face the withdrawal of government advertising, a sanction that does not require a formal order or public justification. The Caravan magazine published an investigation in 2021 documenting how at least seven regional news channels had seen government ad budgets cut in the months following coverage critical of state governments, with channel managements subsequently applying pressure on editors.
Private corporate advertising compounds the problem. As the 2023 Hindenburg Research report on the Adani Group drew international attention to alleged stock manipulation and regulatory capture, the story was virtually absent from mainstream Indian television in that form. Adani is a major advertiser across multiple media properties. Republic TV, typically eager to run adversarial content against opposition figures, aired multiple segments questioning the motives of Hindenburg Research rather than the substance of its findings.
What Chronic Exposure Does to the Civic Mind
The cumulative effect of prolonged exposure to this media environment on individual cognition and collective civic capacity is perhaps the most important and least-discussed dimension of the crisis. The psychological literature on “hostile media effects,” “parasocial aggression,” and “motivated reasoning,” well-developed in the context of partisan media in the United States and Europe, applies with particular force to the Indian context, where the intensity of emotional content is higher, the factual correction infrastructure is weaker, and the alternative information sources for large portions of the population are more limited. Several empirical findings are particularly notable:
On issue prioritization, a 2023 Lokniti-CSDS survey found that respondents who identified TV as their primary news source ranked “national security threats from Pakistan followed by China” and “cow slaughter” among their top five concerns for government action. Respondents who primarily consumed digital news were far more likely to prioritise unemployment, healthcare, and agricultural distress, issues that, by any objective economic measure, have greater immediate impact on the median Indian’s life. The divergence suggests that media consumption is not merely reflecting preferences; it is generating them.
On political tolerance, a 2022 study published in Asian Survey found a statistically significant negative correlation between frequency of Hindi news TV consumption and scores on a political tolerance index measuring willingness to extend civil rights to religious minorities. The correlation held after controlling for income, education, urban-rural location, and pre-existing political affiliation. The study’s authors were careful not to claim simple causation, but the relationship is robust and directionally consistent with the framing tendencies documented elsewhere.
On epistemic confidence, arguably the most troubling finding in the literature concerns what cognitive scientists call “the Dunning-Kruger gradient of media exposure,” the phenomenon in which individuals who consume the most information feel most confident in their understanding while demonstrating the largest gaps in factual accuracy. Indian primetime television, with its loud certainties, its dismissal of complexity, and its anchors who never say “I don’t know,” produces this effect systematically. A 2021 study by the Reuters Institute found Indian news consumers reported the highest levels of self-rated news comprehension of any country surveyed, while scoring among the lower quartile on factual accuracy tests about the same news events.
On deliberative capacity, democracy requires not merely that citizens be informed, but that they be capable of deliberation, meaning capable of weighing competing claims, tolerating ambiguity, and updating beliefs in response to evidence. Indian television news, structured around the spectacle of performative certainty and the emotional dismissal of opposing views, is in the business of producing the opposite, citizens who are confident, inflamed, and deliberatively impaired. The cumulative output is a public sphere in which nuance is stigmatised as weakness and factual uncertainty is interpreted as political betrayal.
The Accountability Vacuum
In most democracies with functional media ecosystems, the mechanisms of accountability for journalistic failure include, independent press councils with punitive powers; libel and defamation law accessible to aggrieved private citizens; professional associations with credentialing authority; and, most importantly, a competitive marketplace of reporting that corrects errors through adversarial exposure. India has none of these in effective form. The Press Council of India has 28 members, no enforcement powers, and a decade-long backlog of complaints. It can “admonish” a publication; it cannot compel a retraction, impose a fine, or recommend a licence suspension. Its rulings
are routinely ignored. Between 2019 and 2023, it issued formal admonishments in 47 cases of documented misinformation; zero resulted in any editorial change at the cited publication.
Defamation law in India, unusually among major democracies, retains criminal provisions, meaning individuals can be imprisoned, not merely fined, for defamation. This is an instrument that, in practice, functions more as a tool of suppression than accountability. Since 2014, at least 67 criminal defamation cases have been filed by government officials, ruling party politicians, or their associates against journalists, according to data compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists. The effect is structural, the threat of criminal prosecution for aggressive reporting creates a chilling effect that does not require the cases to succeed. Professional journalism associations, chief of which are the Editors Guild of India, and the Press Club of India, have issued salient statements but have no enforcement mechanism and, increasingly, face internal pressure from members employed by conglomerate-owned media houses who are reluctant to challenge their employers.
The most damning accountability void may well be structural, the journalists who report on media are themselves employed by the media. With the effective capture of most large outlets by conglomerate ownership, the watchdog function has largely migrated to a fragile ecosystem of independent digital outlets, these namely are The Wire, The Caravan, Scroll, NewsLaundry, Article 14, which themselves have been reported to be biased, and operate on small budgets, while facing disproportionate legal harassment, struggling to reach audiences that are even a small fraction of those commanded by the television majors.
The Price of a Captured Press
The stakes of this failure are not aesthetic. They are constitutional. India is a democracy in which approximately 650 million voters make electoral decisions, at least partly, on the basis of information provided by a media ecosystem that is demonstrably captured by conglomerate ownership, structurally incentivised to distort through the TRP system, systematically biased in its framing of religious and political identity, and almost entirely unaccountable for its most consequential failures.
The argument sometimes advanced, that Indian voters are sophisticated enough to discount media bias, that “people know the media is biased,” is not supported by the cognitive science literature. The documented effects of framing, agenda-setting, parasocial influence, and repetition on belief formation operate below the threshold of conscious critical evaluation. Knowing that the media is biased does not protect the viewer from the effects of the bias; it protects only against specific claims identified as suspect, not the ambient formation of mood, priority, and identity that primetime television manufactures in aggregate.
The result, playing out in real time, is a civil society that is progressively less equipped to hold power to account, less tolerant of minority views, more susceptible to manufactured crisis, more willing to conflate dissent with disloyalty, and less able to accurately identify the material conditions of its own life. This is not merely a media problem. It is a democracy problem, and the democracy in question is the world’s largest.
The printing presses and transmission towers of Indian mainstream media are, by any reasonable measure, among the most powerful institutions in the republic. They have been captured, distorted, and weaponised. The cost is being paid not in newspaper columns or TRP points, but in the slow, cumulative degradation of the public mind, and of the republic that mind is meant to govern.