The Delhi High Court has handed both the political circuit and the media a ticking parcel with its judgment in the Ashok Chavan case. It shouldn't be long before we learn what's ticking. (What's not ticking is the media. Subdued quiet seems the norm.) The former Maharashtra Chief Minister had challenged the power of the Election Commission of India (ECI) to go into the truth or falsity of his 2009...

Team Anna both galvanised people and captivated the news industry, in two closely related but distinct strategies. India is not yet a society where Big Brother is Watching You. However, the mass spectacle of people wearing “I am Anna” topis and T-shirts signals a new phase of politics. If we recall “Anna” means Big Brother, we may wonder if in this case Big Brother is You, Watching. In the second case too,...

The truth about the Indian media’s increasing reliance on revenues from news that has been paid for, has long been shrouded in half-truths, corporate denials and misleading information in carefully sifted reports sent out by regulatory bodies. While the national media, flush with high TRP ratings and advertising revenues, is patting itself on its self-righteous back for relentless coverage of the public protests against corruption in high places, it is...

The substitution of one man for the people, and the reduction of the people's role merely to being supporters and cheerleaders for one man's actions, is antithetical to democracy. The Central government's flip-flops on Anna Hazare are obvious: it went from abusing him (through the Congress spokesperson) for sheltering corruption, to extolling him for his idealism; from arresting him, without any justification, and getting him remanded to judicial custody for a...

Its facets include concentration of media ownership and the transformation of news into a commodity. THE last two decades have witnessed a dramatic transformation of India's ‘mediascape' – a term first used by Arjun Appadurai, an academic of Indian origin based in the United States, to describe how visual imagery impacts the world and to describe and situate the role of the mass media in global cultural flows. While there...