https://thewire.in/media/backstory-the-toxic-news-studio-enables-hate-mongers-like-nupur-sharma
the studio news chat show and the studio news show model cannot be understood without some inkling into why news television is so important to the media industry although it accounts for a modest share of total television viewing and total revenue. In his 2015 book, Behind A Billion Screens, Nalin Mehta argues that news television may make little or no money but it brings access to enormous power.
Put simply, it is this patronage that feeds the content of most news television. A senior television manager whom Mehta interviewed had put it like this to him: “A news channel is a useful asset. It brings influence and access, and opens doors in politics and in government.” Large corporate entities are essentially looking for the same dividends when they make news media acquisitions, but this of course is at an infinitesimally larger scale.
In 2014, the acquisition of news television entities Eenadu-Network 18, with their pan-Indian presence, allowed Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), to influence policy making within the government and consolidate its hold on the media market. Today RIL owns over 72 media channels with a user base of 800 million and the news channels among them are faithful to the interests of the ruling party.
The news studio chat show came to be emblematic of this exercise of power and patronage. But for politics and its patrons to find acceptance with audiences, it also needed an anchor to play a role of the God in the Machine. When Bennett Coleman and Company was seeking an entry into the news television business in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, the model that drove Vineet Jain as its owner was Fox News.
For Times Now it was about creating the illusion of “breaking news” without too much emphasis on the real investigation and fact-finding that goes behind real news breaking; it was about talking heads chosen to play their assigned adversarial roles arguing at each other with no real interest in furthering public discourse in ways that benefit the country.
18/06/2022
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