In the out-and-out corporate media environment that exists today, market-friendly value systems are a natural consequence and crony capitalist behaviour by media luminaries is par for the course.
In the first flush of independent cable and satellite television in the early 1990s, there was the buoyant expectation and excitement of liberation from state control. A clear departure from the monotonous, drab, cliched, hortatory, government-extolling, politically cautious, socially prescriptive and culturally ritualistic programming was an end in itself. This break came close on the heels of a brief phase of euphoria—what could be characterised as the glasnost and perestroika years of Doordarshan towards the latter part of the 1980s—when a Reithian public interest temper seemed, unimaginably, to capture the imagination of the state broadcaster and yielded a season of bold and critical television fare, even if it was produced and delivered, for the most part, by producers contracted from outside to give Doordarshan a credible current affairs visage.
That interlude was to prove a tantalising but elusive possibility of what Doordarshan could itself deliver if the government of the day would allow it professional freedom. The opportunity slipped away, or was frittered way, and the initiative swung all the way the other way, from the patronising arms of the state into the grasping ones of the market. The process began when maiden private ventures like Zee in Hindi and Asianet in a regional Indian language (Malayalam) set out to push the established frontiers and laws of broadcasting and create the market for private television in the country. The air was expectant, when these tentative steps towards an independent electronic media regime were taken, with the promise of choice and variety and diversity, and a virtual renaissance in the electronic media. The market was a means to carve out a public viewership.
This story is from the August 5, 2016 edition of FRONTLINE.
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This story is from the August 5, 2016 edition of FRONTLINE.
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