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

Abstract A new form of "entertaining news," accessed by most through television, has become a privileged domain of politics for the first time in countries "beyond the West" in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. What are the political consequences of this development: What is the relationship between media and politics in these regions? We answer these questions through a case study of India, the world's largest democracy, where two decades of media expansion and liberalization have yielded the largest number of commercial television news outlets in the world. We show why prevailing theories of media privatization and commercialization cannot account for the distinctive architecture of media systems in places like India. In this article, we first provide an overview of the historical and contemporary dynamics of media liberalization in India and the challenges that 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 studying the relationship between television news and democratic politics in India, and by extension in the global South. In the concluding section, we reflect on the broader comparative insights of the essay and discuss directions for future research. We believe that our alternative comparative framework captures more meaningfully the diversity and complexity of emerging media systems and their relationships to democratic practice in these regions. Keywords: liberalizationIndia mediacomparative media studiesinformal politicsmedia and democracyGlobal South Acknowledgments The authors wish to thank Dan Hallin, Vipul Mudgal, and Michael Schudson for their comments and helpful feedback on this research. Notes 1. To indicate that our focus on a particular set of countries has geographical, historical, and also 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" have access to the Internet at home, as opposed to 28% in the "developing world." In India, despite the fastest growing telecommunications industry in the world, Internet access remains extremely skewed at 3% in terms of access at home and under 12% in terms of overall access. For more, see http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/stat/default.aspx. 3. In a related contemporaneous example that underscores the relevance of mainstream, "old media" today, Wikileaks relied on traditional news media platforms to get out its message into the public sphere, thereby suggesting the continued importance of news media as agents and sites of public knowledge even in the digital age. 4. Research on the "vernacular news revolution" in India's thriving print news media has drawn important distinctions between the relatively rarefied elite field of English-language journalism versus the popular and often populist news cultures embodied in vernacular journalistic fields targeting less privileged readers (Batabyal, 2012; CitationNinan, 2007; CitationRajagopal, 2001; CitationRao, 2010; CitationSonwalkar, 2002, 2008; CitationStahlberg, 2006; CitationThussu, 2007; CitationUdupa, 2011; CitationUdupa & Chakravartty, 2012) We build on these studies by moving the comparison from English versus vernacular news to comparisons between the different vernacular or regional news media systems within India, where television channels have over the past five years become significant institutional players in the everyday as well as extraordinary politics of Indian democracy. 5. While there is of course substantial scholarship on the historical constitution of these cleavages and the considerable societal contestation over the "rules of the game" that occurred in European democracies, the literature on political parallelism and the relations between media systems and political systems deals with a later time period, when these issues (and the consequent political order) had been settled and democracy was consolidated rather than transitional or emergent. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out. 6. We are referencing both the 2004 volume and the new edited 2012 volume of Hallin and Mancini. 7. World Bank estimates put the percentage of India's 1.15 billion citizens living below the poverty line at 42%, while a range of studies have found that the real figure falls somewhere between 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 apartment block to a central video cassette player, on which a set number of Hindi films and foreign sitcoms would be played for a fixed monthly fee (see CitationMehta, 2008; CitationNaregal, 2000). 9. CitationParthasarathi (2011) states that "of the six cable distributers who together provide access to about a quarter of cable & satellite TV homes in India, the leading two are owned by media houses that 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 Organization estimates that 70% of India's urban workforce is engaged in informal economic activity (in contrast to 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. CitationParthasarathi (2011) notes that the high relative valuation of news broadcasters' stocks in relation to actual revenue or profit can be explained by their strategy of "developing multiple revenue streams": "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). 12. CitationMcCargo (2011) makes a similar point about the importance of "informal power-holders and actors" (p. 8) as well as the larger arena of informal negotiation that accounts for the media-politics relationship 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 and informal dimensions and practices of democratic politics, and to the relationships between these two domains that are observed in all democracies, rather than proposing a new definition of democracy in nonprocedural 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 sectoral growth (IT zones in specific urban or peri-urban areas such as Bangalore) or the development of special economic zones, has occurred simultaneously with attempts by the national government to manage quite stark regional inequalities. 15. India is a linguistic federation where each of the constituent state units or regions encompass distinct language communities. In other words, unlike the states of the American federation, each Indian state is both a territorially and a linguistically discrete unit (CitationStepan, 2001). 16. These classifications reflect preponderance. In other words, most channels in Bengal are directly 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 media ownership are entirely absent in West Bengal. 17. We are basing these estimates on available and mostly self-reported data from the channels as well as from Television Audience Measurement (TAM) data that are publicly available. We recognize that these data are unreliable, and the numbers are meant only to give a general sense of the overall picture 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; News Time (launched in 2010 by a real estate conglomerate), with no clear political affiliations; and NE Bangla (established in 2004 by an entrepreneur politician from Assam), targeting Bengali audiences living outside West Bengal, specifically in the northeastern regions of the country. However, they are by far the "minority players" in terms of their market share and also in terms of their social and political influence and reach. 19. Presentation by Kanwal Sandhu, owner-editor of Day and Night Television (Punjab), April 8, 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); Sakshi TV (launched in 2009 with less than 10% of audience reach), which has shifted its alliance from the 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 less than 5% audience reach), also with networks across both Congress and TDP. 22. Our proposed typology of "media systems" uses the familiar terminology in existing comparative political communication scholarship. However, it should be clear from the preceding discussion that we are not implying a systematic coherence or institutional boundedness to the various regional media systems we have described. 23. Since we completed research for this article in 2010, CitationGuha Thakurta and Chaturvedi (2012)have traced the growing trends of conglomeration within the Indian news media industry, especially in terms of the largest national players. However, as they point out in this work, while the regulatory lessons of media consolidation might be universal (greater regulation against cross-media ownership; protection of media diversity), the relationship between politics and media organizations and actors follow distinct logics in the Indian case that we have elucidated in this article.