News Production Practices in Indian Television:

An ethnography of Star News and Star Ananda

Somnath Batabyal
SOAS
University of London
PhD Thesis

1
 Declaration

I undertake that all material presented for examination is my

own work and has not been written for me, in whole or in part,
by another person(s). I also undertake that any quotation or
paraphrase from the published or unpublished work of another
person has been duly acknowledged in the work which I present
for examination.

Name: Somnath Batabyal

Signed ______________________________

2
 Abstract

This thesis is the result of fieldwork carried out in television

newsrooms in two Indian cities. The research was situated in Star
Ananda in Kolkata and in Star News in Mumbai, both channels part of
the Rupert Murdoch owned Star group. The fieldwork was conducted
through 2006 and the early part of 2007.
Doordarshan, the state run and the only television channel available in
India till the early 1990s had enforced a hegemonic, unitary notion of
India since its inception. In a world of media plenty, had the national
imaginary changed, and if so, how? The central research question this
thesis tries to answer, therefore, is: has the proliferation of private
news channels in India in every regional language given rise to a
pluarility in how the nation is articulated in Indian television?
Methodologically, this thesis takes an ethnographic approach. It uses
participant observation and depth interview techniques as research
methods. With over 90 recorded interviews with senior journalists and
media managers, this thesis provides rich empirical material and in-
depth case studies.
This work makes three overarching claims. Firstly, the assumed
traditional divide between corporate and editorial no longer holds in
Indian television. Each also does the job of the other and a distinction
between them is purely rhetorical. Secondly, journalists imagine
themselves as the audience and produce content they think they and
their families will like. Given that these professionals mostly come from
wealthy backgrounds, across television channels in India a singular
narrative in content and a hegemonic understanding of an affluent
“nation” is achieved. Connected with this is my third claim: news
channels and advertisers targeting affluent audiences promote a notion
of a prosperous “nation”. Though catering to different language groups -
Hindi and Bengali speakers - by targeting the affluent, Star News and
Star Ananda produce a similar, unvarying content that promotes an idea
of a unitary, prosperous “India.”

3
 Acknowledgements

This thesis is dedicated to John Singh.

Four years and a bit is a long time, especially when in a foreign country
and in different educational systems. The transition from a journalist to
the world of academia was difficult and sometimes suspect. Money was
scarce and student life, after the relative plenty of a professional, was
arduous. Despite these, I have no doubt that this past half a decade has
been the happiest of my life and if given a choice, I would do it all over
again, without hesitation. Several people helped in this happy
transition. Here, I can name but a few. To all those others, my heartfelt
thanks.
Prof Annabelle Sreberny and I started at SOAS in the same year.
She was a visiting Professor and I, taking a year out of journalism to
pursue a Master’s Degree. It was largely her effort which convinced me
that academia might not be beyond the realms of possible. Every time
those doubts resurfaced in the past years, a meeting with her reassured
me. She went far beyond being my supervisor for this work and donned
several hats. Annabelle gave belief when I had none. As mentor, her
intellectual fervour gave direction to this work. As a friend, I have
cherished the lunches, dinners, cocktails and conversations in and
around central London. If this thesis has any worth, credit is due to her.
The failings are mine.
It was Prof Mark Hobart, my second supervisor who suggested
news ethnography as a possible area of work. He was deeply suspicious
of a journalist’s application towards academic pursuits, so if this thesis
can convince him of such possibilities, the effort would be worth it. His
intellectual honesty and critical questioning shaped my early academic
outlook and his contribution towards this work is immense.
London was the first city I stayed in for a considerable period
outside India. It is a city with which I have had a continuous love affair,
loving its streets, the music and its people. To Priya Singh who first held
my hand in an alien city, I am deeply thankful. She took me home to a

4
posse of wonderful people: Greg, Maneesha and Naila who for the past
several years have shared and enriched my life. Naila, Maneesha and
Priya’s everyday observations on Indian television, its media and stars
kept this thesis rooted. Greg’s worldview, his passions ranging from
psychoanalysis to cycling made me explore worlds hitherto unknown.
Together they made the past five years my happiest.
Lena Michaels has been an intellectual companion of many
years. Her love for India and Nepal, her knowledge of South Asian
politics and her refusal to accept most of my theories always made me
question my own work. She has been a most wonderful friend without
whom this work would not have been possible. I remain grateful and
value her contribution.
To my colleagues and friends, Meenu, Matti and Angad, no words
can express my gratitude. As we started on our fledgling doctoral
careers, we had made a pact that academia would not make us suffer.
We would have fun through the process, we decided. Sacredmediacow,
an independent media collective was formed to ensure this and for
three years, the talks which we held, films we screened and the
conferences we organised, kept us away from the libraries and
computers. The resultant book commission from this process is an
acknowledgement that poverty need not bar creativity. To you three,
my salutations.
This work would not have been possible without the help of the
journalists at Star News and Star Ananda. I wish to acknowledge the
help accorded to me by Uday Shankar who not only gave me permission
to conduct the study but facilitated my stay at every level. His
commitment to academia and this work is much appreciated. To all the
journalists who tolerated my presence, incessant questions and queries,
who gave me their valuable time, this work would not have been
possible without your cooperation. To Gopal Kaushik and Yuvraj
Bhattacharya, many thanks for making it so much fun. I must make a
special mention of Yogesh Manwani, who not only gave me time and
inputs and shared the secrets of the media market, but over the last few
years has become a most valuable friend and ally. Comrade, many

5
thanks and with you I share the dream of a more equally representative
media world.
I am grateful to Pradip Saha, dear friend and fierce critic, who
helped in gaining entry for the fieldwork. His acumen and energy for
activism has long been a source of inspiration.
The SOAS Students Union has played a large part in this work.
Part time employment at the student shop meant that there were
occasional meals at decent restaurants and a break from the baked
beans and canned soup. I loved playing the music for the Junior
Common Room and despite David, the post room organiser, being fed
up of hip hop and raga, I was allowed by Khalid and Peter to continue. I
remain indebted to both of you. The Union also provided funds to run
Sacredmediacow and without their active support, our efforts would
have come to naught.
I am grateful to the Centre for Media and Film Studies. Despite
the financial insecurities of a small and nascent department, it
supported me in various ways. I enjoyed being a teaching fellow at the
Centre and its commitment to new ideas and support for
Sacredmediacow and its more eccentric activities is much appreciated.
This thesis would not have been readable without Georgie; a
most efficient and affordable proof reader. She took her work far too
seriously and delayed submission by at the least, a couple of months.
Her inputs, comments and questions have improved this work
immeasurably. A most wonderful friend, her contributions are
treasured.
To the organisations who helped sustain this PhD process,
heartfelt thanks. Special mention must be made of SOAS and the
University of London to whom I am deeply thankful for providing travel
and research grants that helped sustain me during the fieldwork period.
To all those not mentioned here and who will never read this
thesis, I have no way of telling you how appreciated you are. If you
chance on this page, coffee or a drink at the Students Union bar is on
me.

6
 Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction Page 8

Chapter 2: Literature Review Page 24
Chapter 3: Methodology Page 57
Chapter 4: Corporate strategies Page 92
Chapter 5: Editorial Processes Page 123
Chapter 6: Audience Matters Page 171
Chapter 7: Structures of news content Page 205
Chapter 8: Conclusion Page 256
Bibliography Page 264
Appendices Page 278

7
 Chapter 1

Introduction

The changing mediascape in India

India is in the news. Whether it is the country’s rising status as an

economic powerhouse1 or the teeming millions living below the poverty
line, its software geniuses earning million dollar salaries or call centre
employees snatching up Western jobs, India makes a good copy. Films
on India cause controversies and garner prestigious awards. Their film
stars grace the cover of Vogue and international magazines.
The booming Indian media business exports the country’s new
found confidence in various ways. Bollywood has claimed its niche
amongst world cinema. Films now open in London and New York
before they do in Mumbai or Delhi. Indian music, both classical and
popular, finds place in high street stores across the western world. The
country’s performers grace the Barbican and the Carnegie Hall, its
music booms out of night clubs and bhangra pop is regular fare.
India’s ever expanding television industry embodies this change.
Not only has the scale of television completely transformed in economic
terms, it has also become the locus where a ‘changing’ India is most
visibly articulated. As Butcher states in the preface to her book,
Transnational Television, Cultural identity and change: when Star came
to India; “[t]he media landscape simultaneously embodied and reflected
those changes” (Butcher, 2003:9). By 2006, the industry was estimated
to be worth more than Rs 185 billion (approximately 230 million
pounds), a dramatic turnaround from its humble beginnings in 1959 as
an educational project sponsored by the state (Kohli, 2006: 62). The
black and white days have been replaced with gloss, glamour and
money. The state sponsored Doordarshan, the lone channel on Indian
airwaves until the early 1990s, has been eclipsed and the last two
1
India is currently the fourth largest world economy, behind the United States, China
and Japan. (The Washington Post, Dec 28th, 2008)
8
decades have seen a most extraordinary growth in private channels,
now numbering around 360. Nearly 160 more channels are waiting for
the government’s permission to go on air. 2 The Indian television
viewer, more than anyone else in the world today, is then the most
spoilt for choice. More than a hundred million households in India now
own television sets. Seventy million of them are connected to cable or
satellite TV. At the tip of their fingers lie choices galore; movie channels,
music channels, television soap operas and news broadcasts. CNN and
BBC, the Rupert Murdoch owned Star TV bouquet of channels,
international sports channels and the home grown Zee Television all vie
for the attention of the Indian audience.
Within the medium of television, the news genre has seen the
most spectacular growth, prompting some to ask: “is India the world’s
biggest TV news bazaar?” (Thussu, 2007: 96) From just one news
channel in 1998, today India has close to sixty 24-hour news channels
spread across the country, most of which are “national, but many
international in reach, [and] some catered to the regional markets”
(ibid: 96, 97). News anchors are the new Indian celebrities, articulating
reality to India’s millions. With citizen journalism, live outdoor
broadcast vans fitted with the latest technology, talk shows and
discussions, analysis and reports, there seems to be no end of goodies
for a nation of viewers until very recently fed on state propaganda as
news.

Scholarship on Indian media: making a case for grounded research

The beginnings of Indian television were humble, accidental even. After

an exhibition in New Delhi, the multinational electronic company,
Philips, had left behind some equipment. All India Radio (AIR) used this
to put together a broadcast in September 1959 for ‘teleclubs’ organised
around 21 television sets that were installed in and around the Indian
Capital (Mehta, 2008: 29). If the beginnings were accidental, no one

2
Source:Rediff India website, December12,2008,
http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/dec/12you-might-soon-have-500-tv-
channels.htm
9
could have foreseen the exponential growth of the industry in this
century in the sub-continent. The boom in satellite television (1990s)
and the proliferation of private channels in India wrong footed most,
including academia and scholarly work remains limited. However,
predating the satellite boom, some important work was done on Indian
television. Of significant importance is Arvind Rajagopal’s work on the
rise of Hindu nationalism, the Indian middle class and their linkages
with the media and consumerist politics of the late eighties (2001).
While it sets down an important marker, the time frame of the research
predates all satellite channels. Sevanti Nainan’s competent,
authoritative work on Indian television records the early years of the
satellite boom (1995) and Butcher’s work on the cultural impact of the
satellite revolution is noteworthy (2003). Treating the business of
television media solely as an economic entity, Vanita Kohli’s book The
Indian Media Business, draws attention to the colossal capital now
involved in Indian television (2006). Satellites over South Asia
documents the changes in the region’s television infrastructure through
the 1990s (Page and Crawley, 2001). A more recent study focussing on
how the cultural imaginations of national identity have been
transformed by the rapid growth of satellite and cable television in
postcolonial India is Kumar’s Gandhi meets Primetime (2006). Most of
these works take the political economy approach to examine Indian
media, particularly television and its impact on the political, social and
cultural life in the country. Ethnographic approaches to studying the
media are even fewer. Mankekar’s study of television audiences and the
attempt of the state to create a ‘modern’ India while reinforcing family
‘values’ is an excellent example (1999). William Mazzarella’s case study
on the advertising industry in Mumbai connects to wider debate about
global consumerist patterns and local mediations (2003). Swedish
anthropologist, Stahlberg’s ethnographic approach to studying a
Lucknow based newspaper and how it constructs society is the first to
study newspapers in India using such a methodology (2002). While a
commendable effort, it focuses less on news production dynamics and
more on social constructing of locality through media content.

10
On news channels, academic work is even more limited. Nalin Mehta’s
recent book on television news channels is the first of its kind and
offers a comprehensive history of Indian news channels (2008). The
book is an impressive scholarship of the political, economic and social
implications of the news revolution in the country. Daya Thussu, in his
book on the rise of global infotainment, devotes a chapter to India and
its news television content (Thussu, 2007: 91-113). Prasun Sonwalker
has made important interventions through journal articles focusing on
the “Murdochisation” of the Indian press and the new news ecology
(2002). Besides these, and some edited volumes consisting of
journalistic commentary on news practice, academic scholarship on
news is virtually non-existent (see Sahay [ed], 2006). This research
attempts to fill the giant gap, if partially, between the spread of
television news channels and its scholarship.

Central Research Question and the initial hypothesis

Focussing on television news in India and its surrounding practices, the

central research question of this thesis is: how is the nation constructed
in Indian television newsrooms? Scholars have long commented on how
the nation is flagged through news in particular and the media in
general. In the British context, Scannell and Cardiff, in writing the social
history of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) have argued that
the public service broadcast conveys the political idea of the nation
through mass culture (1991). Scannell has also stated that the BBC
provides the space for a contemporary public sphere (1989). Similarly,
Madianou demonstrated how Greek nationality and nationhood is
constantly invoked in its news media (2005).
In his seminal work, Imagined Communities (1983), Anderson
links the spread of European nationalism in the colonised world to print
capitalism. In a world of media plenty, Arjun Appadurai makes the
argument that a similar link can be found between the post-national
imaginary and the rise of electronic media (1996:22). While I discuss
these themes in detail in the literature review, following from both their

11
works, my initial hypothesis was that in India, with its “multiethnic,
multilingual, multireligious, multicultural, multipolitical” (Ram, 2000:
xi) political economy, a plethora of television channels must result in
the articulation of multiple notions of nationhood. I presumed that
news channels in every official Indian language must have broken the
post-Nehruvian imaginary of a pan-Indian nation constructed by the
state owned television channel, Doordarshan. Reality, however,
disagreed. My empirical evidence shows, and I argue that, while the
post-Nehruvian India has indeed dissipated, in its place another notion
of India, every bit as hegemonic has arisen; an India for and by the
middle class.

Television and the rise of the Indian middle class

The Indian television audience, most particularly its middle class, came
into prominence with the economic liberalisation of the country, a
process which started in the late 1980s and picked up momentum after
the International Monetary Fund (IMF) induced structural reforms
(Rajagopal, 2001, also see Joshi and Little, 1996). The term ‘middle
class’ is notoriously promiscuous and does not lend to an easy
definition. Sociologists have criticised the elasticity of the category
‘middle class’ under the liberalisation of the Indian economy (Lakha,
1999) and have noted the differentiation within the term (Deshpande,
2003). In his book The Great Indian Middle Class, Pavan K Verma
attempts to contextualise the term:

To my mind, in the Indian context, anybody who has a home to live in

and can afford three meals a day, and has access to basic health care,
public transport and schooling, with some disposable income to buy
such basics as a fan or watch or cycle, has already climbed on to the
middle class bandwagon. (2007: xviii)

As a purely economic entity, the Indian middle class does not

have the same economic clout as their western counterparts. Applying
such terms thus needs careful consideration and contextualisation.

12
Though it is not the purpose of this thesis to provide a definition of the
middle class in India, they are a very important constituent of this work
as the target audience of television news channels. This work, therefore,
understands the middle classes as the ‘core audience’ and uses a market
definition of the socio-economic criteria (SEC) of viewers to understand
which audience groups are thought to be lucrative targets by television
companies.3 (see appendix 1) (For more on the Indian middle class see
Fernandes, 2006, for their consumption patterns, see Jafferlot and Veer,
2008)
However we choose to understand the Indian middle class, there
can be little doubt that they have been a pursued lot. Almost every
major global manufacturer of goods, especially the consumer variety,
has tried to feed off the Indian middle class’s “newly legitimated right to
consume” (Rajagopal, 2001:3). From luxury car makers to handbag
manufacturers, Swiss watch-makers to Hollywood producers, they have
all tried to extract a piece of the global consumer that the middle class
Indian has been advertised as. But alongside being courted by corporate
giants and held up as the brave new consumers of 21 st century
capitalism, there have been the brickbats. The Indian middle class has
been blamed for “shocking callousness” and turning a blind eye to the
“unspeakable squalor and poverty and disease and illiteracy of the vast
majority” of Indians (Verma, 2007: xiv). Dipankar Gupta (2000) has
called the Indian middle class “shallow consumers” and “misplaced
modernisers” and the rise of the Hindu rightwing has been attributed to
them (Rajagopal, 2001).
The rise of the middle class in India coincided with the
burgeoning growth of television. This has led to the articulation, I argue,
of a ‘middle class nation’, particularly in the news genre, thereby
effectively marginalising all other possible articulations of nationhood.
It is pertinent to point out here that this thesis does not claim that the
vast numbers of the middle classes in India are passive recipients of a
new television culture. Indeed, anthropological work amongst Indian
3
The SEC table shows that viewers are classified according to a household’s chief
wage earner’s (CWE) earning capacity and educational qualifications. A household
belonging to SEC A is more desirable to television advertisers than say one from SEC B
or SEC C.
13
middle classes has shown vastly differing attitudes towards the so-
called globalisation of the economy. 4 (See Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase,
2009)

Indian Television News

As the rise of the middle class has been unprecedented, the growth of
news channels in India has been nothing short of spectacular. They
abound in every regional language in India. There are multiple news
channels in English and even more in Hindi. Despite the seeming
saturation of the media market, new channels are announced regularly.
Just as news channels proliferate, serious concerns have been raised by
academics and practitioners about news values, the dumbing down of
content and the recent corporatisation of news in Indian television
channels (see Mehta 2008, Thussu, 2007: 91-113, Sonwalkar, 2002).
The critique of television news is of course not unique to India.
In America, it has been blamed for having “contributed to a decrease in
attention span and the death of curiosity, optimism, civility, compassion
for others, and abstract and conceptual reasoning (Arden 2003:48).
John Simpson of the BBC has blamed television news for turning
America into an “Alzheimer nation, unaware of its own or anyone else’s
past, ignorant of its own or anyone else’s present (2002:288). Another
journalist, Andrew Marr, commenting on the changing British news
practices and its perception has stated “The idea of news has altered. It
stopped being essentially information and became something designed
to produce – at all costs, always – an emotional reaction, the more
extreme the better” (2004: 381).
While journalists have for long been documenting the particularities of
their trade (see for example Rosenblum, 1998, 1989, Woodward, 2004),
alongside media scholars in recent times, they have voiced serious
concerns about their own practices. In India, with the recent explosion
of news channels and an emerging news ecology, journalists turned
4
(Since this thesis looks at the middle class as the target audience for television
channels, it is necessary to note here that I will often use the term “core audience” and
the “middle class” interchangeably)

14
academics have attempted to look back at their own practices from the
outside while making use of their insider knowledge to comment on
news practices (Mehta, 2008, Sonwalker, 2000). My interest in
television news also stems primarily from the experiential. I was a
journalist in India from the mid 1990s and as a television
correspondent in the early 2000s saw first-hand the transformation
which the Indian news sphere was going through. I am the concerned
journalist and the academic outsider, the two positions from where I
choose to enter this thesis.

Ethnographic studies in newsrooms: Making a case for India

Simon Cottle has argued that “[i]n the fast-changing fields of media and
media research, studies that once challenged us to rethink basic
positions of theory can all too quickly become ritually rehearsed and
accepted as orthodoxy (2000:19). Writing specifically on newsroom
ethnographies he states that though they have proved invaluable to
media studies by providing a more “grounded theory of news
manufacture” “much news ink has dried up for good under the bridge of
technological change, and economic, regulatory and cultural forces have
also played their part in the radical, (often professionally traumatic),
reconfiguration of news corporations, news production and journalist
practices (ibid: 1-2). ‘New(s) times’, he states, “demand a ‘second wave’
of news ethnographies that deliberately set out to theoretically map
and empirically explore the rapidly changing field of news production
and today’s differentiated ecology of news provision.” (ibid: 3) News
ethnographies, even in their heydays, remained confined to Western
settings. (see for example: Warner, 1971; Epstein, 1973; Altheide, 1976;
Murphy, 1976; Tuchman, 1973, 1978; Schlesinger, 1978; Golding and
Elliott, 1979; Gans, 1979; Fishman, 1980; Ericson et al. 1987; Soloski,
1989) “It has become routine for universalistic observations about the
media to be advanced in English-language books on the basis of
evidence derived from a tiny handful of countries.” (Curran and Park,

15
2000:1) “These are nearly always rich Western societies and the
occasional honorary “Western” country like Australia” (ibid).
It is in this context of a changing news ecology in India and a lack
of ethnographic approaches to studying newsrooms that this thesis
chooses to situate itself and make its intervention. A particular burden
of this work is to enquire if news practices in India are indeed different
from its western counterparts and how they contribute to the new
discourse of India resurgent.
Despite their focus on mostly western practices, the strength of
ethnographic studies in newsrooms is that the researcher can enter the
newsroom environment and describe practices from within,
contributing to a more nuanced form of theory. While there is an
abundance of material which has emerged out of India focusing on its
media and connecting it to a larger political economy discourse, there is
a significant lack of material looking at the particularities of practice. In
the sphere of television news production, there is none.
This study claims to be the first television newsroom
ethnography from India. The research is a result of ethnographic work
carried out in television newsrooms in two Indian cities: Kolkata
(previously Calcutta) and Mumbai (previously Bombay). The research
was situated in Star Ananda in Kolkata and in Star News in the city of
Mumbai. Both the news channels are part of Media Content and
Communication Services Ltd (MCCS); a joint venture between Rupert
Murdoch owned Star group and ABP (Anandabazar Patrika) TV, a
regional publishing house from Kolkata. The fieldwork was conducted
between November 2005 and September 2006. The first part of the
fieldwork was spent in Kolkata followed by an intensive five months in
Mumbai.

The Chapters

This thesis has eight chapters, including this introduction. The next
chapter, the literature review, is divided into three parts. The first deals

16
with the primary research concern: how is India articulated through its
mainstream media? It puts forward a theoretical framework through
which to understand the imagination of nationhood in India’s present
media ecology.
The second section contextualises the subjects of research, the
two television channels, Star News and Star Ananda, in the current
political economy of India. It compares present news channels on
Indian television to the state run television network Doordarshan which
until the early 90’s was the sole provider of television content in the
country. Doordarshan’s project of a “pan-Indian national programming”,
the political meddling in its day-to-day affairs and its attempt at
“nation-building” (Rajagopal, 2001) are examined in this section.
Contrasted against the Doordarshan days is the privatisation of
channels today and the market driven approach to news production.
The final section is a discussion of the advantages of ethnography as a
methodology with which to study newsrooms, and a review of earlier
such studies.
The third chapter discusses the specific research methods used
within the ethnographic framework: observer participation, depth
interviews and analysis of news content structures and how and why I
have employed such a triangulation. The chapter provides a detailed
account of the process of gaining access, ethical dilemmas of the
research and the limitations of this work. My reflections on the
fieldwork, relationship with the journalists and managers, my own
views of working in Mumbai and Kolkata and also particular episodes
that highlight the fieldwork experience are also discussed. This chapter
also has a section on the limitations of this thesis and other research
directions that might have been possible but which I did not follow.
By dwelling at length on my own self-narrative of being a
journalist in India prior to my academic pursuits and how it affected my
approach towards this thesis, this chapter adds to a growing body of
work done on Indian media, particularly in news, by former
practitioners. (Mehta, 2008 and Sonwalker, 2000) While there has been
much work in the UK and the US by journalists writing and commenting

17
on their own practices, in India such work, especially academic, is new
and emerging. This particular chapter therefore adds to a nascent body
of literature on Indian news media where the ethical dilemmas of being
both an insider (journalist) and an outsider (researcher) are worked
through. This is also a theme that is constantly evoked throughout this
thesis.
The fourth chapter, the first to focus exclusively on fieldwork,
suggests that the corporate section of today’s newsrooms is actively
involved in producing and planning news content. In detailing the work
practices of the corporate section of MCCS, I propose that earlier news
ethnographies paid scant attention to corporate strategies. Any
research on today’s advertisement driven news television houses that
ignores corporate influence on content will provide only a partial
picture of news determinants within an organisation. By examining
minutely the different sections in the corporate office of MCCS, namely
the chief executive officer’s functions and the sales, marketing, research
and human resources teams, this thesis argues that the traditional
editorial/corporate division in television news organisations no longer
holds. I claim that corporate responsibilities now include direct
editorial inputs. Observational data and interviews with key personnel
of each of the departments highlight how the corporate section designs,
plans and executes news strategies, news stories and news
programming. Specific instances are listed to support this argument.
This chapter, therefore, feeds into a pressing debate in media
theory in India, and indeed elsewhere. With the advent of private
television channels in the country, the role the corporate play in
editorial matters has assumed importance. In his book on newspaper
barons, The Paper Tigers (1998), Coleridge had observed the same
trend in the Indian newspaper industry in the late eighties. “Of all the
newspaper owners in the world, I met no one so single-mindedly
wedded to marketing as Samir Jain, [owner of India’s largest publishing
house, Bennett and Coleman and the publisher of The Times of India]”.
(1998: 81). By examining the particularities of how the corporate takes
on key editorial responsibilities, indeed to a point where a distinction

18
between the two becomes immaterial, I attempt to provide media
theory with empirical data with which to understand the ever
spreading tentacles of a market driven, ratings obsessed media
industry. This is not to be read as a straightforward imposition on
editorial practices by the corporate, as there is in fact close
collaboration between the editorial and the corporate teams. As much
as the corporate assumes editorial functions, the editorial team
inculcates the mantra of maximising profitability.
In the fifth chapter I examine the newsrooms of Star Ananda and
Star News. It offers a comparative analysis of work practices in Kolkata
and Mumbai. By doing so, it wades into some of the major academic
debates on news media theory. Academic work has often portrayed
journalists as unthinking, unconscious subjects (Ericson et al. 1987).
How does this claim hold up in today’s market driven newsrooms of
India? Soloski has argued, “objectivity is the most important
professional norm and from it flows more specific aspects of news
professionalism” (1989: 213). How is objectivity understood in Indian
television newsrooms and what are its consequences? Has the meaning
of the term changed given the changing news ecology? Is news mere
“routinisation” of production processes? (Halloran, et al. 1970) What
kind of professional socialisation goes on in Indian newsroom and what
are its consequences? How does peer group pressure work in these
contexts? Who is the audience, how are they imagined and, as I argue,
how are they “captured” in newsrooms? In contrast to the academic
debates about the “forgotten audience,” or audience as the “missing
link” (Schlesinger, 1978: 106), my empirical data suggest that Indian
television news is all about the audience and its construction. Instead of
assuming that Indian news practices are identical to Western
professional practices, this research enters the newsroom milieu, see it
at different times of the day, and understand news practices as well as
journalists’ interpretation of them.
Several themes emerge. The key among them being the concern
news producers have for maximising profits. While the corporate has
clawed its way into the editorial, the latter too has become a willing ally.

19
The onus placed on Television Rating Points (TRP), a quantitative
viewership monitoring mechanism devised by the market, has rendered
editorial judgement captive to it. News producers have now come to
view these numbers as reflective of their own performance.
Journalists however, cannot be dismissed as mere cogs in the
wheel, “unwittingly, unconsciously serving as a support for the
reproduction of a dominant ideological discursive field” (Hall, 1982:
82). In Mumbai several journalists I interviewed were critical of their
own practices. Many felt that they were compromising on “news values”
and “ethics” but stated that the job demanded it. In Kolkata though, this
critical reflection was absent and journalists dismissed any notions of
“values” in news, stating that the primary motive was to increase
profitability.
The audience is the primary concern of both the editorial and the
corporate and the sixth chapter examines how the audience is
understood in the two television newsrooms in particular and the
media industry in general. Unlike traditional work on audience studies,
this chapter attempts to understand the audience as a discursive
formation and explores how its imaginings within a newsroom affect
news content. It looks at the audience in two separate ways. Firstly, it
focuses on the quantitative aspects of measuring the audience. It
explains the mechanics of TRP data collection with a brief background
on Television Audience Measurement (TAM), the company responsible
for collecting and collating the data in India. By explaining the
procedure, reviewing the literature on television ratings and examining
the political economy of television news production in India, the
chapter claims that ratings target affluent audiences and television
content is produced for this wealthy section of Indian television
watching public.
Secondly, through interviews with journalists, the chapter
attempts to understand the journalists’ imagining or understanding of
the audience. It establishes that journalists in both the cities imagine
themselves as the audience and produce a content that they think they
or their families and friends would like. Given that journalists belong to

20
an elite section of society, the news content becomes an articulation by
the privileged for the privileged and “in this promised land, the poor are
wished away, for everyone’s full potential may be realised and well-
being achieved by all” (Chakravorty and Gooptu, 2000: 91).
This discourse of the elite is not an Indian phenomenon. The
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has published an impressive body of
work on the question of how societal elites manage to reproduce
themselves thus consolidating and entrenching their position in society
(see Bourdieu, 1973). The chapter on news audiences therefore
addresses a major body of work in social and cultural theory. But while
connecting to this larger debate, it shows the particularities of Indian
newsrooms where a certain articulation of audience is privileged over
others, justified over claims of viewership demands. Presenting
interviews with journalists, the chapter then explores the processes of
newsroom socialisation through which this becomes common rationale.
The seventh chapter analyses the structures of news content in
the two channels. Seeking to connect news content with corporate
strategies and editorial processes, I claim a causal link between the two.
I argue that pursuit of a certain audience, an obsession with TRP ratings
and a certain professional socialisation in news rooms leads to
television journalists’ understanding of news being skewed and
homogenised leading in turn to a colonising of communication space by
‘cricket, crime and cinema’.
The debate about tabloidisation and dumbing down of news
content is an ongoing one. Writing in the context of broadcast
journalism in America, Schudson has critiqued the “intrusion of
marketplace values into the professionalism of journalists (2003, 90).”
Thussu states that “[t]he lack of concern among television news
networks for India’s majority population is ironic in a country which
was the first in the world to use satellite television for developmental
purposes” (2007: 111).
It has been argued that in pursuit of advertisement revenue,
news channels are dumbing down content to reach the lowest common
denominator. William Mazzarella in his ethnographic study of the

21
Indian advertising market in the early 2000s, quoting an industry
executive talks of the Indian predilection for uproarious tamasha or
spectacle in advertising content. (2003: 220) Interestingly, Thussu uses
the same term, tamasha, to describe news content in India. (Thussu,
2007: 91) My work connects these two worlds, of advertising and news
content, and shows the processes by which in the latter’s pursuit of the
former, news content gets reduced to a tamasha or spectacle.
The concluding chapter comes back to the beginning, addressing
the questions I started out with and attempting to provide certain
frames through which the entire work might be analysed. As mentioned
earlier, a key ambition for this work is to understand the notion of
‘India’, and the practices through which the ‘nation’ is articulated. The
media articulates national identity and to an extent the country’s
imagining of its role or position in global politics. It is often the media
that becomes the “primary site for the exposition of different social and
political discourses…” (Chakravorty and Gooptu, 2000: 93). In India,
with its transitional economy emerging from decades of trade barriers
and restrictions, the news media business is creating a homogenised
notion of nationhood. My thesis concludes that the new India is only for
a few thousand: the sample size audience of rating companies. It is
imagined by even fewer, the journalists of the new Indian television
newsrooms. Together, they articulate and live the dream of ‘Cricket,
Crime and Cinema.’
Meant to be a detailed case study of news practices from
emerging economies in the South, the concluding chapter looks at the
empirical evidence against some of the established ‘orthodoxies’ of
media studies in news theory and analyse how they hold up to scrutiny
in a different news setting and a new century (Cottle, 2000). (See
Chapter 2 for a detailed account of these orthodoxies) Are they still
useful tools to determine and analyse journalistic practice? This section
works through the orthodoxies and the evidence to see how they might
still be useful categories for analysis in India and elsewhere.

Research Claims

22
 In summary, this thesis makes three broad claims. First, the
assumed traditional divide between corporate and editorial no longer
exists in Indian television. Each does the job of the other and a
distinction between them, at least in this context, is academic. Second,
journalists imagine themselves as the audience and produce content
they think they and their families would like. Given that these
professionals mostly come from prosperous backgrounds, across
television channels in India a singular narrative in content and a
hegemonic understanding of an affluent nation is achieved. Connected
to this is my third claim. In pursuit of advertisements, which target
wealthier sections of society, television channels too focus on the same
group as their primary or core audience. With journalists coming from
the same economic class as the target audience, a match-making takes
place. Privileged journalists articulate for a privileged audience and a
hegemonic, unvarying content is produced across news channels.
The remit of this work is varied. For media scholars, journalists
and anyone else interested in Southern practices, the thesis provides a
detailed case study of two Indian newsrooms. To the theorist, it
provides empirical evidence to challenge and build on existing
frameworks of media theory. To the ethnographer, the work provides
an example of how a practitioner turned academic might approach
his/her subject of study and the resultant conflicts and dilemmas that
arise in different situations. For journalists everywhere and Indians in
particular, this work attempts to hold up a mirror to their own practices
by someone who, not very long ago, was part of their curious breed.

23
 Chapter 2
Literature Review

How does a country where 456 million people live below the poverty
line get to frame itself as an economic power house? 5 The average
Indian family today consumes 100 kilograms of food less than it did in
1991 when the process of economic reforms started to kick in.
Incidents of farmers, unable to pay back loans, committing suicide have
become so regular that they are relegated to the inside pages of local
dailies. Yet, national parties coined ‘India Shining’ campaigns as election
platforms and the Indian media jumped on the bandwagon. 6
As any social reality, ‘nationalism’ is a historically situated
concept and hence discursive. One of the key areas where such
discourse is played out is in the media: it is often the media that
becomes the “primary site for the exposition of different social and
political discourses…” (Chakravorty and Gooptu, 2000: 93). Recent
work in media studies on the relationship between media and
nationalism has argued that the “inequalities of power or the
homogenising tendencies” (Hallam and Street, 2000: 7)of the process of
nationalism, creates media biases and forces an articulation on those
who resist or are marginalised from this national identity. This process
is further aided by the present day media’s penchant of targeting
specific audiences groups, thereby marginalising entire sections, which
it does not consider its core readers or viewers.
One of the primary concerns of this work is to understand how
the transformed, capital intensive and entertainment driven Indian
media, especially television news, imagines nationhood in the 21 st
century. Who does it include and who are excluded from this
imaginary? To do this, the first part of the literature review will put
forward a theoretical framework through which we can analyse the
5
Source: the World Bank report on India in 2007. The global poverty line is measured
at $1.25 per person per day.
6
The Bharatiya Janata Party ran the 2005 general elections in India on the India
Shining campaign and contrary to popular belief, suffered a humiliating defeat. The
country’s news media, almost without exception had predicted a landslide win for the
BJP.
24
empirical material. The second part of the chapter is a historical
reconstruction of Indian television. If we are to understand how present
day television media is reconfiguring nationhood, Doordarshan and its
efforts to build a pan Indian nation for three decades, until the late
eighties, must be understood. This section will pay attention to the
state run television channel’s efforts and contrast it with the glitz and
glamour of the private channels. Having identified the theoretical
frameworks and the context in which this study is situated, the third
and final part of this review will discuss news ethnographies, their
advantages and blind spots as a methodology. It will attempt to
establish why, in the Indian context and given our research questions
and concerns, this was felt to be the most appropriate approach for this
work.

Nationhood: Theoretical Frameworks

Benedict Anderson’s work serves as a departure point for this analysis,

especially since his conceptualisation of the link between the rise of the
nation and the rise of print capitalism resonates with my own concerns
in this investigation. In Anderson’s analysis, printed texts – the novel
and the newspaper - which first developed in Europe in the eighteenth
century and then spread to the Third World through a spread of print
capitalism, came to provide the technical means to forge the idea of the
nation in societies outside Europe (Anderson, 1983).
“But the revolution of print capitalism and the cultural affinities
and dialogues unleashed by it were only modest precursors to the
world we live in now” (Appadurai, 1990: 28). In India, the rapidly
growing media spaces (especially since the explosion of the media
market since the 1990s in India) were constructing a new idea of the
‘authentic’ Indian. Private television channels were eroding
Doordarshan’s pan Indian nationhood, influenced by Nehruvian
socialism and ideas of nation building. The “imagined community” was
being re-articulated. The new private television channels, though
substantially free from state control, were not “a democratic electronic

25
public sphere where all voices are freely represented and heard, and
which apparently appeal to the free domain of popular imagination”
(Chakravorty and Gooptu, 2000: 91). Instead, as my empirical evidence
will show, particular visions achieve dominance through constant re-
articulation (see chapter 7).
Michel Foucault has changed our perceptions of knowledge,
linking it intrinsically with power (power/knowledge complex) through
discourse (see Foucault, 1972). Foucault has argued that discourse
constructs the topic, that “[D]iscourse is a group of statements which
provide a language for talking about ...a particular topic at a particular
historical moment” (Hall, 1997: 44). The study of discourses includes
the rules which prescribe certain ways of talking about some topics and
excluding others and how knowledge about a topic acquires authority, a
sense of embodying the ‘truth’ about it. This knowledge linked to
power not only assumes the authority of ‘the truth’ but has the power to
make itself true, “not the Truth of knowledge in the absolute sense but
of a discursive formation sustaining a regime of truth” (Hall, 1997: 49-
50). Calling into question the overall category of ‘reality’, Foucault
demystifies the ‘regimes of truth,’ (media, governments, agencies, world
views, etc) which claim that there is a singular version of reality that
can be identified.
If there can be multiple versions of social reality, then
construction of nationhood will be a contested one, given the
opportunity. The Indian television economy, with its hundreds of
channels, might be producing a range of myths which could then be
producing multiple versions of the nation. Indeed, as Appadurai has
argued, the electronic “mediascape” might even transcend the notion of
the nation. Eloquently extending Anderson’s argument, Appadurai finds
a link between the post-national imaginary and the electronic media.

“[...] as mass mediation becomes increasingly dominated by the

electronic media, (and thus delinked from the capacity to read and
write), and as such media increasingly link producers and audiences
across national boundaries, and as these audiences themselves start

26
 new conversations between those who move and those who stay, we
find a growing number of diasporic public spheres (1990: 22).

Appadurai’s argument “that the era in which we could assume that

viable public spheres were typically, exclusively, or necessarily
national could be at an end” (ibid) is seductive. Indeed, as I mentioned
in the Introduction, I had started out this journey hoping to find a land
of ‘multiple Indias’ articulated by a myriad television channels. Reality
however, or rather my empirical evidence, argued otherwise.
Doordarshan’s unvarying idea of India promoted relentlessly on the
airwaves had indeed given way to the market forces of capitalism and
private channels. But instead of Appadurai’s post-modern dream,
another unvarying notion of India had come to the fore, dominated by
a middle class consumer revolution. Between 1980 and 1989, India
saw a 47.5 per cent rise in consumption expenditure (Dubey 1992:
150). This process received a further boost following the opening up
of the economy in the 1990s. A new and confident middle class,
animated by the vision of setting India on a newly liberated path of
progress and economic prominence on the world stage, “assumed for
themselves the role of the makers of the nation in new ways. In the
emerging middle class political vision, the nation is a community of
citizens who are enfranchised by freedom of choice, consumption and
material gratification and a lifestyle of enjoyment and pleasure”
(Chakravorty and Gooptu 2000: 91).
Arvind Rajagopal, writing on India and this new television
audience, has argued that the market reforms of the early 1990s and
two epic television serials, The Ramayana and The Mahabharata
helped the rise of Hindu nationalism in India (2001). “Liberalisation
and Hindu nationalism shared their technologies of transmission for
expanding markets and audiences respectively. If their messages and
their adherents overlapped or crossed over, it was not necessarily out
of conscious design, although design was not absent” (ibid: 3). My
empirical evidence is closer to Rajagopal’s than that of Appadurai’s
post national imaginary. The former has drawn an “opportunistic”
alliance between a resurgent middle classes and Hindu nationalists
27
 facilitated by television images in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
(2001:3). It is Rajagopal’s resurgent nationalist middle class which by
the turn of the century had turned into the core audience of Indian
television. The next part of this chapter elaborates how, dictated
primarily by market economics, Doordarshan moved away, in the late
1980s from its earlier goals of ‘education’ and ‘nation-building’ and
how private channels took this process forward to construct a middle
class India.

Doordarshan: Building a “nation”

In a charmingly informal book of his days as the Director of

Doordarshan, Indian Administrative Service7 (IAS) officer Bhaskar
Ghose talks about his experiences in the state-run television service
(Ghose, 2005). Full of political intrigue, the book is an insider account of
the state control over the airwaves in India until the storm of satellite
television caught it unawares. Bhaskar Ghose was plucked from an
insurgency ridden North Bengal where he was the district
commissioner, brought to Delhi at the behest of Rajiv Gandhi, Prime
Minister and head of the Congress Party in the mid eighties, and
appointed to take over Doordarshan. Despite Gandhi’s personal interest
in Ghosh’s appointment, intrigues were never far away and a political
dismissal was always at hand. Ghose recalls an instance at a party
where he met the late Rajiv Gandhi when he was the Director of
Doordarshan:

The formalities were over, and I was leaving, when Rajiv Gandhi
called me back.
‘Bhaskar”, he said. ‘just stay on a minute.’
Rajiv Gandhi personally went to the door that led to the main
corridor of the Parliament building and locked it.
‘What’s all this I hear about your being anti-Congress?’ he asked.

7
Indian Administrative Service is popularly known by its acronym IAS. It originated as
the elite civil service of the Indian Government under colonial rule and was formerly
known as the Indian Civil Services. It continues in the contemporary civil services of
India, though these are now organised differently.
28
 ‘Anti-Congress, sir?’ I said completely surprised. ‘I’m not anti-
Congress or anti or pro any party.’
‘That what I thought,’ Rajiv said. ‘But all these Bengal MPS in the
Congress are saying your news is slanted against the Congress. They
say you’re Jyoti Basu’s man.’ He laughed in that very contagious way
he had. (Ghose, 2005:163)

Despite the evident political overtones of the reported conversation,

Rajiv Gandhi was a young, relatively modernising prime minister who
was attempting to bring Doordarshan out of the top heavy, state
controlled approach of earlier decades. By the mid eighties, “[l]ed by
Rajiv Gandhi-now the prime minister of the nation, a younger, more
urbane, Anglophile, and technophile generation took charge of
producing a new, more cosmopolitan image of Indian television”
(Kumar, 2006: 34). The cosmopolitan image that was to emerge in the
late eighties was a far cry from the objective for which public broadcast
television in India was said to have been started. Indian television had
begun as a socio economic educational project for villagers in India in
1959 (Thomas, 2005: 99). In January 1960, in collaboration with the
Delhi Directorate of Education, All India Radio began producing one-
hour educational programmes for students in higher secondary schools.
In the same month, Ford Foundation sent a team of experts to examine
some of the educational programmes being made and made a grant of
$564,000 to the government of India as partial support for a four-year
educational project.

“General television services were launched with an one hour daily

transmissions from Delhi on the eighteenth anniversary of Indian
independence, August 15, 1965. Although entertainment and
informational programming was introduced as part of the “General
Service,” the proclaimed goal of television broadcasting in India was
educational, and programming emphasised issues such as adult
literacy and rural development. General Service consisted of a ten-
minute “News Round Up” mostly read by an on-screen presenter in a
format developed for All India Radio” (Kumar, 2006:27).

29
The late 1960s was a period of expansion for television in India;
broadcasting stations were established outside Delhi, in Mumbai (then
Bombay), in the troubled states of Jammu and Kashmir and in Amritsar
to counter the flow of Pakistani television programmes. By 1975,
centres were operating in Chennai and Kolkata (then Madras and
Calcutta respectively). The political overtones of the central
government and the way it chose to operate television services were
evident in the fact that the opening of the centres was embroiled in
controversies. In Kolkata which is a bastion of the Left, the party which
ruled the state of West Bengal never felt adequately represented on
television as central bureaucrats controlled television programming.
“The authorities seem to forget that India is a federal polity, with its
multi-racial, multi-lingual and multi-cultural components…’, wrote Jyoti
Basu, the long serving chief minister of West Bengal (cited in Page and
Crawley, 2001: 63).
Central control also meant the domination of Hindi over other
languages. The promotion of Hindi as the national language ran into
problems and political agitation in Madras (Chennai) (Kumar, 2006:
29). As Page and Crawley point out: “in linguistically diverse countries,
central control tended to involve the reinforcement of a dominant
language- in Indian, Hindi, in Pakistan, Urdu and in Nepal, Nepali” (Page
and Crawley, 2001: 62). The declaration of a state of emergency in June
1975 by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and her use of All India
Radio (AIR) and Doordarshan as propaganda machinery, further
confirmed the political usage of the media by the central government.
After the emergency and the defeat of the Indira Gandhi government in
1977, the fledgling political party, Janata Dal came to the helm. With a
promise of sweeping changes, the new government appointed former
newspaper editor B G Verghese as the head of an independent
commission to decrease governmental control in broadcasting. While
impressive on paper, the commission’s recommendations could not
make much headway as Janata Dal lost power owing to internal
frictions, bringing the Congress Party back to the centre in 1980. Mrs
Gandhi immediately shelved all proposals of decentralising

30
broadcasting. But other events conspired to wrench governmental
control away from television broadcasting in India.

The 1982 Asian Games

New Delhi was awarded the opportunity of hosting the Ninth Asian
Games in 1982 and this event more than any other, until the economic
liberalisation of the 1990s, propelled the growth of television in India.
Colour television was introduced during the games and a technological
overhaul began. Ghose, writing in his capacity as then Director of
Doordarshan, states: “The most elaborate preparations ever to have
been made for a sports event of this kind were taken up, with a high
powered organising committee headed by Rajiv Gandhi, assisted by a
number of his friends and an assortment of experts from different
fields” (2005: 28). The relatively small Indian middle class – which until
now had little to do with the television agenda of the government – got
their first taste of entertainment programming, and of colour. A decade
and a half later, this small Indian middle class was proclaimed as the
largest such economic group in the world, and to become the focus of
advertisers and news producers, both nationally and internationally.
“The gradual shift of successive Indian governments from an
earlier commitment to socialism, together with the hosting of the Asian
Games, prompted the massive growth of television in the country”
(Thomas, 2005: 100). The Asian Games not only ushered in colour and
efforts to modernise the television broadcasting infrastructure in India,
but it also initiated a movement away from ‘educating’ to ‘entertaining’.
Though an effort to merge the two together continued for some more
time, it was the latter which gradually gained primacy.

Entertaining the Nation

The success of Hum Log (We the People), a soap opera centred around
the everyday lives of a North Indian joint family, highlights
Doordarshan’s efforts to combine the educational with entertainment.

31
Starting in July 1984, two years after the Asian Games, “Hum Log was an
attempt to blend Doordarshan’s stated objectives of providing
entertainment to its audience, while promoting within the limits of a
dominant patriarchal system, such educational issues as family
planning, equal status for women, and family harmony” (Singhal and
Rogers, 1990: 75, cited in Kumar, 2006:32).
As this thesis is concerned with production practices, it is
interesting to note the circumstances under which soap operas –
‘serials’ in Doordarshan parlance - came to Indian television and its
production practices. Ghose, then Director of Doordarshan, writes:

Early in the 1980s, David Poindexter, president of a US-based NGO

called Population Communications International, brought to the
Ministry of Information and Broadcasting the idea of using soap
operas to communicate social messages subliminally. The then
secretary, S.S Gill, was interested and Poindexter was able to bring in
Miguel Sabido, a pioneering producer of soap operas in Mexico who
had used them successfully to carry out messages about family
planning. Why this started in Mexico isn’t difficult to explain. In a
predominantly Roman Catholic country like Mexico, family planning
in any form frowned upon; advocating it on television is out of the
question. Nevertheless, concern over the high rate of population
growth led to the idea of using soap operas to convey, very subtly,
messages about the benefits of small families, the misery that afflicts
large families living on a small income, the better quality of care
received by children in small families and so on. Nothing overt, just
ideas woven into the storylines of what were otherwise turgid family
dramas (Ghose, 2005: 33).

The Pan-Indian and Me

I have used the experiential as a media practitioner quite extensively

through this thesis. When it comes to situating the self as part of pan-
Indian audience watching Hum Log, memory is an unstable analytical
tool, given that they are from childhood and recollected only in patches.
Nonetheless, contextualising these memories, along with the available

32
literature should help to enunciate the notion of “India” and “Indianess”
which the Doordarshan bosses and their political masters were striving
to achieve.
I grew up in Guwahati, the capital city of Assam, situated in the
north-east of India. The seven states comprising the region have been
mired in insurgency and separatist movements throughout the colonial
period and since Indian Independence (see Nag, 1991). Part of
Doordarshan’s strategy of nation building was an attempt at national
integration through their programming. This included a show of
regional films every Sunday afternoon starting with Assamese, then
Bengali, then Bhojpuri and so on, through the twenty-five official
languages in alphabetical order until it came back to Assamese.
However inclusive it attempted to be, the domination of Delhi and the
Hindi language was always obvious. Serials like Hum Log conveyed a
notion of what the “Indian” family was like. The story of a North Indian
family and their trials and tribulations over three generations are
portrayed as the defining characteristics of families all across the
country, with the Hindi language taking precedence over all others.
Disconnected from the North of India geographically, I was part of a
television audience which was sold the notion of an ideal Indian family,
with “patriotic pride, family planning, gender relations and communal
harmony” doled out in large dollops through the episodic narrative
(Kumar, 1996: 32). Well known veteran film actor Ashok Kumar used to
sign off each of the 156 episodes by translating the show’s title into a
different Indian language and his “one-minute summary came to
symbolise Doordarshan’s programming agenda of creating a collective
union of the nation’s diverse linguistic and ethnic communities.” (ibid:
33).

Selling the ‘nation’

At the same time, the broadcasting of Hum Log also signalled a new era
of commercialisation on Indian television: Doordarshan entered into a
contract with Food Specialities Limited, the Indian subsidiary of Nestle,

33
to sponsor the production of the serial. Food Specialities agreed to pay
the production costs in return for the rights to advertise its product,
Maggi Two Minute Noodles, nationally. With an estimated audience of
sixty million, the sales of Maggi Two Minute Noodles “increased from
none in 1982 to 1,600 tons in 1983, 4200 tons in 1985, 10,000 tons in
1990 and 15,000 tons in 1998” (Singhal and Rogers, 1990:100, cited in
Kumar, 2006:33). The huge economic success of Hum Log would alter
the “educational” aspect of this and later serials, planned as they were
around Mexican prototypes.

Indeed, the serial was so successful financially that the producers

gave up all pretensions of carrying any message, however subliminal
or subtle. The scriptwriter began to write plain soap opera episodes
that lost none of the popularity of the original episodes; if anything,
they were watched even more widely. This was only the beginning.
Hum Log was followed by serials like Buniyaad, all of them brought in
handsome profits to the producers (Ghose, 2005: 35).

The commercialisation of programming on Doordarshan was soaring by

the mid-1980s and a new breed of younger politicians led by Rajiv
Gandhi discarded the early designs for using Doordarshan as a public
medium for national development in favour of a more entertainment-
oriented commercial culture. Shanta Kumar writes:

As advertising and commercial sponsorship of sporting events,

sitcoms, soap operas, dharmic serials, and film based programming
brought in considerable revenues, Doordarshan effectively
manipulated its monopoly over viewers across the country by
strategically scheduling what the network called national
programming during the prime time hours of late evenings and
weekends (1996: 35).

Arvind Rajagopal has argued that the emergence of Doordarshan’s

“national programming” as a pan-Indian genre was crucial for the
postcolonial project of nation building (cited in Kumar, 2006: 35).
Rajagopal, defining the notion of national programming on Doordarshan
writes that the network relied on programmes which portrayed an
34
idealised, mythical and historical past which ignored latter day
divisions and present realities.

I choose the term “national” to indicate the broad cross-regional

appeal of the programmes, and their (usually implicit but sometimes
explicit) elaboration of a national culture. The state’s appeal to myth
and history (intermingled, as always) is instrumental in this purpose.
A shared past, behind and above all latter-day divisions, is projected
as the crucible in which a distinctive Indian identity was shaped. This
identity is, of course, under fierce dispute as competing interests vie
to redefine its character; currently, minorities, especially Muslims,
are threatened by a blatantly “Hinduized” national identity. (ibid)

Rajagopal developed this argument in his later work (2001) to argue

that the rise of Hindu nationalism fed on two factors: the market
liberalisation which led to a middle class resurgence and the cultural
symbolics of television, primarily the airing of two religious epics, the
Ramayana and the Mahabharata. I focus briefly here on how these
serials were produced as it elaborates the state interference in
Doordarshan and also the gradual move towards commercialisation of
the Indian airwaves.

Producing the ‘myth’ of India

Ghose makes it clear that the genesis of historical serials came from the
Congress Party, from no less than the then Prime Minister and its
leader, Rajiv Gandhi. (Following Rajagopal’s argument, it is ironic that
it was the pro-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which rode the
Hindu revivalist movement on the back of such serials and came to
prominence). Ghose writes that in early 1985 Rajiv Gandhi had written
to the minister for information and broadcasting, V.N Gadgil, stating
that the serials being shown on Doordarshan should depict “the values
that were enshrined in our ancient texts and philosophy, the kind of
values that were contained in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.”
(2005: 38). In those days, Doordarshan had few in-house serials; two
Mumbai based film directors, Ramanand Sagar and B R Chopra were
35
brought in to direct them. Sagar’s relationship with Ghose was stormy,
with the latter referring to former as an ‘old bandicoot’ in his memoirs
(2005:40). Referring to the quality of the serial as ‘awful’, Ghose is still
forced to air it because of political pressure. The following exchange
between Ghose and Gadgil, the minister elaborates the situation:

‘What did you think of Sagar’s Ramayana serial?’ he (Gadgil) asked.

‘What you did, sir,’ I (Ghose) said. ‘It’s awful.”
Gadgil sighed and nodded. ‘Yes, I know. Yes. But you see,’ he said
looking away, ‘I’m afraid we have to start screening it.’…. ‘I have no
choice. Some MPs have begun saying that we are holding it back. I
believe they mean to speak to the PM.’ (ibid: 40)

The religious overtones of the serial meant that Ramanand Sagar could
continue to get extensions as politicians did not want to be blamed for
stopping it and hurting majority Hindu sentiments. When Ghose
attempted to stop the extension of the serial, Sagar told him that the
consequences would be severe. Ghose retorts that the consequences
would have to be faced; to which Sagar plays his trump card:

‘Even if it comes up in Parliament?’ the bandicoot asked me softly.

‘What will the mantriji (minister) say then?…. ‘You know it cannot be
stopped now,’ Sagar continued…. ‘There will be chaos if it is stopped.’
(ibid: 42)

Ramayana and Mahabharata, despite questionable aesthetics, helped

further the commercialisation of television in India. While political
interference in Doordarshan was rife, and continues to this day; in the
late 1980s, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and his advisers attempted to
move away from the socialist era and the Nehruvian notion of nation
building and development which had dominated Doordarshan, towards
a more entertaining style in programming (see Kumar, 2006: 35). This
can be seen as the precursor to a television industry now solely
focussed on entertainment and the middle class. It will be helpful here
to examine the conditions under which the explosion of channels took
place and how, in a competitive market vying for the same eye balls

36
(that of middle class India), this gave rise both to homogeneity and a
dumbing down of content.

The Indian Television Industry: 1990s to date

The catalysts of the booming television industry in India were two

separate events: the opening up of the economy in the early 1990s
(Bhatt, 1994: 1), followed by the first Gulf War. The former brought
cable television to India; the latter showed what a spectacle it could
provide (see Kumar, 2006: 3).

By the early 1990s, a number of factors had come together to

challenge the viability of governments’ control of the electronic
media. Among these were the emergence of a democratic consensus
across the region, the growth of a more independent press, the
popularity of video, the beginnings of economic liberalisation and the
development of a new, extended, urban middle class in India and
other countries. (Page and Crawley, 2001: 68)

The Indian government’s control over the electronic media, so carefully

orchestrated during its inception in the 60’s, was breached indirectly.
As in much of South Asia, it was the rapid rise of videos that broke the
monopoly. “Though more of a threat to cinema than to TV, it gave the
middle classes a greater choice of entertainment, whether through
imported western films or the latest products of Bollywood” (ibid: 66).
Two significant developments therefore took place almost
simultaneously: the rise of a new middle class in India, and the rapid
growth of a market driven media that catered to and articulated middle
class imaginings. An inkling of the possibilities of television came with
CNN’s coverage of the 1991 Gulf War. The telecasting of live events set a
new benchmark for television journalism. CNN might have created the
awareness, but there were other agents which made change possible in
the South Asian broadcasting scene. Page and Crawley point to three:
the AsiaSat-1 satellite - the first Asia specific satellite available for
television broadcasting in the region; the entertainment oriented

37
content which proved highly attractive, as opposed to the fare doled out
by national networks; and the cable system created to meet local
demand for new satellite service (Page and Crawley, 2001: 76). A
Chinese capitalist operating out of Hong Kong, Li Ka-Shing, owned
AsiaSat1, which provided satellite coverage to both private and national
broadcasters from Turkey to Japan. But it was Mr Ka-Shing’s
broadcasting company Hutchison Whampoa that started the revolution
called Star (Satellite Television Asia Region) TV, later bought by Rupert
Murdoch’s News Corporation in 1993.
India was not meant to be a central target and the “phenomenal
success of Star in winning and audience in India was a surprise to Star’s
own managers” (ibid: 77). Within six months, India was Star’s biggest
market, despite it targeting only the English speaking elite. Soap operas
like The Bold and the Beautiful and Santa Barbara became household
names. Yet, its access to most of India was restricted because of the
language barrier. Private channels came up rapidly to fill this gap,
including none less than Zee TV. Beamed through AsiaSat-1, Zee became
an international player in its own right. Regional channels with
language specific audiences sprang up across the country and channels
like Eenadu TV and Sun TV in South India established an audience
loyalty in the late nineties. With the relative marginalisation of English,
Star launched Hindi language channels and its impact was felt
immediately.
The archaic broadcasting laws of India formulated during the
colonial era were meant to maintain the government’s monopoly over
the airwaves but a Supreme Court decision in 1995, stating that the
airwaves belonged to the public, forced a review of the laws. The Indian
Government did not allow private players to broadcast from India and
thus most used Hong Kong as their base and AsiaSat-1 as their satellite.
But in 1998, the government removed this restriction, allowing even
more channels to come into play.

38
Origins of the Private News Channels in India

Here we return our focus to the transnational news channels in India

and their sudden growth. The importance of owning news channels for
broadcasters was also because of the perceived impact they could have
on the governments in South Asia, especially in their attitudes towards
broadcasting regulation and also as a key tool for lobbying for change
in them (Crawley and Page, 2006: 87). CNN, as mentioned above, was
the first channel to open up the possibilities of live news in the Asian
market. Despite the success of its 1991 Gulf War coverage, CNN, which
was formed in 1985, took a further four years to start operations in
Asia. It opened its first Asian Bureau in Hong Kong in 1995 and within
three years it had seven bureaus in the continent, one of them being in
New Delhi. “The nature of globalisation in the 1990s underlined the
importance of strategic alliances between broadcasters, or between
broadcaster and distributor, and the short-lived nature of some of those
agreements” (Page and Crawley, 2001: 84). In India, CNN operated with
both private and public broadcasters. It collaborated with NDTV in
1993 for selected news coverage to be shown on Doordarshan’s
national network. The programme, The World This Week, became one of
the top rated programmes on Doordarshan and made Prannoy Roy, the
head of NDTV, a household name. The fact that within fifteen years,
NDTV had four channels of its own - three devoted exclusively to news
and one to entertainment - exemplifies the fast moving economy of
news business in India.
The BBC and CNN were in competition in India. While the BBC
was constrained financially because of its charter and financial
obligation as the British domestic public service, CNN was able to move
more quickly, at least initially. It was successful in signing a partnership
with Doordarshan in 1995, making it the first broadcaster to be allowed
on an Indian satellite (INSAT2B), though two years later the agreement
was revoked. The BBC’s constraints were to a large extent mitigated by
the creation of BBC Worldwide in 1996. Its operation in Asia had started
earlier with its partnering with the Hutchison Whampoa Group in

39
providing news and information to the Star TV network. This came to
an end when Murdoch took control of Star in 1993 with different
agendas and goals to the BBC. The latter went on to sign deals with
private television groups in India. One such group was the largely
unsuccessful Home TV for which the BBC provided news in Hindi. With
the launch of satellites like the American PanAmSat; CNN, BBC and
other similar groups found an easy access to Asian televisions sets
through cable operators who were able to receive these satellite signals
and thereby upload directly to homes. This allowed for beaming signals
from outside (Hong Kong) and circumvented government regulations in
India as well as regarding foreign television companies in Pakistan, Sri
Lanka and Bangladesh.
In providing Hindi news for Home TV, the BBC had realised that
the attraction of an international broadcaster lay in its ability not only
to provide global news but also to focus on regionally focussed news, a
mantra which Star TV took to heart under Murdoch. In fact, much of
Star’s strategies were derived from earlier experiments by BBC and
CNN. The latter were the first to rope in NDTV. Star News was produced
completely by NDTV, both in Hindi and English. This allowed Star to
cash in on the experience and popularity already created by The World
This Week, the earlier news programme produced by NDTV in
collaboration with CNN.
The news genre was to be fragmented into more specific areas,
especially business and sports news. Niche broadcasting or ‘narrow
broadcasting’ focus took advantage of the global reach of satellites and
their ability to target specific audiences, and channels like Singapore-
based Asian Business News International (ABNI) developed business
specific news channels. Within this niche, “there was a dual target:
viewers and opinion-formers as well as potential investors.” (Page and
Crawley, 2006: 84). As my chapter on content analysis shows, even
within general news channels, niche programming, specific business
hour news, sports news and news on cinema and entertainment are
more the norm than the exception. The Head of Research at MCCS,
Jyotsna told me in an interview:

40
 In a broad sense the genre is news, but within news it is amazing
what the possibilities are. It could be a news show based on
automobiles, a news show on finance, or it could be a news show
targeting the women or youth. So programmes are completely slotted
based on viewership data, and also on past experience and on what
the competition is showing at that time (09/05/2006).

News Channels in India: The Present

If CNN became a household name during the Gulf war, fifteen years
later, in a partnership venture with India Business Network (IBN), it
had made its inroads into Indian livingrooms. CNN-IBN is just one of
eight national news channels in English in India, with at least four more
in the offing. Following in CNN’s footsteps, Reuters teamed up with
India’s biggest media conglomerate, the Bennett and Coleman Group,
and Times Now launched operations in 2006. However, compared to
Hindi, the growth of English channels has been slower. The latter’s
growth is astonishing, considering that the first such channel, Aaj Tak,
was launched in 2000 and only as a 20-minute capsule on Doordarshan.
Along with the available literature, I use the experiential (I was part of
the industry when the changes were happening) here to reconstruct the
shift of television news channels from English towards the regional
languages, especially Hindi.

The shift to regional languages

Following the success of Aaj Tak, Star News re-launched in 2003 and
started its own in-house production, launched only in Hindi. NDTV,
which until then had produced for Star News, launched both in Hindi
and English but with more prominence and money put into the former.
As part of the NDTV news set-up, my colleagues and I realised the
sudden differences in power relations with our Hindi colleagues.
English, until then was the preferred medium, with English language
journalists being paid more money and managing to secure more

41
privileges. Overnight, the balance of power shifted with the Hindi
channel, NDTV India getting new recruits with higher salaries and more
facilities like bigger studios and better equipment than their English
counterparts. Clearly, the advertising money was in the Hindi-speaking
market. For Star News, “within one week of the switch to Hindi, Star
News ratings almost doubled. (Thussu, 2007, 102)
Along with the success of Hindi news channels and targeting
niche audiences, vernacular news channels have also filled the
airwaves. Not just regional players were involved, but also international
players too. For example Star launched a Bengali news channel in
association with the Anandabazar Group in Bengal in 2006 and in 2008
launched a Marathi News channel. “Almost from its entry into the
volatile Indian broadcasting market in 1992, the localisation of his
operations in India was a unique character of Murdoch’s strategy in
India (Thussu: 101).” Regional giants in the South, Eenadu and Sun TV
launched their own news channels in early 2000 and today, local
language news channels exist in almost every Indian state. From just
three private news channels in the late 1990s, India now has over sixty
of them. There are seventeen Hindi language channels and eight in
English besides dozens in the various vernacular languages of the
country. Kumar notes:

Even a cursory glance at the changing landscape of Indian television

reveals that the meteoric rise of satellite and cable channels in the
1990s has disrupted the hegemony of state sponsored network,
Doordarshan, in unparalleled ways. (2006:2)

But the break with Doordarshan and the embracing of a market driven
television economy has not been without its problems. With no
competition and used by the government as a medium for propaganda,
Doordarshan’s programming focusing on education, development and
national integration, promoted a homogenised notion of the nation.
Private news channels however, whilst having a regional focus and
niche audiences are driven by a profit motive. This brings us to a central
question of this thesis: has a plethora of channels targeting different
42
language groups broken the national imaginary promoted in the
Doordarshan days and allowed for several different ‘Indias’ to coexist?
This question had led to my choosing Star News and Star Anando as case
studies, to see if a Hindi and a Bengali channel offer different notions of
the nation and ‘Indianness’ and if so, what these notions are.

A ‘national’ audience?

Both these news channels advertise themselves as ‘national’ channels.

Star Ananda claims that it is the first ‘national’ news channel in Bengali.
It follows to reason therefore, that both produce news for national
television audiences. Is the imagination of nationhood different in
Bengali and Hindi? If so, what are they and how do the imaginaries
change? If not, and a singular idea of nation still dominates, is it
different from what was articulated in the days of state sponsored
Doordarshan. What are the particularities of such change?

The new India of Television Rating Points

In the chapter on audiences (see chapter 6) I explain how the television

ratings system in India targets the affluent. The system originated in the
US, with advertisers wanting to justify their expenditure and
understand viewer responses. Advertisers targeting audiences have a
vested interest: they have something that they want to sell to the
audience. For this the latter needs purchasing power and therefore
India’s middle class, supposedly the largest in the world, became a
prime target for television producers. Until very recently, the
monitoring boxes used in the ratings surveys were not used to survey
nine of the poorer states in India. The majority of the surveyed audience
are from the metropolitan cities and in the higher income bracket. As
Mehta notes “The biggest problem though is that TAM sample measures
only urban areas. India’s entire rural population, consisting of an
estimated 145 million households, is totally ignored (2008:180-181). A
homogenous audience means that once a certain kind of programming

43
gets high audience ratings in a particular channel, every other channel
wants to replicate the same. This gives rise to homogenous content and
“cricket, cinema and crime” dominate Indian television news channels.
Though not the nationalist, propaganda-oriented content of
Doordarshan, yet the private news channels of 21st century India have
created their own myth of a “promised land” of affluence and well
being. “In this promised land the poor are wished away, for everyone’s
full potential may be realised and well-being achieved by all”
(Chakravorty and Gooptu, in Hallam and Street [ed] 2000: 91).
It is clear that the Indian media has undergone a transformation
of epic proportions in the last decade. Political economy approaches to
media studies have commented on the “market triumphalism and the
weakening of the nation-state” (Dubey, 1992) in the country. These new
discourses of the nation: what it is to be ‘Indian’, who is ‘Indian’ and the
Indian media played a key role in this imagining. In seeking to
understand this new ‘India’, I chose to conduct two newsroom
ethnographies. The lack of news television studies in India and a desire
to fill this gap were also a major impetus for this approach. News
ethnographies have some inherent strengths that allow us to
understand production dynamics in a way broader political economy
approaches cannot. In the next section, I review earlier ethnographic
approaches to newsroom studies, the salient points of the methodology
and the problems.

News ethnographies: “The First Wave”

Ethnography as a methodology for research entails the extended

involvement of the researcher in the social life of those he or she
studies. Ethnographic data has provided both the empirical grounding
for meta-theories as well as ammunition for critiquing the same. Since
the early accounts of heathen “natives” by Christian missionaries and
white male anthropologists making field trips to study the “exotic
cultures” in non-western settings, ethnography has come a long way.
The ground it has covered is evident if we look at the first formal

44
ethnographies in the 1920s of Malinowski and Mead, the later works of
Evans-Pritchard and Bateson and compare them with the reflexive
ethnographies, (Geertz, 1973, Rabinow, 1977), experimental
ethnographies (Taussig, 1987 Fischer and Abedi, 1990), and
interpretive and auto ethnographies (Danahay, 1997) of more
contemporary researchers and anthropologists.
Specific to media theory, “ethnographic studies of news
production have provided invaluable insights into the nature and
determinants of news production and a necessary corrective, therefore,
to grand speculative claims and theories about the news media. These
more grounded studies have variously examined the daily routines,
bureaucratic nature, competitive ethos, professional ideologies, source
dependencies and cultural practices of the news media.” (Cottle,
2007:1). Instead of pontificating about the media from without,
ethnographic studies entered the media environment and sought to
describe practice from within and thus contribute to a more nuanced
form of theory.
Since the 1950s, an abundance of theoretical and empirical
research – especially studies of the sociology of news production – has
looked at what determines the selection of news at the production level.
During the 1970s and 1980s, a number of ethnographies have looked at
organisational, bureaucratic and professional nature of news
production and news manufacturing processes (see Cottle 2003:13-16).
Gans (1979), for example, has argued that there are in fact four strands
of theory that try to explain what determines news at the level of
production.
The first of these gives primacy to the professional judgement of
the journalist in determining the selection of news. A classical example
of this would be the much-cited “gatekeeper” study by White (1950).
White investigated the selection process behind how an editor of a
small-town American newspaper selected news from the wire-feeds for
his newspaper. His study concluded that the selection was, in the end,
mostly determined by the personal and professional feelings of the

45
editor.8 While this grounding of the editorial in the realm of the
personal ignores the wider organisational context of news making and
has been critiqued for “essential naivety”, (Golding and Eliott, 1979: 12)
there are several instances where this model still applies. Gregor (1997:
49), giving an example of such personal biases, points out that a violent
male-on-male attack described as a ‘serious sexual assault’ by one local
television station in northern England, is termed ‘rape’ by another.
The second strand of theory has been more in favour in
sociologically oriented approaches to media practice and production.
According to many variants of such theories, news can be seen as an
outcome of complex organisational practice. 9 Epstein (1973: xiv), for
example, has concluded that what determined the selection of news “lay
in defining the basic requirements which a given organisation needs to
maintain itself.”10 This organisational approach has been elaborated
further by, among others, Schlesinger (1978) who spent three years
observing the work practices of the BBC from 1972 to1976. According
to him, what we see as news is composed of pre-planning and routine
and is the end result of ideological and organisational practices (1978:
47). Similarly, Golding and Elliot's (1979: 137) cross-national research
into Irish, Nigerian and Swedish newsrooms concluded that news
production across countries was the outcome of a “strongly patterned,
repetitive and predictable work routine, essentially passive in character
and varying only in detail from country to country” (1979: 83).
The third strand of theory sees news as a 'mirror' of reality itself.
While this approach tends to be more in favour with journalism
practitioners themselves, most media and cultural scholars have
dismissed it as a form of 'naive realism' (see Tuchman, 1978). The
fourth and final cluster of theories explains the selection of stories by
8
There has been substantial debate about the 'gatekeeper' model, for an update of
which, see Pamela Shoemaker (1991). According to Shoemaker, multiple gatekeepers
control different aspects of the complex process, each having some degree of power
over the selection routines and shapes of messages.
9
This approach is somewhat similar to Inden's (following Collingwood) analysis of
complex agencies. There are no simples agents: rather the outcome of actions, the
selection of news is the outcome of a complex relationship between agents
(organisational practice). See for examples Inden, 1990.
10
For examples of more organisational approaches see Ericson et al (1987), Gitlin
(1980), Fishman (1980), Golding and Elliot (1979), Schlesinger (1979) and Soloski
(1989).
46
describing influence from outside the newsroom. Such theories are held
by technological determinists such as Marshall McLuhan; Marxists
analysts who foreground the influence of capitalism and dismiss
journalists as “public relations agents of monopoly capitalism” (Gans
1979, from Tumber 1999: 235-236); ideological determinists who link
news selection with the political ideology of those in power (see
Herman and Chomsky 1998); cultural theorists who see journalists
according to values of the national culture (see Galtung and Ruge,
1965); and by theorists who suggest that news is shaped by the sources
on which journalists rely (see Cohen, 1963; Gans, 1979). The four
strands of news theories that Gans proposes are heavily influenced by
ethnographic approaches and detailed case studies.
Yet, as Cottle argues, in a fast changing news ecology, early
ethnographic studies are proving increasingly unhelpful in answering
complex questions about news determinants (2000). By their very
influence, these ethnographic works have created their own
‘orthodoxies’ in media theory and news studies (ibid). Here it is
pertinent to discuss Cottle’s proposed orthodoxies which, he claims,
media theory has become entrenched in as my methodological
framework found grounding through these.

The pre-suppositions and ‘orthodoxies’

Cottle, calling for a ‘second wave’ in news ethnographies, argues for

work that “sets out to theoretically map and empirically explore the
rapidly changing field of news production in today’s differentiated
ecology of news provision” (2000: 21). Stemming from routinisation,
which he terms the first “orthodoxy”, he points out five other
“interrelated and apparently entrenched orthodoxies within the field of
news study, each of which has become increasingly out of touch with
today’s production practices, diversified news ecology and wider news
culture” (ibid). I discuss four of these orthodoxies in detail, since I
initiated my research work with them as a theoretical point of entry.

47
1) Routinisation

Taking routinisation as a big determinant for news production analysis

and as the first orthodoxy, Cottle states that it “has led to several
unintended consequences (2000: 22)”.

Firstly, the characteristic ‘event orientation’ of news, gives expression

to the temporal routines of production. (Halloran et al. 1970) and this
in turn displaces from public view wider issues of social structure and
longer term processes of change (Schlesinger, 1978). Secondly, a
newsroom division of labour is required to monitor the ‘news net’ of
other news media and sources (Tuchman, 1978), specialist journalists
and correspondents are therefore organised into ‘news beats’, and
news bureaus are established in certain locations (Rock 1973;
Tuchman 1973; Fishman 1980). Thirdly, this places journalists in a
position of dependency on ‘official’ sources who are thereby granted
‘routine’ entry into the news media and become the ‘primary definers’
of events (Hall et al, 1978). Fourthly, ‘routine’ also features in the
journalists’ deployment of a ‘vocabulary of precedents’ that help them
to recognise, produce and justify their selection and treatment of ‘news
stories’ (Ericson et al. 1987: p348) and so, in this way, helps to create
the professional journalist’s ‘news sense’. Bureaucracy and
organisational expediency of routine, therefore, as these studies help to
elaborate account for the relatively ‘unconscious’ role played by news
journalists in news manufacture” (ibid).

48
Cottle argues for a Foucauldian shift from ‘routine’ to ‘practice’ which
can help overcome simplistic ideas of journalistic intent or ideological
culpability in processes of news production. ‘Practice’ here can be
understood as actions or activities that are repeatable, regular, and
recognisable in a given cultural context. Practice is often contrasted
with theory, ideas, or mental processes: what is done as opposed to
what is thought; the pragmatic as opposed to the ideational. This
discursive shift, according to Cottle, would move away from the
theoretical positioning of journalists as mere ‘supports’ or ‘bearers’ of
the organisational system, rather than as active and thinking agents
who purposefully produce news through their professional practices. It
can allow the would-be ethnographer to accommodate both a sense of
the ‘discursive’ and the ‘administrative’ in the enactments and
regulations of social processes.
Looking at journalistic ‘practice’ in newsrooms has helped me to
move away from the structural/agency debate in social sciences and
thus avoid its inherent limitations. Social action (such as news
selection) has been historically attributed either to underlying
structures (such as organisations, ideology, capitalism) or to human
agency (such as professional judgement, reporting the ‘truth’). Since
1968, French post-structuralist theory has raised serious questions
about the validity of either of these approaches in explaining social
action (see Foucault 1972, 1990; Laclau 1984; Deleuze 1998a, 1998b.
For attempts to reconcile structure and human agency in human
sciences see Bourdieu 1977, 1990).
Recent studies of news production (Cottle, 1993a, 1999; Pedelty,
1995) lend credence to the fact that journalists do not act merely as
‘supports’ but are clever individuals who quickly adapt to the needs and
requirements of the different organisations they work for. Even before
conducting my ethnography, I was sceptical of the supposition of the
‘gullible journalist’. Without careful empirical scrutiny, I was unwilling
to accept that journalists are just instruments in a conspiratorial
regime.

49
 The scepticism helped. In Mumbai interview after interview with
journalists and media managers revealed that news production and the
resultant content does not necessarily come from an unconscious
“routinisation” but a carefully thought out corporate and editorial
strategy of which the journalist is very much a part. The latter might not
approve of the “news values”, but will definitely do what the “system”
requires. S/he is not an “unconscious subject”, but an un/willing
participant.
Cottle states that, methodologically, the ‘first wave’ of
ethnographies demonstrated a less than suitably reflexive stance
towards their subject matter (2000). Today, reflexivity is far more than
simply ‘going native’ and then regaining academic distance. My
research could hardly ignore the academic/journalist crossover or, as in
my case, the journalist/academic and the resultant interplay between
different disciplinary outlooks and cultural milieu. I explore this further
in the chapter on methodology (see Chapter 3).
One way of circumventing the earlier theoretical problems of
structure/agency can be achieved by looking at how news producers
themselves comment on their own practice. In the methodology
chapter, I discuss my interview methods with journalists who reflected
and commented not only on their own practices but also on television
news journalism in Indian in general. Amongst others, Hobart (1999)
has stressed the importance of looking at commentary in the analysis of
media practices. He writes:

Among the many practices which make up contemporary mass media,

some are reflective. That is they are about practices themselves. Just as
a crucial, indeed, constitutive, set of practices frame, represent, modify
and articulate events, actions, text or what have you, these practices
comment on and articulate these articulatory practices. In this sense,
they are meta-practices, meaning not of some higher order, but simply
ones that come after. I shall use ‘commentary’…as a way of in singling
out these kinds of practice, the constitutive purpose of which is to
comment on previous practices of articulation. (2000:10).

50
Cottle states that if we are sensitive to the ways that journalists are
themselves aware of, and knowingly involved in, the reproduction of
different news forms, we may also want to pursue the professional
journalist’s reflexivity in relation to his/her practices and how this
informs the ‘interpretive community’11 of journalism– albeit with the
proviso that this ‘interpretive community’ now needs to be interrogated
in respect to its internal differentiation, whether by news outlet (Cottle,
1993a), gender (Carter, Branston and Allan, 1998) or ethnicity
(Benjamin, 1995; Wilson, 2000). To these differentiations, I would like
to include language. In India, where certain languages have dominated
while others have been marginalised, the rise of the vernacular in press,
particularly television, is changing news dynamics rapidly.

2) Professional objectivity

A second orthodoxy, in part derived from routinisation, is journalistic

objectivity.12 In fact, the two are said to be inexorably linked. Soloski
has argued that “objectivity is the most important professional norm
and from it flow more specific aspects of news professionalism”
(1989:33). There are several consequences that are said to follow from
this. Authoritative sources are routinely sought and granted privileged
access to the media. Tuchman sees this ‘strategic ritual’ as a pragmatic
response to the elusiveness of objectivity. The norm of objectivity is
internalised and journalists police themselves and discretion becomes
predictable. Also, this claim of ‘objectivity’ obviates, we are told, the
need for explicit organisational policies as a form of control (Larson
cited in Cottle, 2000:28).
Cottle points out the obvious problems with assuming that
journalists subscribe to a prevalent, perhaps universal, ideology of
objectivity which generalises what in fact may be a far more variegated
set of epistemological positions of which the journalist is aware. These

11
The term interpretive community is used by Barbara Zelizer (1993)
12
Professional objectivity is claimed as a significant principle of the journalistic trade.
Difficult to pin down, it can refer to fairness in reporting, balanced or unbiased
coverage and remaining detached from ones reporting duties. Quite often, it means all
of the above.
51
are: the new ‘public journalism’ in the US and forms of advocacy
journalism in other parts of the world (Glasser and Craft, 1998), (for
example, human interest and development journalism in India); tabloid
and populist forms of journalism which lay their claims ‘to know’ by
different textual strategies; a new band of anchors and news presenters
who emote news instead of the stoic, detached style of presenting. All
these point at a complexity which cannot be overlooked on the basis of
selective findings from earlier studies which focussed their empirical
sights on high profile, mainstream western outlets.
In India there are different tiers of news production houses.
There are international players like Murdoch who share space with
Indian entrepreneurs like Prannoy Roy of NDTV and Arun Poorie of Aaj
Tak. Both groups of media barons also compete for space along with
regional giants in all parts of the sub-continent. The assumption of a
shared notion about an empirically unsustainable concept like
objectivity made me sceptical even before I started my fieldwork. After
it, I can say that in the current news production scenario in India, the
notion of an all encompassing objectivity should be relegated to the
dustbins of academia. The Bengali journalists’ notion of objectivity
differs from that of Mumbai journalists, and this reflects in their news
coverage. There is also a marked difference between what constitutes
news and good reporting for print journalists now operating in
television newsrooms, and what does for journalists who started their
careers in television. With print having a long history in Indian news,
journalists from a print background share notions of objectivity
developed through several decades and handed down through
generations.13 Also, with the corporate now playing a large role in
editorial matters, earlier understanding of the term ‘objectivity’, as a
shared value amongst journalists inculcated and understood in
newsrooms, must be rethought.

13
Earlier print journalists, now in Star News, felt that there was a deplorable drop in
news standards. Such lament was muted from journalists who have always worked as
television reporters.

52
 “Journalists are often fully aware of the philosophical difficulties
involved as well as the pragmatic conventions and artifices that they
and their colleagues deploy to create a semblance of news balance and
impartiality. Too often they are patronised by academics who think
they are the only ones who have insight into such representational
issues and who fail to recognize the range of practitioner’s view on
offer” (Cottle, 2000: 28). Journalists often practise moral partisanship
and appeal directly to sentiment and feelings; and this is not just in
tabloids. I believe a careful scrutiny of mainstream and even serious
news output can reveal how subjectivist news epistemology can be
inscribed into serious news. The journalist Andrew Marr, as I
mentioned in the introductory chapter as stated “The idea of news has
altered. It stopped being essentially information and became something
designed to produce – at all costs, always – an emotional reaction, the
more extreme the better (2004: 381)” Dismissing journalists as
unthinking agents, not only does them disservice, it discredits rigourous
As a practitioner and also after my fieldwork, I am convinced that
journalists, at least in senior positions, influence news content and if
not actively then by subterfuge promote their own positions, which are
not necessarily ideological. These positions vary sharply depending on
the medium, language and class.

3) Hierarchy of Access

The ‘first wave’ of ethnographies made a powerful case that routines

and bureaucratic modes of news production coupled with the
professional ideology of objectivity serve to access the voices of the
socially powerful, and marginalise or even silence those of the
institutionally non-aligned and powerless (Hall et al,1982; Goldenberg,
1975; Gitlin, 1980). Social hierarchy is thus replicated in and through
the patterns and processes of news access.
This, the third orthodoxy, is further backed-up by observations
on how socialisation processes generate intra-group norms established
in interaction with ‘competitor-colleagues’ (Tunstall 1970; Dunwoody

53
1978; Fishman 1980), as well as in the specialist reporters’ or
correspondents’ immersion into the professional world-view of his/her
principal sources – whether, for example, the police (Chibnall 1977) or
the military (Morrison and Tumber 1988; Morrison 1994; Pedelty
1995). Moreover, this systematic over-accessing of the powerful and
their views, is given a further boost by the capacity of resource-rich
sources to produce ‘psuedo-events’ (Boorstein 1964; Sigel 1973) and
encourage favourable coverage through the provision of
bureaucratically useful (and commercially beneficial) ‘information
subsidies’ (Gandy, 1982). This third orthodoxy therefore, states that
news perspectives are narrowed and bent in accordance to the values
and views of powerful sources and that this results in a tendency
towards news conformity, status quo and ideological closure. (Cottle,
2000: 30)

Schlesinger, critiquing Hall’s ‘primary definer’ thesis and advocating the

‘third orthodoxy,’ makes a powerful case for a more externalist
examination of various source fields and less concentration on the
media (1990). Schlesinger’s model is based within the sociological
paradigm’s concern with processes of public knowledge and
definitional advantage (Cottle, 2000b). The concern here is therefore
with the interaction of social relations and differentials of institutional
power, organisational resources, and cultural capital.
Indian media, as most media across the world, is the domain of
the powerful. News media accords power to its owners. Rupert
Murdoch is just one case in point. But it would be naive to believe that
Murdoch personally affects the everyday production of news. There are
far more complicated processes in play. In India, the competition for
advertising and the role of capital must be taken into account. As the
chapter on the corporate section of MCCS in this thesis shows, sales
teams plug stories to get advertising; brand managers promote stories
to create niche value for their channels; and research and rating teams
monitor and change programmes and content to get maximum eyeballs.

54
The understanding of the “powerful and the elite” needs to be re-
defined and contextualised in a fast changing political economy.
A journalistic phenomenon which deserves greater enquiry is
how journalists’ preconceived story ideas or frames result in the
deliberate pursuit of certain voices and how, especially in television,
these are elicited in interviews and subsequently clipped and packaged
in conformity with this ‘view’ (Halloran et al, 1970; Cottle, 1991,
1993a). There is a complexity here – both strategic and cultural – which
Cottle demands to be explored empirically and which promises to
illuminate further an important aspect of ‘power’ in the perennial dance
between news sources and news producers. In Indian television this
can be extended to the relationship between news producers and their
imagined audience and what the former believes the latter wants to
hear and see.
As I saw from my interviews of journalists, stories are chased
simply because another channel is showing them; programmes are
conceived simply because a rival channel has got a new show with high
audience ratings. A channel showing a story means follow-ups from
other channels simply because they do not want to be left behind; the
processes are both strategic (no one wants to let go of a story) and
cultural (it is now accepted as norm in television news rooms to
continuously monitor each other).

4) The forgotten or the Imagined audience

The fourth “orthodoxy” in media studies, Cottle claims, is that “mass
audience” by definition being “unknowable”, can only be “imagined”.
“While this literally may be the case, it ignores that the audience
approached “as a discursive conceptualisation or typification inscribed
by the news producers into their particular news forms rather than as
an empirical object ‘out there’, the ‘imagined audience’ of the news
producers is literally ‘at work’ within newsrooms” (Cottle, 2000: 34).
Following from this, my thesis does not include audience
research but an “imagination” of the audience by news producers in
Indian television. The academic focus on the audience as “imagined”

55
fascinated the news practitioner in me (see Batabyal, 2005). How did I
imagine the audience as a journalist? Did I at all? How do news
producers in India imagine theirs? If the audience is not ‘real’ how can
they shape or affect content? Do they, or is the content shaped by the
news producer’s imagination of the audience? There were two different
strands of enquiry that I followed during my fieldwork (see Chapter 6).
One aim, by conducting depth interviews with journalists and media
managers, was to understand how the audience was imagined in the
Indian newsrooms and then to explore through observation and
content examination how this becomes ‘news’. Linked to this was how
quantitative data or Television Rating Points (TRP) on the audience
were produced by the Indian media industry, how television companies
use this data and how this affects the news producer’s imagination and
practices within newsrooms.

Conclusion

Summing up the literature review in this chapter, I have first set out the
meta-theoretical terrain of this research: to understand the
reconfiguration of the national imaginary in television newsrooms in
India. I have then contextualised the present day television economy in
the country, particularly its news ecology and compared it to the days
of the state run television network, Doordarshan. The third section
framed the methodology of this work, the efficacy of the ethnographic
approach to understand newsroom dynamics and given the lack of such
studies, its relevance for understanding India’s turbulent television
economy.
Using the above mentioned orthodoxies as methodological
frameworks and with the intent of understanding the construction of
nationhood in India through its television newsrooms, I started my
fieldwork in Kolkata and Mumbai. The next chapter on methodology
describes in detail the course of my work, the workplaces, people I met,
my relationship with the subjects of my study, the quandaries,

56
dilemmas and doubts and the daily practices of the researcher and the
researched.

57
 Chapter 3
Methodology

Choosing the news channels

Though unsure of gaining entry, my first place of choice was the Star
News Headquarters in Mumbai and if possible, the Kolkata office of Star
Ananda. The reason lays both in the experiential and the dynamics of
the Rupert Murdoch owned Star group in India.
To start with the experiential, it might have perhaps been easier to
work with NDTV Ltd in New Delhi since I had already worked with them
for two years, initially as Editorial Head of Kolkata and then as a
Correspondent in New Delhi. Gaining entry to the Delhi and Kolkata
newsroom might have been easier. But it was this proximity, which lead
to abandoning the idea. I felt too close to it. I knew almost everyone and
not only did I have an opinion on them, they also had an opinion on me.
Some were friends, others I couldn’t see eye-to-eye with and in a highly
charged environment like the television newsroom nothing is neutral.
This cannot be conducive to good research.
The headquarters of Star News, that is MCCS, was in Mumbai. This
helped making the decision based on the experiential. Having been a
journalist in New Delhi for several years, most journalists were
colleagues. Mumbai, however, would be a new experience. I had
occasionally made forays into the city on reporting stints, but staying
and working in the city would be new. Though I had worked in Kolkata
briefly before, Star Ananda was a new channel and most journalists
would not be known to me.
The dynamics of MCCS and its two channels, Star Ananda and Star
News, played no small part in making my choice. The parent company,
MCCS, is uniquely placed in today’s multi-lingual television news
environment in India, owning Star News and Star Anando, the latter
being the first 24 hour Bengali news channel and having now added a
Marathi news channel, Star Majha to its bouquet.

58
 The Context

To contextualise the formation of MCCS: Rupert Murdoch-owned

Star Television entered Asia in the early 1990s, changing forever how
Indians watch television. American soap opera replaced Doordarshan’s
staid offerings and The Bold and the Beautiful crashed into Indian living
rooms. Star News itself was launched in 1998 but Murdoch, instead of
producing the news in-house, handed over the production rights to New
Delhi Television Ltd (NDTV), a production house based in Delhi which
until then was producing a hugely popular hourly news bulletin each
week on the state-owned Doordarshan, called “The World This Week”.
NDTV had complete editorial authority and autonomy in their
arrangement with Murdoch and uplinked their programmes to Star’s
Asian headquarters in Hong Kong, from where it was beamed back into
Indian and Asian homes through Star Television owned transponders.
This was done to bypass Indian laws, which placed restrictions on ‘live’
news being up linked from Indian soil. 14 There was also a five-minute
delay between up-linking and broadcast to avoid the ‘live’ tag. Star
News, while it was being produced by NDTV, had one channel. It
produced news both in Hindi and English with a half hour cycle for
each. Precedence and preference was always given to English with the
Hindi channel merely translating news from English and having far
fewer reporters and editors with pay scales that were markedly lower.
From my own experience of working at NDTV, I can state that the
English reporters were always better paid, given more opportunities
while the Hindi counterpart had far less social standing within the
organisation. Things were, however, to change dramatically (see
Batabyal, 2005). The sudden proliferation of vernacular news channels,
especially in Hindi, completely altered the dynamics of news production
and consumption. The elitism of English news channels and news
journalists was disappeared and, in its place, a market driven credo of

14
Indian Broadcasting laws do not allow a person of foreign origin to broadcast live
news in India. Thus Star sold most of its shares to the ABP group and the new
company MCCS was formed as a joint venture between the two with ABP owning 74
per cent of the shares in the company.
59
rating oriented news developed. This research wanted to understand
the dynamics of news production in this changed scenario.

Vernacular News Channels: The Beginnings

Aaj Tak, a part of the India Today15 group launched India’s first
national Hindi news channel in December 2000 and “it demonstrated
the levelling impact of technology and a profound change in traditional
methods of news gathering (Mehta, 2008: 86). Within a year it was
garnering high TRPs. Following its success, Zee Television also launched
a Hindi news channel, Zee News, and did well. Meanwhile, Star News,
which was being produced by NDTV, had very high credibility and even
higher losses. NDTV was not bothered. They were on a contract and
continued to produce news which came to be well regarded. But the
honeymoon could not continue for long. Murdoch was a successful
businessman and beyond a point, the losses started to hurt. Star and
NDTV parted ways on March 1st, 2003. NDTV decided to launch two
new channels: one in Hindi, and the other in English. The entire set up
was revamped. Hindi reporters were hired by the dozen, their salaries
hiked; they were given the bigger studios, the better equipment. The
message was clear. Once on its own, without Star’s financial muscle,
NDTV was focusing on the Hindi channel, believing that was where the
audience and money lay. A significant change was happening in Indian
television production houses. The elitism of English had given way to
the money power of Hindi and other regional languages.
Star News started in-house production. Interestingly, they launched
only in Hindi. This was in line with Murdoch’s overall strategy of
“Indianising” his television channels. “Starting with Hollywood-based
programming aimed at the affluent but tiny English speaking minority
[less than 5 per cent of India’s population], Murdoch recognised the
limitations of this strategy and rapidly Indianised his television,
including news operations in India” (Thussu, 2007: 100)” Reporters

15
The India Today group is one of the largest publication houses in the country and
before television was the publisher of the respected weekly, India Today which is still
the country’s largest selling weekly news magazine.
60
were hired from newspapers, magazines and other television news
production companies. Fashion designers were hired to advice on the
kind of clothes to be worn; hair stylists were brought in to groom the
correspondents, and the male journalists appearing on television were
asked to be clean-shaven. Star News promised something different.
But the new arrangement was not without its hiccups. Government
regulations did not allow for Murdoch, a foreigner, to produce news
directly within the country. Star News stock was divested and a regional
media baron, Abhik Sarkar, bought 74 per cent of its share. Sarkar owns
Anadabazar Publications, which has a large presence in eastern India.
Along with top-selling Bengali newspapers and magazines, Anadabazar
also publishes The Telegraph, a respected national daily. MCCS was thus
formed in 2003. For me, the dynamics of this new company is
interesting. An international media baron decides that he needs to
produce news content in India, but launches the channel in Hindi and is
forced to divest his shares to a regional news group. This leads to the
launch of a Bengali news channel in the form of Star Anando in 2005. I
wanted to understand the news dynamic within Star News and Star
Ananda, the politics of an international broadcasting company
producing Hindi and Bengali news from India and now being controlled
by an Indian media baron instead of the omnipresent Rupert Murdoch.

Standpoint Theory, the Journalist and the subject of study

The desire to conduct this study is rooted in my years as a journalist.

The experiential is necessary to understand here as it has both helped
my comprehension of the subject of study and plunged me into the
confusion of being an ‘insider’. There has been a constant negotiation
between the academic ‘outsider’ and the journalist ‘insider’ in how I
have presented myself to the ‘subjects’ of study and also in analysing
the research material.
This research, therefore, owes a particular debt to the standpoint
theorists who helped develop means of constructing episteme that
resonates intensely with the experiential (see Harding, 2003). Though

61
standpoint theory has been critiqued for being insufficiently personal, I
found that it helped me to articulate “why, I, the articulating academic,
find a certain issue of value to explore but more importantly, how my
subjectivity resonates with and through the subject matter as I analyse
it” (Sreberny, 2002: 294-295). My choice of subject matter, my entry
into the research and my later analysis of the empirical evidence is
influenced by this.
This chapter, then, while focusing on a triangulation of social
research methods employed for the field work, will also work through
the ethical issues of this research: how I as a journalist employed my
professional experience to conduct this research, how I gained entry
into the workplace and the insider knowledge I used to attain proximity
and confidence of the journalists.
The crucial thing here is the Kantian distinction between viewing
events from ‘the inside’: the ‘I’ as news practitioner, as opposed to from
‘the outside’; the ‘I’ as researcher. The former attempts to understand
people in terms of his/her own appreciation of the world. The latter
treats people in terms of knowledge of their behaviour under objective
conditions. Where ethnography stands, with psychoanalysis quite
separate from all other approaches, is in working dialogically between
the two and throughout this chapter, this fine distinction,
researcher/practitioner and insider/outsider, will be continuously
evoked and worked through.
The writing style of this thesis and the descriptive passages are
much influences by Geertz’s “thick description.” In his essay, "Thick
Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture", (Geertz
1973:3-30) Geertz explains that he adopted the term from philosopher
Gilbert Ryle. Ryle pointed out that if someone winks at us without a
context, we don't know what it means. It might mean the person is
attracted to us, that they are trying to communicate secretly, that they
understand what you mean, or anything. As the context changes, so
does the meaning of the wink. Geertz argues that all human behaviour
is similar. He therefore distinguishes between a thin description, which
describes only the wink itself, and a thick description, which explains

62
the context of the practices and discourse within a society. I have
attempted, in a similar vein, to contextualise in as much detail as
possible, news practices and its surrounding rituals in Indian television
and my own role in producing the data.
Instead of bringing an argument from the outside, it is the
empirical data which I gather from my fieldwork that helps develop my
arguments. The empirical, therefore, drives the theoretical.

Methodology: The Theory

A Triangulation of Methods

To answer the specific queries I had at the beginning of my research, I

had chosen to conduct a newsroom ethnography in two Indian
television newsrooms. “In the context of news study,” writes Cottle
“participant observation or ethnography (the terms are often used
interchangeably today) refer to the research method that involves the
researcher spending considerable time in the field, observing and
talking to journalists as they go about their daily tasks and documenting
their professional practices and culture. (2007: 6)” I believe that a
triangulation of methodological approaches: the observer participant,
interviews and analysis of news content structures, allowed me to
overcome the inherent drawbacks of each method.

“Participant observation deploys a number of methods, including

observation, talk and interviews, and attending to documentary sources.
Although each on its own may be considered to have its weaknesses,
together they provide a stronger basis on which evidence and findings
can be triangulated. That is, claims and accounts produced from one
source can be contrasted to those from another. Consistencies can thus
be recognised and interpreted and discrepancies or differences can be
pursued further and all in pursuit of deeper, more valid, interpretations.
This, in turn, can prompt further multi-pronged inquiries until the
researcher is confident that a more realistic understanding of the
situation has been achieved. (ibid: 6)

63
1) Not a “Participant” observer in the newsroom: the observer-
participant

I had been a participant in the newsroom; I was returning as an

observer. I chose not to mix the two. In social research methods much
has been said for participant observation. Anthropology, in grips of a
crisis, demanded a more participatory engagement with subjects to
understand the nuances of their reality. So while academic distance was
necessary, a plunge into the ‘real’ was advocated. But I already knew
the nuances: for me, the difficulty was in negotiating distance. Despite a
determination to maintain distance, this was indeed difficult, as I
needed to invoke my own journalistic affiliations and experience to get
some people to talk, but also to invoke my academic stature with
others. This constant negotiation between the insider and the outsider
will be worked through as I describe the nuances of fieldwork. A more
appropriate terminology would be that I was an ‘observer participant’
in the newsrooms. Gold’s much cited classification on involvement of an
ethnographer in the field states that observer as participant is more
detached than the participant observer from his/her subject, a position
which I was trying to achieve (cited in Bryman, 2001: 299).

2) Depth Interview

I chose to conduct depth interviews to supplement my observation and

also to complement it. I had initially planned to formulate questions
around my observations. But I found that the best way to proceed was
to let both the methods work simultaneously. Interviews helped to
explain to people what I was doing and what I expected from them.
Long conversations meant that journalists were happy to allow me into
their midst and were comfortable with my presence. In Kolkata, I found
I was more comfortable with interviewing people and then proceeding
with the observations. I felt that my status as a former NDTV journalist
who had earlier held a senior position in the city helped people to treat

64
me with a degree of respect and feel that it was necessary to talk to me.
In Mumbai, while my earlier journalistic career helped, it was not a
primary factor as people were happy to talk and help regardless.
(During the course of this thesis, several quotes from the interviews
have been repeated in different chapters. As the points of analysis in
these chapters are varied, the same quotes are used to understand and
emphasise the arguments.)

3) Analysis of Content structures

I had initially thought of focussing on the coverage of crime in both the

channels but then decided to look at a week of the entire programming
in both channels and to draw out a more comparative analysis. 16 This, I
thought would also complement the ratings analysis which I have
focussed on, since it is done every week. I arranged for the telecast to be
recorded live at the Mumbai office and the gentleman in charge was
particularly helpful once we had established that we had mutual
acquaintances and that his residence in Kolkata was next to where I
grew up in the city. A constant negotiation of the personal and the
professional was a necessity to secure cooperation. People were
generally more ready to oblige once a connection, either professional or
personal, could be established, and this negotiation continued
throughout the fieldwork year.

Gaining Access

As all ethnographers know, gaining access is almost always the most

important part of the research. In this work, I was seeking to gain entry
into the heart of the Murdoch empire in India, as well as the bastion of a
family-owned business, the ABP Group. In India, while the media boom
has caught almost everyone by surprise, media research has failed to
keep pace with this explosion. Would a media house, caught up in the

16
Though I looked at a week’s programming in both the channels, in the chapter on
content analysis, I only used three days’ worth. This was sufficient to establish
patterns and involved more than a hundred hours of material to examine.
65
throes of a fierce fight for eyeballs, allow a researcher to walk into their
midst? It is the experiential knowledge of growing up in an Indian
environment where emails and phone calls go unanswered and where
patience can be severely challenged, that let me have the confidence
that entry can be secured, if one has the initial contacts. This was my
“insider” knowledge. I also know that an “outsider” who had no
previous association with the Indian media might have been able to do
the same with far less trouble. But that was not my situation. I was
implicated by association with the Indian media, especially news
journalism.

Confirming access: A game of patience

The gaining of access to MCCS involved months of networking,
transatlantic calls and using of contacts gained through my years as a
journalist in India. I started my first enquiries in the winter of 2004
when I went to India for a holiday. My first point of contact was Mr
Bharat Bhusan, Delhi editor of The Telegraph, the English newspaper
belonging to the Anandabazar (ABP) group, which is a majority
shareholder in MCCS. I had worked with Mr Bhusan for two years in The
Hindustan Times where he was the Executive Editor and I was a Staff
Reporter. I had hoped that Mr Bhusan would manage to put in a word
for me to Mr Abhik Sarkar, who heads ABP. Mr Bhushan said that would
not be possible as there was a “strict firewall” between television and
newspapers within the group. He did, however, provide me with an
email address of Mr Sarkar and also told me to send a letter by post
stating my purpose of study. Mr Bhusan said that Mr Sarkar is a “bit of
an anglophile” and a letter through my supervisors should work. If it
did not, he promised “to look into it.”
In 2005, April, I sent my first email to Mr Sarkar and followed it up
with a postal mail, which had references from Prof Annabelle Sreberny
and Dr Mark Hobart, my first and second supervisors respectively.
Within days I got an email back saying that I should contact the Chief
Executive Officer (CEO) of the group, Mr Uday Shankar, to whom my
email to Mr Sarkar was also forwarded. Here I met my first stumbling

66
block. Emails to Mr Shankar went unanswered. I posted him a set of
references, besides providing him with names from the media industry
that would vouch for me, and an outline of my work and what it would
require. There was no reply.
By August 2005, I called a friend, Mr Pradip Saha, who is the
Managing Editor of an environmental magazine called Down To Earth.
Mr Saha knew Mr Shankar well as the latter had worked with the
magazine. He promised to help and have a chat with Mr Shankar. This
took three months and frantic calls from me. Mr Saha called me in
October 2005 saying that Mr Shankar has agreed. I immediately sent Mr
Shankar an email thanking him for allowing me access and providing
him with dates when I will be in Kolkata and Mumbai. Again there was
absolutely no reply. I reached Kolkata in mid-November without as yet
having confirmed access.
Mr Saha provided me with Mr Shankar’s mobile number, albeit
after instructing me not to let him know who gave it. I called Mr
Shankar on the 20th of November. He was cordial on phone and asked
me for a “wish list” of what I want. I sent him a detailed email stating
my subject and the kind of access, which I would require. To this again
there was no reply. After waiting for a week, I called him again. Mr
Shankar told me that he has no problems regarding my wish list and I
could come and meet him in Mumbai. I told him that I had stated in my
email that the first stage of work would be in Kolkata. He said that he
would write back to me on whom I should contact in the Kolkata office.
I waited until December 5, 2005 before calling Mr Shankar again.
The first name of the person he provided me with was someone who
had already left the organisation. This time he asked me to get in touch
with Yuvraj Bhattacharya, the Output Editor of Star Anando. I asked him
if he would have a chat with Mr Bhattacharya before I called him and Mr
Shankar agreed to do so. When I spoke to Mr Bhattacharya he had no
clue as to who I was or the purpose of my work. However, dropping the
CEO’s name helped and I was called to the office that very afternoon.
Yuvraj and I met in an empty studio and he gave me a brief background
about Star Anando and its overall aim, which I was allowed to record.

67
He then said that he would get in touch with me once he had spoken to
Mr Shankar. Yuvraj called me a day later to let me know that Mr
Shankar had said that I will have to sign a confidentiality agreement 17
with MCCS after which I could start work. The agreement was made
ready in a couple of days by MCCS, and after I signed it, Yuvraj and I had
another quick meeting in which I explained how I wanted to proceed
with my work and the kind of assistance I would require. He agreed to
introduce me to anyone I wanted to meet besides also allowing me free
reign to come and go as I pleased, and talk to anyone I chose. I was also
given a temporary pass and the security at the entrance was informed
that I would be at the workplace for a few months.

Working in Kolkata

Fieldwork is about contingencies: adapting to different situations and

making continuous adjustments to well laid plans. However, despite
expecting all sorts of complications, my research lived up to and beyond
what I had hoped for: I gained far more access to people, material and
places than I had thought would be accorded by a multi-national news
corporation which has Murdoch as a partner.
I had expected the difficulties to be institutional. My barriers were,
however, in understanding how to deal with people, to quickly adapt to
techniques of introducing myself, to understand when to play out my
professional background of being a senior journalist and when to call in
the stature that comes with being a researcher from the First World.
While the first few days were exciting as I was getting to know a new
place, it was difficult to get people to respond. I began to break this
barrier once I met with a few former colleagues whom I had worked
with in Kolkata previously. Bipasha Basu for example, Senior
Correspondent and anchor who I had known previously, seemed
delighted to meet me, took me around and introduced me to people. I

17
The confidentiality agreement forbade me to write on my research while I was
continuing my fieldwork in India or to help rival news channels with information. It
did not forbid any publication after fieldwork was completed. It played no part again
during the fieldwork and was never mentioned again. My methodology was not
affected in any way, changed or compromised.
68
also met the Bureau Chief of Star Ananda, Suman Dey who had been a
junior colleague of mine in Kolkata in a little known Bengali channel.
Though he was happy to help, I felt he was a bit uncomfortable, given
that he was now holding a very senior post within the organisation
while I knew him as a junior reporter. Ratna Karmakar, a sports
correspondent was also a former colleague who was glad to help.

The first day at Star Ananda

I spent an hour with Yuvraj Bhattacharya, Assignment Head of Star

Ananda on the first day, where he explained to me the editorial focus of
the organisation and the structures within the office. This helped me to
plan how to approach my research. Once the confidentiality agreement
was signed, and I started work on Dec 12, 2005, I had a rough plan in
mind.
I had wanted to spend the first few days with the Sales team to
understand the way a product is sold and what are the points of
emphasis. Yuvraj introduced me to Mr Rajesh Chugh, General Manager
of Sales, and I set up a meeting with him for later in the day. However,
post the meeting with Mr Chugh and chatting with two of the sales
executives, I realised that the sales department in Kolkata follows
orders from Mumbai, where sales strategies are conceptualised. I,
therefore, decided to work with the Sales team in Mumbai at the MCCS
headquarters.
I also introduced myself to Aastha Khandelwal, Human Resources
Manager at Star Ananda. Though we had a long discussion about
strategy, again I realised that HR policies are shaped and implemented
in Mumbai. I decided that it would be best to concentrate on editorial
processes and look at non-editorial or corporate functions only in
Mumbai. Later in the evening, I met with Suman Dey, Bureau Chief of
the Kolkata Office and he gave me an idea of how the reporting team
looks at stories and the different ways in which breaking news and
regular stories are handled.

69
 After the first day, I decided that it might be best to look at the
editorial team in terms of the different sections the office
administration had divided them into, to handle production. I had toyed
with the idea of looking at journalists in terms of experience:
respectively examining trainees, early, mid career and senior
journalists and their understanding of news and news sense. But given
that most journalists in Star Ananda were newcomers, the graded way
of looking and understanding them might not be ideal. I had also
thought of looking at gender: the kind of power relations between male
and female journalists, how the latter are employed, whether women
hold key positions, and office politics and gossip around gender.
Though I did continue to look at gender positions and issues during my
research, this did not become a focus of the thesis. I had chosen to study
journalists in the material conditions they occupy every working day
and therefore thought it best to understand them through the
designations, departments and responsibilities they have been given by
MCCS. I started with interviews and observations. It was convenient to
first talk to a journalist, understand his or her surroundings and how
they perceive and think about it and then evaluate their responses
through observations.
While I had a general set of questions, I tried not to have a fixed
format. The depth interview technique helped in letting the
interviewees talk about themselves, their work and how they perceive
themselves within the office environment. Interviews lasted generally
between forty to fifty minutes. Despite not having set questions, there
were certain areas I was keen to investigate and therefore pursued in
almost every interview. Questions relating to understanding the
audience, news sense, notions of news, and work routines were almost
always a part of the interview. Nearly every formal interview was
recorded and I also took notes.18
Once I had an understanding of the specifics of their daily practices
in the newsroom, I observed the interviewees in their material
surroundings. This involved sitting in the studio or the production
18
Shahzi Zaman, Managing Editor of MCCS was the only one who refused to allow
recording of the interview.
70
control room (PCR), watching the anchor read the news and the various
background activities that went on: how s/he was prompted when a
close up was asked for; when a mid or a long shot was wanted; how
much time was given to stories; which stories were dropped, what
became headline news and which stories were given less importance;
how at times things happen simply because there is no time for
reflection; and how patterns of such moments develop. Besides being in
the studio, I went out with reporters on shoots and observed how they
collected shots, got bytes and acquired information. I also followed the
life of the story once it got back to the newsroom and was written,
edited and then aired. I sat with editors as they selected shots and used
images and sound for stories. To observe the practices at different
times within the newsrooms, I sat through the four shifts, morning, day,
evening and night.

Building a relationship

Relationships with my subjects of study were varied. The younger

journalists were always more willing to help. The more established
ones were more wary and less generous with their time. To talk to the
latter, it became important to lay stress on my past journalistic
experience. The younger journalists quite frequently asked me if I could
secure them a job in Delhi with NDTV, the organisation I had earlier
worked for. I usually remained non-committal or evasive.

The Editorial

Broadly, the editorial team is divided into two sections: the Input and
the Output. I have discussed both in detail in the chapter on editorial
functions. Here I discuss the manner of my engagement with them.

Input: The Reporting Team

71
On the first day of research, I met with Bureau Chief Suman Dey who
heads the reporting team. The team comprised of nine reporters
including Dey and also has stringers in the various districts of West
Bengal who work as freelancers for Star Anando. The reporting team
also depends on the Star News network of reporters across India and
the reporters from the Bengali and English daily, Ananda Bazar and The
Telegraph respectively. I spent considerable amounts of time attending
morning meetings and observing how the “new agenda” was set for the
day and then, shadowing reporters, I saw how the plans were executed.
Besides Dey, I also formally interviewed Bitonu Chakraborty, the crime
reporter in Kolkata, while accompanying several reporters as they went
out on their stories. In contrast to my subsequent research in Mumbai,
Kolkata was a more difficult place to work. With the benefit of
hindsight, several reasons can be attributed to it, all key to who I was
and the political economy of news in the state.
The journalists in Kolkata were cagey about me. This is related to
the fact that their jobs were new and more prized than any they had
held before. Star Ananda paid salaries that were significantly better
than previous television channels in Kolkata, and the brand name of
Star was prestigious. No one wanted to lose their jobs, least of all by
talking to a researcher. Drawing them out in interviews was infinitely
more difficult than journalists in Mumbai who were critical of their own
practices and that of the organisation.
Who I was mattered a lot. I had been a journalist who headed the
editorial team of NDTV in Kolkata, perhaps the best television news
employer in the country, with generally better salaries and work
conditions than their rival channels. In this regard, I was equivalent to
the most senior editorial personnel in Star Ananda. Yet, I was trying to
ask them the most obvious questions: “What is news”, “who is the
audience”. This put them off or was met with a laugh and the response,
‘but you know it’. Junior journalists seemed in awe of me, senior
journalists, cagey and resentful. My academic status was also a cause for
heartache: foreign education is prized. Thus there materialised a line of
eager journalists who wanted to know about foreign scholarships or

72
possible contacts in NDTV to secure a job. I continuously had to work
through these issues.

The Assignment Team

The Assignment team was the most important section in the Kolkata
bureau and was headed by Yuvraj Bhattacharya, the man in charge of all
local editorial matters. I spent the most amount of time with Yuvraj,
conducted three formal interviews with him at different points in my
research, had several lunches and met him socially outside the office.
While Yuvraj was my contact person in Kolkata, we became friends and
kept in touch throughout my time in Mumbai. Yuvraj wanted to use my
presence in Mumbai, and my researcher access to the heads of different
sections within MCCS, to find out about the politics of the office, how he
was favoured in the office hierarchy and what was thought of his work.
I, in turn, used this to understand the kind of intra personal
relationships that went on within offices and the different branches of
the organisation. Yuvraj also spoke freely about the politics within the
Kolkata office, which helped immensely in understanding the internal
dynamics and the sometimes petty power struggles that are a part of
everyday office life.
For an ethnographer, such relationships border on the dangerous.
Ethically, it is a potential minefield. It can alter dynamics of research. In
my case, my friendship with Yuvraj worked to an advantage. Being the
senior-most, his friendship with me and easy camaraderie in office
signalled to the others that it was all right to talk to me. The marked
difference in attitude towards me from others in the office, before
Yuvraj decided to befriend me, clearly helped me in making the choice
that the friendship will go in furthering research possibilities. This of
course led to the ethical question: was I using Yuvraj? I worked through
this situation by explaining to him that his proximity to me was helping
me immensely in my work and it was his choice whether he wanted to
continue. Yuvraj accepted this and we continue our contact today which
has spread beyond the remit of my research.

73
Output: Output Desk

After the Assignment Desk, the Output Desk in Star Ananda is the
most important wing, as it looks after all the productions aspects of the
channel. My contact person here was Soumik Saha, Senior Producer.
Not only did I record formal interviews with Soumik, I spent several
days with him as he worked, following his routine and work practices. I
joined him on night and morning shifts to observe the differences in
routines in the mornings and evenings. Since he was pivotal in the
production of news in Star Ananda, this was useful, as activity centred
around him.
The Output team also consists of anchors, writers, producers and
studio managers. I spent time with and interviewed several anchors
and sat with writers as they wrote copy and made changes. I asked
them about the changes they made and the reasons for them. I spoke to
several producers of different levels of experience and observed them
while they were at work, noting the various processes involved in
production.
A shift for a journalist is supposed to be 10 hours, but almost
everyone has to work far more: an average of twelve to fourteen hours
a day. Soumik, whom I shadowed for several days, overstayed every
time. His night shifts would finish at nine in the morning but at late
afternoon he would still be in office, only leaving for a few hours to go
home, change and come back again for the night shift. A working week
consisted of six days but again journalists were asked to come in on
their off days, especially reporters who were following stories in their
particular beats. People grumbled about the long working hours to each
other but there were never any open protests. Peer group pressure
forced people to work knowing that someone else would be willing to
do their job if they didn’t.

74
Reflections

I had spent a little more than four months in Kolkata conducting my

research. The first part ended in end April 2005. I came back for a short
while in September of the same year. At the end of the first leg, I should
have been ecstatic. From being unsure of gaining entry, my entire wish
list had been delivered. I was allowed access to all parts of the office at
all times of the day. Everyone I wanted to talk to had responded, though
with varying degrees of enthusiasm. I had over forty recorded
interviews and several hours of observation duly jotted in my diary. Yet,
I was troubled. I knew I had not been able to put a finger on ‘it’. I knew
there were things which I could not understand. Who promoted this
particular kind of news? What was the driving force behind news
agenda? Who controls this set-up? The answers were to be found in the
corporate room of MCCS in Mumbai, which I discuss in detail in the next
chapter on corporate policy. While I had gathered sufficient data in
Kolkata, the means of production control were still locked in Mumbai.

Mumbai

Before I start describing the work processes and how I conducted my

research in Mumbai, I feel it important to stress the material conditions
of my staying and living in Mumbai, which I think affected my work and
its outcome. Unlike in Kolkata, where I was staying with my parents, in
Mumbai, I had to find rented accommodation. Given the high price of
real estate and difficulty of commuting, I chose to stay in a student
hostel, which was in central Mumbai and quite close to the MCCS office.
The advantage of the place I stayed in was that it was cheap and
commuting was easy; the disadvantage, of course was that the living
conditions were poor and as a consequence I ended up spending almost
every waking hour in office. I did also spend several nights on the office
couch while observing the work routines at night. This meant that I
would reach office most days by seven am and have breakfast in the

75
office canteen and leave after having dinner by 12 pm. Consequently,
the work period, though shorter than the time I spent in Kolkata,
yielded enormous amounts of data.
A note in my diary on 24th May, 2006 reveals my initial reaction to
work in Mumbai.

I have not been keeping a diary or going through my notes as much as I had
in Kolkata. I just keep jotting down as much as I can. The reason must be
that I have much more to do here. Star Anando had given me access but I
was not really welcome. I had to push my way through. Though I must say
Yuvraj tried harder after our marathon drinking session.
Star News is a contrast. Almost everyone smiles. You are a part of this. Carol,
Aditi, Gopal, everyone has made me feel a part. Shahzi has been more than
cooperative. He has introduced me to people regularly and taken me in to
the morning meetings. I have sat through several of these. I have attended
assignment desk sessions: through the evening as stories are planned and
then a night seeing them work. This week I am going to be with Gopal and
his team in IKT.

The initial reaction to working in Mumbai is obviously affected by

the sharp contrast with my experience of Kolkata. As I mentioned
before, journalists and managers at MCCS were far more comfortable
with my presence than at Kolkata. However, the initial euphoria was
soon tempered. Shahzi Zaman’s enthusiasm dampened somewhat as he
saw me spending more and more time in the newsroom. While never
being hostile, he became increasingly reluctant to spend time with me.
However, he was the only person who seemed aloof; everyone else I
approached made time for my queries and allowed me to observe them
at work.

Starting Up

I reached Mumbai at the end of April 2006. After sorting out a place to
stay, I called Mr Uday Shankar who asked me to come and see him at
11am one morning. My first meeting with him, though brief, was
fruitful. He called his Executive Assistant, Rushit Jhaveri, and told him

76
that he would be the contact person for me and a desk and computer
were also to be provided. Mr Shankar then said that I could start work
in a couple of days once he had informed the different heads of the
departments who could then prepare to meet me.
I started work in Mumbai on 8th April 2006 in a far more organised
manner than in Kolkata. Carolina Gomes, secretary to the CEO along
with the Executive Assistant helped with the initial settling in. My
access card, desk, computer and a phone connection were arranged on
the first day. I sat on the corporate floor next to the CEO’s office and this
helped as a vantage position for observing the corporate world in
journalism, something I had not been privy to earlier.
It was also clear from the beginning that the different heads of
departments were aware that I would be working and the nature of my
research. All of them, on the face of it, seemed co-operative, ready to be
interviewed and to facilitate my work.

First day at office

I started work on the 8th of May 2006 in Star News, Mumbai. After the
preliminaries of settling in: getting the right chair, making sure the
phone worked, and getting passes for the canteen meals, were over, I
started to make the initial forays. As far as the CEO Uday Shankar was
concerned, he had told me that I could pretty much meet anyone and if
there was anything I needed, I should ask his secretary or assistant. He
would meet me for a formal interview when required.
Sitting in the corporate section, next to the CEO’s office, surrounded
by the heads of sales, marketing and research, a whole new world
within journalism was opened to me. I have been a journalist for close
to nine years and have worked within print media, both in newspapers
and magazines and also as a television journalist, but I had no idea how
what I helped produce was marketed and sold, nor how much work
goes into it. This is the world I delved into and spent significant
amounts of time immersed within in Mumbai.

77
 The three most important people on the corporate floor, besides
Shankar himself, were Prabal Ganguly, Head of Sales; Yogesh Manwani,
Head of Marketing; and Jyotsna, Head of Research. I introduced myself
to all three of them. While Jyotsna was busy, both Prabal and Yogesh
offered to be interviewed later in the day. After the interviews, both of
them offered to help me in my observations and they introduced me to
their staff. Consequently, Yogesh Manwani and I became friends, with
both us spending considerable time in each other’s company. Even after
my research, we have spent family holidays together and he keeps me
updated on news and gossip from MCCS and is the person with whom I
still crosscheck my findings and data, whenever in doubt.
On the first evening at MCCS, I met with the editorial team. Carolina
Gomes, Uday Shankar’s secretary took me to the editorial department
and introduced me to the Managing Editor Shahzi Zaman and his
Deputy Milind Khanderkar. Both asked me to start work at 9am the
next day, when I would join them for the morning meeting.

Reflections

While welcoming such access, it was necessary for me to ask the

question why a multinational news organisation would open its door to
a researcher whose work is likely to be critical. With hindsight, I am
certain it was because they did not care about the implications. I had
hastened to assure Mr Shankar on our first meeting that I would be
objective in my writing. He replied with these exact words: “I do not
care”. MCCS knows that a researcher’s account, a doctoral thesis, in no
way harms their stature. But yet, the question remains, why did they
even allow me entry in the first place?
Some explanations can be offered. One, as Mr Bharat Bhushan had
pointed out, the owner of ABP, Mr Sarkar, a “bit of an Anglophile”, liked
that a student from a London university should show interest. He thus
requested the CEO Mr Shankar to facilitate my presence.
But ultimately it rested on Mr Shankar to allow me in and more
importantly, facilitate my work. I met Mr Shankar in London, six months

78
after I finished my research and asked him the question: why was I
allowed in? His reply was that he likes academics and academia and had
he not been a journalist, he might have become an academic. His soft
spot for the world of academia thus might have helped my entry.
Mr Shankar’s friend, Pradip Saha had called on my behalf. Perhaps
the combined force of Mr Sarkar and Mr Saha’s requests helped. Maybe
each of these above explanations had something to do with it. If
working in Kolkata was slightly edgy; working in Mumbai was fun.
Gossip, dinner, critical reflections on work practices and journalism in
India made my Mumbai tenure enjoyable. My friendship with Gopal
Kaushik and Yogesh crossed beyond the need to “cultivate” associations
to a genuinely heartfelt concern for one another.
There are of course, ethical issues involved when a researcher
becomes close to his/her subject. I had to make absolutely certain that
the subjects of my study who became friends were sure about the
purpose of my research, which was to critically appraise news practices
in the organisation they work for. They helped me to achieve this
objective with interviews, observations and by introducing me to their
colleagues. I do not believe that I have compromised on my
observations because of my close associations with these subjects, as
the chapters on corporate and editorial practices will reveal.

Work routines and patterns

My days at Star News would start early. I would come in by 7.30 am,
have breakfast in the canteen, read the morning papers in the editorial
section while chatting with whomever was on duty at the Assignment
Desk about the goings on, before joining the morning meeting at 9 am. I
attended these meetings assiduously which gave me an understanding
of the priorities and how they were played out through the day. After
the morning meeting, I would generally arrange interviews with the
people I was working with, either in the editorial or the corporate
department. As with Kolkata, I divided my time between different
sections of the editorial departments, working, in turn with reporters,

79
Assignment Team personnel, programmers, anchors and the
production team unit. I conducted interviews with people in each
section, then followed these up with observations

Assignment Team

As in Kolkata, the hub of the editorial activity was around this desk. I
spent time in all the different shifts: morning, day, evening and night,
seeing how the routines changed. I interviewed several journalists,
including the Head of Input Rajnish Ahuja and his deputy Utpal, along
with newcomers and mid-career journalists. Here, I must add that it
was the Managing Editor Shahzi Zaman who on my very first day with
the editorial introduced me to the Assignment Team, asking them to co-
operate with my research. This facilitated the initial entry.

Reporters

I spent the most amount of time in the Mumbai Reporting Team of Star
News with Jitendra Dixit, the Bureau Chief, who is also the crime
reporter. Dixit is one of the most talented reporter in Mumbai, with
sources in both the criminal world and police. I introduced myself as a
researcher and seeing Dixit’s slightly hesitant response, also spoke
about my crime reporting days in Mumbai; some of the top policemen
had been friends. Dixit became more inclined to chat. To test me out, he
called up a senior policeman whom I had said to be a contact and
mentioned my name. This took place in front of me. The policeman
immediately wanted to meet up with me and this reassured Dixit of my
claims as a journalist. We spent several afternoons together going on
reporting assignments, talking about his work routines and his
understanding of news practices at Star News. None of these moments
were recorded, as these were not formal interviews. I did jot down the
important points in my diary after our conversations. But Dixit helped
me develop an understanding of how a reporter in Star News conforms,
subverts and works in an office environment with values which s/he

80
does not necessarily share. I bring these understandings to my analysis
of editorial practices at MCCS.

Programmers

According to Mr Shankar, CEO of MCCS, Indian television news

channels do not have a history of appointment viewing. This means that
news channels, given their short history, have not managed to develop
programmes which have high retention capacity in the audiences’ mind.
For example, the BBC’s News Night is a programme which regular
audiences keep coming back to every night; that is, it creates an
“appointment.” Audiences in India switch on news channels to listen to
the news, not to watch particular programmes. With the plethora of
news channels mushrooming daily, encouraging appointment viewing
to create brand loyalty is becoming a priority for organisations.
Innovative programming, which people come back to see regularly,
therefore occupies a primary position in organisational tactics for
pursuing eyeballs.
Consequently, I devoted considerable time with programmers, in
order to understand how they conceptualise and execute their work,
what kind of audience they hope to target, and how. I spent time with
Bivha Kaul, producer of the highly popular Saans Bhi Aur Saazish
(Mother-in-law, Daughter-in-law and Conspiracy, a daily programme
based around television soap opera. Besides formal interviews, we
chatted frequently and I sat with her and her team as they went about
their daily routines. Working with Bivha was based on mutual respect.
She was keen to understand the tools of my trade, as I was keen to
understand hers.
Gopal Kaushik is one of the youngest and brightest programmers in
Star News, producing a weekly legal show called Insaaf Ka Taarazu (The
Scales of Justice). Gopal became a friend and I spent the most amount of
time with him and his team. Gopal and I were virtually inseparable and
I stayed at his house regularly, besides organising office parties at his

81
place. His entire team helped me with my work and I sat with them over
several days as they chose, edited and produced the show.

Anchors

Star News has celebrated anchors; some of them also experienced

journalists. Unlike in Star Ananda, where most anchors are spoon-fed
by the production unit, Star News anchors have a considerable say over
how their bulletins should look, how they play up or down certain
stories and the kind of questions they ask. Anchor-links are also written
by the anchors themselves instead of writers as is the case in Star
Ananda.

Trainees

Thirteen new recruits were inducted while I was in Mumbai. It was

useful to sit through several of the induction programmes and then chat
with all the trainees at once and get an understanding of what they
expect, why they came to Star News and what their perception of news
and news channels are. This entire conversation was recorded.

The Bosses

My longest interview was with Mr Uday Shankar, which ran into well
over an hour and we spoke about all aspects of MCCS and the business
of news television in India. As this interview was conducted at the end
of my time in Mumbai, it was helpful to get his views on my findings. I
also interviewed the Managing Editor Shahzi Zaman; his deputy, Milind
Khanderkar and also the Assignment Desk Head Rajnish Ahuja. While
Shahzi Zaman was cordial throughout my stay, he was unwilling for the
interview to be recorded. Both Mr Khanderkar and Ahuja had to be
pursued before they could be convinced to agree to the interviews
though they co-operated whenever I was around them observing them
work.

82
Corporate

The corporate section has three main divisions: Sales, Marketing and
Research. I describe them individually and their work practices in a
later chapter. As mentioned above, on the very first day, I met with the
Head of Sales and Marketing. After this I also met with Jyotsna, the head
of the Research Team. An important part of the corporate section is the
Human Resources Team and I had informal chats with the Vice
President Sanju Saha besides a long formal one. I also spent
considerable amounts of time with the team members, especially Aditi
Gowariker from Research who helped me understand the nuances of
the Television Ratings Programme (TRP), which forms a chapter in this
thesis. The head of marketing, Yogesh Manwani, subsequently
explained to me over several sittings the unwritten rules of cable
television in India; an unregulated industry filled with treachery,
blackmail and deceit.

Reflections

At the end of three months in Star News, Mumbai, I was, to put it mildly,
satisfied with the research. The questions that came up in Kolkata were
answered. I got to witness the corporate sections of a newsroom, which
has generally been excluded from newsroom ethnographies. I had
managed to record enormous amounts of news content. Every
interview I wanted was granted. I had managed to sit in for all the
necessary meetings, editorial and corporate, and watch the processes at
all times of the day in every section of the organisation. Once I managed
to create a distance from the fieldwork, the diary entries, the recorded
material, interviews and television content, helped create the
framework for this thesis and also for future work.

83
Other Practitioners

To understand the processes within MCCS in the larger context of

media practice in India, I spoke to several journalists, working both in
television and print. Needless to say, my years as a journalist and its
resultant contacts made it easier to access people.
I had formal recorded interviews with the Editor-in-Chief of Times
Television, Arnab Goswami. Mr Goswami was my immediate boss when
I was working with NDTV and helped give me an overall perspective of
running a news channel. I also interviews Mr Bharat Bhusan, Delhi
Editor of The Telegraph and the Mr A K Bhattacharya, Executive Editor
of The Business Standard. I had worked for both of them as a reporter in
Indian newspapers. I also interviewed Gautam Roy and Soni Sangwan,
former colleagues who are now working for different news channels,
for their opinions on news and how things are changing in the industry.
I have not used their interviews directly in this thesis but they helped
greatly in creating an overall perspective of television news reporting in
India.

End Notes: The Inherent Limitations of a Doctoral Thesis

Fieldwork is much more than just a collection of data, recording of

interviews and their analysis. It involves relationships, personal and
emotional entanglements and sometimes, as in my case, lasting
friendships. Not all data, not every emotion can become part of a formal
thesis, bound as they are by a limitation on words and demands of a
coherent narrative structure. Yet, these digressions add to the
researcher’s analysis of the material, both directly and indirectly.
A PhD thesis is almost necessarily reductive. A researcher gathers
data that can be interpreted in more ways than one. In choosing a
particular narrative, s/he forgoes others. At the end of my research
year, I have over ninety recorded interviews, notes on over fifty
informal conversations, four notepads filled with observational data,
and one hundred and ten VHS tapes with recorded material from Star

84
Ananda and Star News. Besides these, I have printouts of several stories,
news lists, insider memos and weeks of audience data. I also have
memories, recollections and thoughts. Despite going through every
interview, I have not used every one directly for this thesis. Some
interviews have been quoted; some left out. This was necessary for
pursuing a certain line of argument and to give coherence to the written
work. Informal chats were helpful in understanding the work
atmosphere and to plan further interviews and lines of questioning.
Though these were extremely helpful, I mention but a few. But the data
collected and the time spent has helped in creating an understanding of
news production processes within MCCS in particular and news
networks in India in general, which I hope comes through in this work.
As I began analysis of the material, I had to remind myself
constantly of the purpose of this research and the overall research
question. I intended to record television India’s news practices, its
politics, the internal dynamics of the newsroom, and the political
economy of news production and through these understand the
articulation of nationhood in the changing news ecology of the country.
This meant that several other forms of analysis had to be subdued.
Here, I record some of the limitations of my work, lines of argument I
could have pursued but did not.

What could have been

The chapter on content analysis could be a full PhD thesis in itself. I

extracted from the content an understanding of its inherent structures.
The analysis does not look at the use of language, placing of
advertisements across different time bands, employment of young
women anchors, the dubious sexual politics of newsrooms, content
comparisons between primetime and other time slots, etc. I reminded
myself that I was trying to see content as a result of certain newsroom
practices; the structures that emerged because of what happens in
newsrooms and corporate strategies. Similarly, in the corporate section
of MCCS, each of its divisions, sales, research, marketing, human

85
resources deserve far more in-depth study. Again, as a researcher I had
to remind myself of my overall framework. I was attempting to put
together material on an area which has little hard data. Television
ethnographies of Indian newsrooms are not available. My role was to
assimilate as much information on news practices as possible, rather
than focus intently on any particular section. Following this line of
reasoning, editorial policies and politics were confined to one chapter.
It is a disservice to the number of interviews and material gathered and
analysed that I did not follow a more descriptive and analytical
approach. But the necessities of recording information, to give shape to
an overall picture of television newsrooms, prevented this. The gender
politics of newsrooms could have been an enriching line of enquiry. For
example, in Kolkata, the women journalists had decided that every
Wednesday afternoon they would hold an informal get-together in the
dressing rooms where everyone contributed to food and drinks. The
men were excluded. What prompted this? Does it still carry on? Do all
women come? Who does, who doesn’t, and why? Combine this with CEO
Uday Shankar telling a female anchor that she must look sexy on
television; compare the number of women anchors to women reporters,
and more lines of enquiry could have possibly opened, leading to an
interesting analysis of gender biases and politics of Indian television
newsrooms. I did not pursue it.
Research into the cable television industry, its relationships with
television companies, the political economy of ratings and advertising
agencies and their grip on the financial aspects of the Indian media
market is a rich tapestry of work waiting to be done. It interests me
enough to think of going back to India for further research. But an
ethnographic approach on newsrooms prevented further work in this
area here.
I had wished a neutrality towards news values, refraining from
commenting on practices and instead, recording them. I have slipped.
The fact that I argue that Indian television is a middle class production
house producing for the self reflects a social concern at the
marginalisation and disarticulation of millions of people. My tone is

86
judgemental, I shape my argument in a fashion to arrive at a certain
conclusion, that news media in Indian television is the domain of the
privileged few. I agree that despite my attempts to record practices
neutrally, a certain line of argument prevailed over others. In my
defence, this argument emerged from an analytical perusal of the
fieldwork material and is not a line of argument I had chosen to pursue
at the beginning of my work. I must mention one of my favourite
philosophers here, Mikhail Bakhtin who writes: “we cannot break out
into the world of events from within the theoretical world. One must
start with the act itself, and not with its theoretical transcription”
(Morson and Emerson, 1990: 50). As much as possible, I have dealt with
the act.

In Conclusion: Vignettes from fieldwork

In the course of my research I encountered much that would not

conventionally enter the field of academia, but I include here to provide
a fuller context to my research findings. In my case, I constantly
negotiated between journalistic enthusiasm for news and the neutrality
of the researcher. I built friendships, I caused suspicion, I felt welcomed,
I was allowed entry and at times invisible walls were erected. The
activities within a newsroom are kaleidoscopic. Here I mention a few
incidents that stand out in memory and in my notebooks.

Who was I? The rumours

Here is a generalisation for a billion people and will be empirically

impossible to prove: Indians understand “connections”. A hangover
from the British Raj, the Indian bureaucracy thrives on this. One needs
“connections” to get electricity, building permits, gas, telephone lines.
The list goes on.
One of the questions surrounding my arrival in MCCS was “whom
does he know to get such access?” In informal chats, during interviews,
people asked me of my “connections” regularly. They were disbelieving

87
when I told them of my methods of gaining entry: persistent emails and
phone calls. Milind Khanderkar, Deputy Managing Editor, when asked
for an interview, told me that I was impossible to refuse as it is known
that I was close to the Sarkars, owners of the ABP group and majority
stakeholders at MCCS.
This rumour was lent some credibility by the fact that I am a
Bengali and the Group Headquarters are in Kolkata, West Bengal. Also, I
had worked as a senior journalist with NDTV in Kolkata and there was
an impression that I must have become close to the Sarkars during that
period. Unsure of who I was, everyone wanted to play safe and chat
with me.
The other rumour was that I was a spy planted by Uday Shankar,
the CEO of MCCS to keep a finger on the happenings within the office.
Gopal Kaushik and Yogesh Manwani told me of this initially and it later
was confirmed by several other members of staff. This led to further
ambiguity regarding my presence.
A body of social theory has been developed and could be used to
analyse and critique the term “connections” and its broad usage in
India. I briefly touch on Bourdieu’s exploration of “cultural capital” and
the bourgeoisie’s attempts to reproduce social order in a later chapter
in the context of content production. It is the same “connected” people
in India, the bourgeoisie, who reproduce a social hierarchy where the
rules advantage them. I had to be one of them, the “connected”, to gain
my entry into MCCS. Similarly, Castell’s network theory or DeLanda’s
work on assemblage theory could have provided interesting analysis on
social networking and the “culture of connections” (see Castell, 1996
and DeLanda, 2006). However, given the direction of my thesis, I
refrained from developing these themes any further.

Shahzi Zaman and the Trainees

My relationship with Shahzi Zaman, Managing Editor, was a tricky one.

At the outset he was co-operative. He introduced me to people and
asked them to facilitate my work. But as the weeks progressed and he

88
saw me spending more and more time with his colleagues and in the
editorial room, I felt he started getting very cagey. The open door policy
changed to “I am busy. Can we chat later?” As time went on, he avoided
meeting my eye and gave me a wide berth. However, he was never
openly hostile.
When an induction programme for a group of thirteen trainees was
being held, I asked Shahzi if I could sit in through some of it. Shahzi
refused. This was the first and only time he categorically refused
permission. But by this time, I had made several other associations. I
was advised by many to ignore Shahzi and attend the induction
anyways, which I did. If Shahzi knew of this transgression, he did not let
me know. Shahzi was also the only person who refused to be recorded
during my interview with him. After a very cautious interview, he told
me that he would think about what he had said and if necessary, would
ask me to put some of it off record. The interview was so restrained that
I have been unable to find anything substantial to use for this work. I do
not know why he was so cautious or restrained. But from conversations
with other colleagues of Shahzi Zaman, I gathered that he does not
court controversy and prefers to be safe. His reticence is a contrast
against the general friendliness from almost everyone else in the
Mumbai office.

A spy or a good researcher

Researchers seek information. Sometimes it is made available to them,

at other times, they pry it out. Company strategy, company goals, the
closed-door meetings, these are secrets any news organisations in a
competitive set-up will have. I knew it would be foolish to ask for
permission to sit in a board meeting. But as I soon found out, people
were willing to tell me these secrets, unofficially of course. As much as
news reporters believe in sources, they too were ready to assume that
role. All official emails to the CEO were routed through his secretary.
Carolina, who befriended me and made sure I knew what was going on
in the office. Every time an employee in the higher echelons was

89
rebuked for over-spending, I would get a copy of the mail. Company
strategies were made available to me; short and long term goals,
marketing strategies, research thrust, all found their way to my mail
box. Besides this, friends took particular care to make sure I understood
what was not to be openly discussed. Marketing strategies, how deals
are made with cable operators, how to artificially hike television
ratings, these are not common knowledge. Friends made sure I
understood these over several sittings. This again was unofficial and
went unrecorded.
I have not made direct use of this material. But they help me
understand the uneasiness of some of the Mumbai journalists with the
work they do and the news values of MCCS. This is reflected in my
analysis of editorial practices in Mumbai and in its contrast with the
work practices in Kolkata where no journalist would say anything
against their place of work.

Sealing bonds

An ethnographer will find that s/he has to partake in local customs to

understand them and to get close to his or her subjects. In Kolkata, it
meant drinking enormous amounts of alcohol with the Assignment
Desk head Yuvraj Bhattacharya. After the first three weeks of research
and not getting anywhere, I decided to take him out for dinner. Dinner
turned out into a marathon drinking session, which ended at 4 am. I
staggered home and wrote down the mental notes I had made
throughout the evening as Yuvraj spoke about the politics within the
office. That one evening had been a turning point in my research in
Kolkata. When Yuvraj as the senior-most started spending time with me
within and outside the office, other journalists felt that they could also
talk to me. This allowed for far more access than during the first three
weeks.
Yuvraj’s conversations were off the record and again, I have made
no direct use of it. Yet, they helped me understand the work ethics of
the journalists in Star Ananda: the ambitions, desires and of course, the

90
internal politics. This also helped me write the chapter on the editorial
practices.

So, who am I?

I am convinced that had I not had a career in journalism, this research

would have been approached in other ways and the results would have
differed. My insider knowledge and my years in the newsroom meant
that there were certain things I took for granted. For example, I knew of
the necessity of news beats for reporters, the time constraints in
television and the taken-for-granted basics of editing news stories.
While this reduced the initiation time and helped me fraternise easily, a
person who has never been in a newsroom would by necessity choose a
different approach. I could not have this outsider perspective, given that
I am implicated in Indian journalistic practice. Then again, if not for my
fledgling academic career, I could not possibly have conceived of this
work. A year’s break for a Master’s degree turned into a fascination
with academia and its rigours. I do not know who played a greater role
in this work; the academic or the journalist; nor do I think that
measurement is important. It is sufficient to acknowledge that this
duality of experience contributed to this work.
Mikhail Bakhtin talks about the concept of ‘live entering’ where one
forgets nothing and brings everything to a new culture. “In this process
one simultaneously renounces and exploits one’s surplus; one brings
into interaction both perspectives simultaneously and creates an
“architectonics” of vision reducible to neither. This architectonics
produces new understanding.” (Morson and Emerson, 1990: 54). For
me, when I entered into academia, I brought to it the “surplus” of my
journalistic training, including a respect for deadlines and a search for
the new. When I re-entered the world of television journalism, this time
as a researcher, I brought to it an academic’s “surplus”, a critical
approach, an understanding of social research tools and methods and a
rigour not present during my journalistic days. The resultant
“architectonics” of these two worlds, is this work.

91
92
 Chapter 4
MCCS: The corporate strategies

The next two chapters in this thesis focus on the production practices in
the two television newsrooms, Star News and Star Ananda and should
be read in conjunction. The first, that is this chapter, examines the key
divisions within the corporate section in Media Content &
Communications Services India Pvt. Ltd (MCCS) which owns both the
channels. It analyses how they influence, control, perform and take over
editorial functions. The second will focus on the newsrooms of the two
channels and examine the daily news practices of the journalists.
This chapter has two immediate objectives. The first is to
contextualise the editorial functions within the corporate structure of
MCCS. The second is to demonstrate that demarcations between
editorial and the corporate are largely meaningless. While corporate
managers perform editorial functions, journalists, as the next chapter
will show, take on the key corporate responsibility of increasing
viewership and thereby, profitability. This thesis claims itself to be an
ethnography of television news production in India. Both chapters,
therefore, are crucial to understanding the dynamics of news
production. By providing empirical material detailing particularities, it
challenges, questions and interrogates earlier newsroom ethnographies
and what, Cottle has called, their “orthodoxies.” (See chapter 2)
These two chapters, along with chapters 6 and 7, provide data
leading towards the meta-theoretical terrain of this work: how is
nationhood articulated in Indian television newsrooms. I aim to show,
through interviews, observational and fieldwork data, the way
journalists and media managers construct an affluent India for an
affluent audience.

Bypassing the laws: Formation of MCCS

In Chapter 2, I outlined the arrival of private television channels in

India. The Hutchison Whampoa group, operating out of Hong Kong and

93
owned by a Chinese capitalist, Li Ka-Shing, originally launched Star TV.
(See Page and Crawley, 2001: 76-77). In 1993, Rupert Murdoch’s News
Corporation bought Star TV. Star News was launched in India in 1996.
Because of the governmental regulation that disallows a person of
foreign origin from broadcasting live television news in India, Murdoch
had to find a way around the law. He overcame the problem in two
ways. First, Star News was uplinked from Hong Kong and there was a
five-minute delay from the uplinking to the downloading on satellite
dishes in India which technically meant that it was not ‘live’. Second, the
entire news content for Star News was owned and provided by New
Delhi Television Ltd (NDTV), a private production house owned by an
Indian, Prannoy Roy, thus overcoming the problem of a foreigner being
barred from producing news in India.
However, the archaic broadcasting laws in India, formed during
the colonial period, could not stand the changing political economy of
the 90’s. In 1995, the Supreme Court of India ruled that the airwaves
were public property “that must be used in ways that ensure the
expression of plurality of views and diversity of opinions in the national
community.” (Kumar, 2006: 44). The immediate cause for the ruling
was cricket. The Hero Cup International was being held in India in 1995
and the organisers of the tournament, the Cricket Association of Bengal
(CAB), sold the worldwide rights for telecasting the matches to
Transworld Image (TWI) after failing to come to a mutually acceptable
contract with state-sponsored Doordarshan. The Ministry of
Information and Broadcasting in India, mollycoddling the state
network, asserted that Doordarshan had exclusive rights for
broadcasting in India and told the government-owned
telecommunication provider, Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) to
deny uplinking facilities to TWI. CAB approached the Kolkata High
Court which, wanting to facilitate the telecasting of the matches, passed
an interim order which allowed Doordarshan to broadcast the games
while allowing TWI to uplink from VSNL. In effect, while TWI had to pay
for the broadcasting rights from CAB, Doordarshan did not. The
Supreme Court took the case up after the tournament and ruled that

94
the airwaves were public property, thereby paving the way in 1998 for
private broadcasters to up-link from within India. This change in law
allowed Murdoch the possibility of changing the production model for
Star News and of having more control over content.19
Star News was ‘re-launched’ at the end of 2002 and, as is
common with Rupert Murdoch ventures, it was mired in controversy.
Re-launching meant, for the first time since its inception in 1996, that
Star News started in-house production instead of having NDTV provide
the content. In 2002, the two channels decided to part ways and, while
NDTV launched two news channels of its own - one in English (NDTV
24x7) and one in Hindi (NDTV India) - Star News decided to target the
North Indian region and launched only in Hindi. The Government of
India regulations, however, still states that a person of foreign origin
cannot own news channels in India nor have majority shares in them.
This was one of the reasons that Murdoch roped in NDTV in 1996 to
provide content. When other news channels joined in protests against
Murdoch, he made “an ass of the law” (see The Frontline, August 2-15,
2003), and sold off 74 per cent share of Star News to the Bengali
newspaper house, The Anandabazar Group (ABP) in August 2003.
The resultant Media Content & Communications Services India
Pvt. Ltd. (MCCS) which is a 74/26 joint venture between ABP TV and
Star News Broadcasting Ltd, initially owned the one news channel, Star
News. Eyeing the profitability of regional news channels, they launched
Star Ananda, a Bengali News channel, in June 2005. A Marathi news
channel, Star Majha, was launched in 2007. The then Group Chief
Executive Officer (CEO) Uday Shankar20 told me in an interview that
MCCS is now trying to come out of the shadow of Star and promote itself
as a brand in its own right.

19
Star’s contract with NDTV stipulated that the latter had complete editorial control
and copyright over the news content.
20
Uday Shankar now heads the entire Star group in India and is CEO, Star India
95
MCCS: The Company structure and workplace: a thick description

The MCCS office is located in Mahalaxmi in Central Mumbai, housed in

the main Star India complex, next to Fame Ad labs, whose studios are
frequently used by Star News for specialised programmes. Star TV has
an office complex with six floors, of which MCCS occupies two. The Star
News editorial department is situated on the ground floor while the
corporate offices, which handle both Star News and Star Ananda are
located on the first floor. The reception, lobby, canteen and other
facilities are shared with Star India. The uplinking facilities of Star News
are on the third floor along with the rest of Star India.

The Corporate Office

The corporate office on the first floor is divided into two sections. The
main section houses the Chief Executive Officer’s (CEO) office and also
the office of the heads of Human Resources (HR), Research, Marketing
(includes Branding and Distribution) and Ad Sales (Advertisement and
Sales). Besides the heads of these departments, other personnel from
these departments too have their workstations here. Before I examine
each of these departments individually, it is important to understand
the CEO’s role and functions.21
Chief Executive Officer: The CEO’s office forms the bridge
between shareholders and directors of MCCS and the everyday
functioning of Star News and Star Ananda. The CEO Uday Shankar was
earlier a journalist who moved from print to television. Uday not only
heads the corporate office but is also the editor-in-chief for Star News
and Star Ananda. Given conventional wisdom that the editorial should
not merge with business affairs of the company and vice versa, the job
should be a potential minefield of ethical dilemmas and conflicts of
interest. (As discussed in the literature review, the various strands of

21
The fact that I start with the CEO in the corporate section immediately blurs the
distinction with the editorial as Uday is also head of the latter. I discuss him in the
corporate section simply because his office is on that floor and also because I start
with the corporate. Had I started with the editorial, Uday would as easily have fitted in
there.
96
newsroom ethnographies that looked at journalistic agency (White,
1950), outside influence for news determinants (Gans 1979; Herman
and Chomsky, 1998), or even those that did look at organisational
practices (Schlesinger, 1978; Epstein 1973) failed to look in detail at
corporate practice and its influence on news content. However, given
today’s news ecology, such omission will provide a less than adequate
understanding of newsroom practices.)
In an interview conducted at the end of my stint in the Mumbai
office, one of the first questions I put to Uday Shankar was how he
viewed the “ethical” dilemmas of combining the role of editor and chief
executive and does this duality compromise journalistic independence.
He replied thus:

I do not think my becoming the CEO along with being the Editor has
compromised the journalistic standards at all. We are a content
company and if content is your core, who else should be heading the
company. This whole disqualification of journalist from heading a
company because he doesn’t understand business is complete
bunkum. Who understand the business better than a journalist? He
might not understand an excel sheet, maybe. What’s so great about
an excel sheet? You could get a commerce graduate to do that. But I
understand the core product. And don’t forget in Rupert Murdoch’s
companies all over the world, the heads of channels are always
content persons. The head of Fox News is a content person, Samir
Nair, the CEO of Star India is a content person, News Corps CEO is a
content person. (July 5th, 2006).

Shankar’s role as CEO and also as head of the editorial team means that
he has tremendous control over everyday functions of the office. During
my tenure at Star News in Mumbai, I was seated facing the CEO’s office,
in close proximity to his secretary and his personal assistant, I was
privy, therefore to most of his and his offices’ activities. Uday Shankar
made sure people knew he was in charge. The staff were scared of him
and the senior personnel including the heads of the different
departments were no exception to this rule. If in Mumbai (Shankar
travelled frequently) he had regular (sometimes stormy) meetings with

97
the various teams, be they in the corporate or editorial. I observed him
letting his displeasure known over particular stories and he was often
around in the newsroom.22 He regularly met with the various heads to
discuss corporate strategy and chaired a Monday afternoon meeting
between all the heads of departments including the editorial and the
corporate. Stories abound in the office about Uday’s quick temper and
those at the receiving end of it. I was told of his ‘fearsome temper’ by
several of the people working in MCCS. I narrate an incident in my diary
that has been crosschecked with several people.

When Star News was being launched, people were hugely overworked
and everyone was stressed. Uday used to spend a lot of time in the
editorial. He was frequently abusive and angry with staffers. One
evening he walked in and started screaming at an editor. The editor
stood up and told him that he cannot speak in this manner. Uday
dragged the editor out and told security at the entrance never to let
him enter again. The editor was sacked. (diary excerpt, June 3rd)

I also include two excerpts from my fieldwork diary to highlight Uday’s

involvement in the everyday affairs of the news channel as well as his
working style.

(June 1st): Tremendous amount of shouting going on as Uday is talking to

someone on phone. He is in a bad mood, very bad. Shahzi, Milind, [Shahzi
Zaman and Milind Khanderkar, the Managing Editor and his deputy] and he
had a long meeting. There were closed doors meetings. Now the door is open
and Uday’s raised voice is clearly audible. He tells Carol 23 to close the door.

(June 15th) Uday comes after a long time. Everyone immediately tenses up. A
girl coming up the stairs tells Carol, “Uday is coming” and we all split from
around his office area.

The above three instances reflect the working style of Uday Shankar.
The first incident, where an editor is sacked, is one of the stories which I
am told by Uday’s colleagues when I ask them about what they think of

22
The reasons for displeasure were varied, ranging from stories which the channel
missed; “bad” or poor quality stories; failure to do stories he had asked for, etc.
23
Uday’s secretary.
98
him. Though crosschecked with several people, the ‘reality’ of the story
had ceased to matter as it had taken on mythic proportions. Newcomers
at MCCS are told the story so that they know how to behave in Uday’s
presence.24 Uday’s authority within the office premises seemed
absolute. I did not once hear anyone contradict him. The next two
instances show that even the senior editorial personnel were
deferential towards him, while his mere presence ensured deference.
As CEO and editorial head, Shankar not only had to undertake the
important job of making profits (he is answerable to the shareholders),
but also of balancing this with the ‘ethics’ of practicing journalism and
the news production of a television channel. Uday Shankar’s approach
to work, its practices, again highlights the merging of corporate and
editorial functions: the shared responsibility of maximising profits by
the editorial, and of understanding and contributing to news content
with an eye to profit by the corporate. The latter is important to
understand and here I chart out how the different corporate divisions
actively promote particular kinds of content with corporate goals in
mind. (I will use my interview with Uday Shankar through the next two
chapters as I describe and analyse corporate functions and editorial
practices)
I begin by examining the Ad Sales team, primarily responsible
for selling advertisement slots to potential customers, their strategies,
and how these affect editorial policies and news content.

Ad Sales

Formation: Though Star News was re-launched in 2002, Star India

looked after the sales. Even after the joint venture with ABP and the
formation of MCCS in 2003, sales continued to be handled by the parent
company. It was only in January 2005, when the prospect of launching a
Bengali channel was assured, that MCCS felt the need to have its own
sales team that would manage both Star News and Star Ananda.

24
Though Uday has never been anything less than courteous to me, the stories of his
temper ensured that I kept a low profile when he was in office like everyone else.
99
Composition: The team was headed by the Sales Head, Prabal Ganguly,
who was also one of the Vice Presidents of MCCS. Besides his deputy,
Sonal, seven other personnel worked in the department.

Function: The main function of the sales team is to sell advertisement

slots in the two news channels of MCCS, Star News and Star Ananda
(and now Star Majha) to clients. Revenue earned through
advertisements contributes to roughly 80 per cent of MCCS’s gross
profits. Most corporate clients of MCCS who purchase advertisement
slots do it indirectly through advertisement agencies. This point is
important. The Ad Sales team will very rarely sell slots directly to
clients.25 The advertising agency employed by a client for their media
policy buys airtime in various television channels and other media
outlets for their clients. These agencies are responsible for the media
strategy and publicity management of their clients and deal with
various media houses like MCCS to purchase advertisement slots for
their clients. Teams from media organisations make their sales pitch
directly to these agencies, which are extremely powerful in the
advertisement revenue market.26

Strategies of selling: Television slots are sold on two basic principles: 27

quantitative and qualitative. If a channel is viewed much more than its
competitors, it becomes imperative for advertisers to be seen on that
channel because of its comparatively high visibility. This, Prabal
Ganguly explains, is the quantitative principle of selling advertisement
slots. Particular time slots are also sold to advertisers who want to be
associated with a channel’s unique positioning. For example, The
Discovery Channel, though by no means a highly viewed channel in
India, has a regular client base for advertising and its association with
25
Clients are of two kinds: retail and corporate. Almost 90 per cent of corporate
customers, which are far more lucrative to do business with, will have advertising
agencies negotiating for them. Retail clients, who are mainly proprietor driven, tend to
do business themselves.
26
In an interview with me, the CEO Uday Shankar calls the ad agencies “lazy” and yet
talks about their vice-like grip on the market.
27
I had a recorded interview with Prabal Ganguly and a very long chat with Sonal who
explained the basic principles of television news format selling and strategies in
general and also particular to MCCS. I borrow from these interviews here.
100
children ensures that certain companies manufacturing products aimed
towards this audience will want an association with the channel. The
unique position of a channel and how it is sold to clients is the
qualitative principle of selling. A channel’s image, its qualitative
positioning, the way it wants to be perceived in the market and by the
viewer; these are aspects that are handled by the marketing
department of the channel. (I will discuss the marketing section of Star
News a little later in this chapter)
For the quantitative, the entire television industry in India depends on
Television Rating Points (TRP), discussed in detail in the chapter on
audiences (Chapter 6). TRP ratings give the industry an idea of the
number of people watching different channels at different times.
Computer software can analyse the age-group of people watching, how
long they watched a programme and also follow the audience patterns
of other channels.
But both quantitative and qualitative aspects of a channel have
to be sold to the advertisement agencies by the sales teams, and this
requires different strategies. Such strategies are important because not
every channel can be the ‘number one’ in terms of viewer preference,
and nor can every news channel acquire a distinctive feature, shared
with no other news channel. Given this, the teams responsible for
maximising advertisement revenue come up with various strategies to
boost sales. News viewing in India is traditionally seen as a male
domain by the advertising market. The news genre, Prabal says, is for
the “male 25 +” viewer. Television sales teams therefore target clients
with male products. “The sales team looks at the product, the market
which the client targets, where does he advertise, does he tilt towards
English or Hindi, how does he spend, is it seasonal or all year spending.”
(Sonal) The spending habits of a potential client are also taken into
account. Some clients are seasonal: Sonal gives the example of clients
who manufacture warm clothes, whereas a bank, she points out, would
advertise all the year round. For example, ICICI Bank has become a
major spender in the Indian market but Star News, has so far received a
relatively small portion of the spending. Star News is now looking at the

101
potential for doubling this account. To do this, the ad sales department
is trying to come up with strategies. The ad sales people “can promise
extras like stories on banking tips or credit cards to ICICI as sops.”
(Sonal). The bank can also be told the kind of advertisements that are
being placed by their competitors in Star News and what can be done
for them to counter this. Specific extras are promised for different
clients. The closing of a deal takes several sittings with the client and
the ad agencies.28
Most buyers want to advertise only in prime-time hours, usually
in the morning before people (men mostly) go to work and in the
evening, after they return. But a channel has to sell at least 20 hours of
news time everyday and therefore

“work out a very, very cost effective as well as innovative manner so that
whenever a client buys, his inventory gets liquidated across various time
bands. There are obvious differences in how this is handled when a
Mercedes or a top of line car comes and advertises, as to make-up
product targeted at women. The latter will be open to taking day slots
too. Advertising sales package thus has to be created keeping products in
mind and the client profile. [sic]” (Prabal Ganguly, 8/05/2006)

It is evident from the selling strategies of the sales team in MCCS

that it must have a close working relationship with the editorial
department. Sops, extras and inducements have to be offered to clients
and therefore specific stories have to be covered. Also, to project a
certain image of the channel amongst potential clients certain kinds of
stories are required, for which the editorial and sales must work closely
with the branding and marketing department. Sales personnel must
also understand the selling potential of different news cycles and
programmes and therefore interact closely with the editorial to
determine content. How is this achieved? Here, I use specific
illustrations to understand the daily practices of sales and editorial
teams, and collaboration between them. For this, I use the observational

28
Though there is an official rate card for advertisements, discounts are available for
big players who spend larger sums of money. Some discounts are not printed on the
card and offered directly to the agencies.
102
method and reproduce notes from two meetings that I attend. The
meetings were on the subject of a new car show and were between the
members of the editorial team, headed by Gopal Kaushik, Associate
Producer in Star News.29 I had seen the pilot episode before the meeting.
The format was simple. Two lovers, a good-looking female model and a
man get into an argument over how to get to Goa from Mumbai. The girl
goes by train saying it will be faster than the man’s car. The car, which
is being highlighted in this show, wins the “race”. The female model is
attractive and wears “sexy” clothes, which Gopal tells me will be the
main Unique Selling Point (USP) of the show.
Before a programme goes on air, the sales department has to be
convinced the ‘product’ is saleable and they give inputs on how to make
it more lucrative. Also, they need to know the kind of clients they can
approach to sponsor and advertise in such programmes. I attended two
meeting that took place between Gopal, his team member Preetam
Bora, and Archana from the sales department. The first meeting was on
June 2nd, 2006 and the next one, four days later, on June 6 th, 2006. Both
the meetings were held in a small room, next to the sales department in
the corporate floor and usually occupied by Gopal and his team
members.30

The first meeting

The meeting started with Archana stating that she had been thinking of
clients who would be interested in car shows: she had come up with
Tata Motors and Indian Oil. Gopal remarked that the programme would
be a product she could easily sell, and, explaining the format, stated that
there would be a storyline around the cars the programme chooses to
highlight. There would be a section where two vehicles race each other,
which was not to be stage-managed. He firmly iterated that editorial
policy would not be changed on this and the race was to be ‘authentic’.
Archana said the car that loses the race would get bad publicity, which

29
I address the understandings of “programme” and “news” at MCCS in a later chapter
on content.
30
I had taken notes during the meeting in my diary.
103
would affect revenues if clients got upset. The discussion switched to
potential clients. Archana mentioned that besides automobile
companies, other products like lubricants could be highlighted. The tyre
industry, she said, is not very big on advertising in television.
Archana then asked what the branding opportunities were.
Gopal replied that there would be two different formats: one would be
takkar (battle) between vehicles and the second would be a test drive.
Archana remarked that she could arrange for vehicles for test-drives
from the car manufacturers. Gopal said that the branding opportunity
for say, Tata Motors, in a test drive situation could be a particular
segment of the programme named, for example ‘Tata Motors Present’.
The programme would start with a question; he added and would be
the third segment which would be ‘non-political.’ He gave an example:
“What is the naughtiest thing you have done in a car”? Archana laughed
and replied “Call it how do you take a woman in a car.” There was
general laughter after which Gopal remarked that the answer could be
given at the end of the programme and celebrities would relate their
experiences on the given topic. Gopal said a ‘teaser’ 31 for this would be
easy to produce with celebrities. Archana asked if the closing section
would have tips for drivers. Gopal replied that he could include that.
Archana added that if this could be done, then maintenance of vehicles
could become a part of this closing section and she could get clients
who would want to advertise this. Archana wanted more from Gopal
regarding what she could sell from the programme. Gopal mentioned
again that he had a model (Manpreet) who would wear ‘sexy’ clothes.
He suggested that Manpreet’s outfit could be sold. Archana jotted this
down. She asked for a five-minute pilot presentation that she could
show to clients. Gopal agreed to get it ready and asked Preetam to
prepare it. Archana wanted Manpreet to wear a cap. Archana said that it
was better to be a “bit conservative” with programmes when it comes
to selling it to clients. She then explained that sales personnel in client
companies are wary of taking risqué products to their bosses. Gopal
said that his programme will have no jargon, there would be more
31
Teasers are short promos which are made to publicise particular programmes and
are aired at different times through the day.
104
action and less talk and he would provide information in the
programme on how to get car finance and car registration done. The
story line would be entertaining, he promised. He also suggests that the
fights between the vehicles could be between bikes and cars, too.
Archana liked this idea and jotted it down. They decided to meet again
soon.

Second meeting: 6th June

(Gopal was not present and the meeting took place between Preetam
Bora and Archana)

Archana started by talking of naming rights32, anchor mention33 of

products and background branding34. Preetam noted these points down
for Gopal. He told Archana that ten stories had already been shot.
Archana remarked that it would now be impossible to do product
placements in them. They spoke of different ways to create branding
opportunities for products. Archana suggested a kind of moving wheel
at the side of the screen, which could highlight the main sponsor 35. She
asked Preetam whether the show would critique new launches by the
clients. Preetam answered in the affirmative. Archana stated that this
might cause a big problem, telling Preetam: “these are big deals and for
your honesty, my revenues will get “lammed” [hit].” She also told
Preetam that the sales department would take thirteen or twenty six-
week commitments from clients and they could not hit these long term
clients with negative publicity. She then asked about the shooting
expenditure per episode. Preetam stated that it was approximately
300,000 Indian rupees36. Archana got upset, saying that it was too high.
32
This could mean the programme or segments within the programme include the
name of a particular sponsor.
33
An anchor might mention certain products of the sponsors during segments. So a
segment on car maintenance can mention a particular product of a client related to the
content.
34
This could take different forms depending on the design and look of the show. A
popular background branding is to use a revolving logo with a sponsor’s name on it.
35
An example of background branding.
36
100,000 (a lakh) Indian rupees (Rs) is approximately 1200 pounds. One crore is a
hundred lakhs which would be approximately one hundred and twenty thousand
pounds.
105
“Do you think sales can do some rocket science and bring in Rs 2 crore?
That is just to break even,” she remarked. She kept repeating “you have
overshot.” Preetam, I noticed, started making sketches of guns on his
note pad. The meeting broke up soon after.

106
Points to note

A programme first has to recoup money spent on it and then make

profit. For this, it needs to be sold to clients for sponsoring or
advertisements. The sales department therefore has ample say over
content as is evident from the above meetings. The editorial also
understands these demands and works with the sales team. At times
however, the demands for selling a programme and what ‘sells’ can
result in interesting situations. Gopal having internalised the necessity
of selling his programme has felt that an attractive model in ‘sexy’
clothes will sell better. But Archana thinks that too “risqué” a product
has problems selling. When I speak to her later, she tells me that a lot of
the oil and rubber companies for which this product is ideal are public
sector enterprises. This means that the top people tend to be older than
those in a corporate firm and selling “sexy” products can become a
risk.37
Archana’s comments on “editorial honesty” being detrimental
for selling a product must raise eyebrows given that MCCS is a news
channel. Selling a programme is the responsibility of the bosses. Gopal,
who is heading the show is far more eager to see that the show goes on
air and is profitable. Preetam’s reactions to Archana’s suggestions are
sometimes hostile, and often indifferent. He makes sketches of guns as
she works out the cost factor.
Appointment viewing is a nascent, not yet large-scale practice in
Indian news television; audiences switch on to news channels
randomly rather than wanting to watch a particular one at a particular
time. For example, in the UK there is a large dedicated audience who
would switch on to BBC for NewsNight. While English news channels in
India have started the trend of appointment viewing, Hindi and other
regional news channels have yet to catch up. This is indicated by the
audience ratings where regular programmes do not necessarily have a
similar viewing pattern.

37
I was told that in a meeting of all department heads, the Managing Editor was asked
by the others to tone down the “sexiness” of the channels as it was affecting the image
and companies felt shy of associating with it.
107
 Uday Shankar and Head of the Research department, Jyotsna,
both told me that Star News and Star Ananda are pushing hard to make
appointment viewing a habit with the audience and thus placing a lot of
stress on programmes and their promotion. At times, however, it is not
sufficient that a programme garners very high audience ratings or that
it is popular. Associations with the programme can be such that
advertisers shy away from it. An example is the extremely popular daily
crime show on Star News called Sansani. The programme is one of the
most watched across all Hindi news channels but several top brands
refuse to advertise in it owing to certain associations of a crime based
show. Therefore, the branding of a particular programme and also that
of the channel are extremely significant in their saleability. The job of
brand management is the responsibility of the Marketing department.

Marketing

Job definition: The primary job of the Marketing department is image

management, i.e. finding ways in which a certain perception of the
channels can be created and maintained amongst the audience in
general and the media market in particular. 38 This is generally achieved
by three broad means: influencing content, through promos and the
placing of advertisements and finally, through public relations
exercises.39

Context: When Star News re-launched in Hindi in 2003,40 there was one
established Hindi news channel in India: Aaj Tak. The fight for second
place was between Star News and NDTV India, which were both
launched around the same time. Zee News, was also establishing itself

38
By market I mean the media market, that is the clients to whom Star News and
Ananda sell advertisement slots and the advertising agencies who act on behalf of the
clients.
39
In an interview and subsequent conversations, Yogesh Manwani, the gentleman
heading the marketing division, explained the various ways his department works. I
use this interview along with discussions with Prabal Ganguly to show its functions.
40
Star News had to face the difficulty, termed “residual equity”, of being an elite
english channel due to the several years of being produced by NDTV. A broad range of
marketing gimmicks, such as hoarding, advertisement in television and print were
launched to change that impression.
108
and Sahara India was on the verge of being launched. Three years later,
television news channels were a dime a dozen in India. The competitive
overcrowding of news providers means “there is a fragmentation in the
news genre, especially in Hindi news (Prabal Ganguly).” In this context,
‘fragmentation’ means that with more and more channels sprouting,
they are fighting for an audience base, in which though there is a net
increase because of more cable connectivity, the actual number of
viewers per channel is shrinking. Given this overcrowded scenario,
branding of a channel assumes tremendous significance to make it
stand out from others of the same genre.
Aaj Tak, being the first to establish itself in the market, branded
itself as the fastest to get the news. Not unlike CNN, which comes with
the tag line “brings you the news first,” Aaj Tak came with the line Sabse
Tej (The Fastest). NDTV India, which had been producing news for
almost two decades and had a recognisable face in the form of its
proprietor Prannoy Roy and other established anchors, was perceived
to be a serious channel. It used this perception and the catch line
khabar wohi joh sach dikhaye (news is that which shows the truth).
Yogesh Manwani, Marketing Head, of MCCS said that in coining the
phrase Aapko Rakhe Aage (Keeps You Ahead), Star News became the
first and only customer centric news channel: “Our approach therefore,
editorially, was that we will report keeping your [the audience] interest
at heart, we will report keeping you in mind, we will report news that
affects you.” The positioning of Star Ananda was relatively simpler
given that it was the first Bengali news channel viewed nationally. 41
As I mention in the chapter on editorial, every journalist I
interviewed at MCCS answered two questions almost identically: how
do you select and reject a story? “I imagine what my audience would
like to see?”; how do you know what the audience would like to see? “I
imagine what I would like to see, what my friends and family would like

41
This audience oriented approach was obviously intended to maximise sales
and garner higher TRP ratings. But its effect is evident in editorial policy. The
managing editor Shahzi Zaman vets stories for two things: jan heet aur jaan ruchi
(public good and public taste). Several times when I sat with him and reporters came
with their stories, he would ask them to justify why the stories should be on air in
terms of these two points.
109
to see.” Imagining the self as audience has given rise to several
consequences which I have picked up in other sections of this work. My
assertion is that the one of the reasons the Indian media continue to
articulate a “promised land” of affluence and wellbeing where the poor
are wished away (Chakravorty and Gooptu, 2000:91), is that middle
class journalists imagining themselves as audience articulate a notion of
India relevant to themselves. At best, it is wishful thinking; at worst it is
a “symbolic annihilation” of 400 million people who live below the
poverty line in India.

Branding opportunities and editorial support: According to Manwani,

once decided upon, the impression of a ‘customer oriented’ channel
needs to be continuously reinforced through content. This requires
collaboration with the editorial. Marketing also comes up with
programme ideas that further the desired image of the channels. Giving
an example, Manwani states that on March 31 st, 2006, Star News had a
programme that was completely developed by the marketing team. It
was called Khabar Hamari, Faisla Aapka (Our News, Your Judgement).
He describes the programme as a way to show their audience that the
news is for them and that they have a say in it, thereby furthering the
idea that they come from a viewer centric position. The programme had
a section where viewers could call in and give their response to the
various stories and feel empowered. Marketing regularly works with
the editorial on such ideas.
A new development in Indian media is that almost every major
Bollywood production now has its media partners and this will include
at least one news channel. This is a strategic tie-up which allows the
movie producer to have ‘unlimited’ air time on a news channel to
promote the movie while a news channel has rights to ‘exclusive’
interviews with the actors, access to film footage and other exclusive
rights. These are primetime news material as films occupy a very
significant chunk in every news wheel. Yogesh Manwani makes these
strategic alliances.42
42
Manwani, during a chat, told me that though the film correspondent should fix up
interviews, he prefers to do it himself as he can get close to the stars and producers of
110
Points to Note

News content is no longer the sole prerogative of the editorial team

and this must be taken into account if news production processes in
Indian newsrooms are to be understood critically. Smythe has argued
that content is “free lunch”. (1981) I would argue that news content in
India is aimed at securing maximum eyeballs and as that is the route to
achieving higher ratings and therefore secure more advertising, it has
its purposes. These purposes, however, do not fit in with a traditional
understanding of news media’s role, which sees it as “as a responsible
institution that disseminates information and promotes debate,” (if the
news media ever played that role) and “obliterate[es] the distinction
between the editorial and business functions in a publication…”
(Bidwai, 1996: 6). As can be seen from the above two examples, the
corporate section, here specifically the marketing team of MCCS, not
only asks for specific stories but actually ‘organises’ content. While it
can be argued that programmes like Khabar Hamaari, Faisla Aapka do
not strictly fall into a news category, no such excuses can be made for
the tailored news of Bollywood organised by the marketing team. Part
of what is termed “infotainment,” Bollywood stories are an important
feature in the general news cycle in Star News and Star Ananda as
indeed they are in every other news channel in India.
Marketing in news channels also rely heavily on Public Relations
(PR) to promote brand awareness. Manwani says that PR is conducted
on a daily basis and a PR company, Vaishnavi, has been hired by MCCS
to promote its channels. This involves letting clients know of certain
exclusive stories or of new programmes coming up. It will include
sending out press releases, putting up hoardings on the streets
advertising either the channels or their contents. These require close
co-ordination between marketing and editorial; the latter must let the
former know in advance of stories which can create ‘impact’ so that
advertisement campaigns and PR exercises can be planned in advance.

Bollywood.
111
Manwani, during his interview, told me that he makes it a point every
evening to go to the newsroom and chat with the editorial people. 43
It is evident that the theoretical frameworks through which
news production practices have been analysed until now need to be
reworked. Scholars have argued that journalists need to hold on to
notions of objectivity for professional purposes (see Lichtenberg, J.
1996). But objectivity is an empirical impossibility. The above examples
show that journalists may no longer hold on to such “strategic rituals”.
(Tuchman, 1978) What can be objective about reporting a Bollywood
cinema production when your organisation has set up a strategic
alliance with them?
Both the Sales and Marketing departments depend heavily on
data and inputs provided by the research team at MCCS. This team also
plays an important role in deciding news content. It gives analysis of
audience data on which the sales, marketing and editorial team rely to
maximise their impact and profit. An audience-monitoring agency, TAM
(Television Audience Measurement) Media Research, provides ‘gross
data’ to most of India’s media industry. 44 The research team uses this
data for analysis while providing the inputs on which much of the
editorial and corporate decisions are based. Before a discussion of the
functions of the Research desk and the particularities of ratings
methods in India, it is necessary to understand the key concepts of the
system and its functions.

Rating the Audience

As mentioned in the literature review, the ratings system developed in

the United States in the 1920s in response to the economic challenge
posed by the introduction of radio, and its resulting commercialisation.
(Smulyan, 1994) Commercialisation almost immediately established a
need for audience measurement, because advertisers and programme
sponsors needed to know how many people were listening to justify

43
The Marketing team also handles distribution, which will be discussed in a later
chapter on audiences and TRP’s.
44
The only exception to this is Zee Television which does not use the ratings.
112
their advertising expenditure. The first audience research tradition to
develop, therefore, was ratings research (Beville, 1998).
Webster (et al) consider the ratings system to be “indispensable
to the media’s interest in building audiences and to the society’s
interest in understanding mass media industries.” (2000: 1) However,
as Ross and Nightingale point out, they (Webster, et al.) describe ratings
analysis as “commercial audience research and situate it alongside
social and cultural audience research traditions, rather than the field of
marketing. (2003: 44). We do not necessarily have to agree with
Webster et al (2000) to see the value of ratings as a basic media
knowledge required to understand “what media services, products and
texts are produced and distributed, and how audience interests are
taken into account (or not) in making those decisions.” (Ross and
Nightingale, 2003: 45). Ross and Nightingale, identify four
types/uses/methods of analysis:

Applied - ratings analysis sets out to provide answers to specific

questions, like ‘how many people watched the programmes we
broadcast last night?’ or ‘what percentage of the people who
watched the programme were women aged 18 to 35?’ In this
sense it is a pragmatic rather than theoretical research.

Adminstrative – ratings analysis contributes directly to the

decisions broadcasters make as to how to operate as a business
(what types of programmes to buy, when to schedule them, what
pricing policy should be adopted for selling advertising spots,
and so on). The analysis helps broadcasting companies operate
more efficiently, and in this sense it is not critical of the media –
rather it is part of the communication system.

Quantitative – rating analysis relies on sampling procedures, and

on adding up instances of audience behaviour described as
‘exposure.’ (I will explain this in detail) Qualitative information
about audiences is outside its scope.

113
 Syndicated – ratings analysis is used to generate reports that are
offered for sale to companies and individuals involved in the
media industries. It is not designed to solve social or cultural
problems, but to deliver immediately usable information to the
industry.

All four approaches are based on techniques developed for counting

and statistically analysing a single audience behaviour, referred to in
the media as “exposure”. “Exposure” is defined as “open eyes facing a
medium.” (Sissors and Bumba, 1996: 467-8). Industry leaders have
chosen a measurement of media audience – exposure – that is less than
perfect, but that can differentiate media vehicles on the basis of their
audience sizes. (ibid 1996: 69)
Ross and Nightingale write:

In an industry dependent on advertisement, media industries can be

understood as existing to generate exposures. In this sense, audience
exposures are the commodity at the heart of broadcasting. Exposure is,
in effect, the only commodity produced by the broadcasting industries.
All other products of broadcasting (the programmes, the newscasts,
the personalities, the advertisements) are services designed to generate
audience exposures. From this industry perspective, exposures are
counted and analysed in ways that allow them to be pre-sold to
advertisers and others. The capacity to predict, and therefore to pre-
sell, audience exposures provides the cash flow for commercial
broadcasting. And the capacity to predict audience exposures for
particular media vehicles is based on another mass-audience
behaviour: the loyalty demonstrated by the inclination to view
additional episodes of programmes enjoyed. (2003: 45-46)

As I mentioned above, this “exposure” is analysed in two different ways:

gross and cumulative. The gross analysis data in India is provided by
TAM for almost the entire media industry. On this data, each television
company or media agency conducts cumulative analysis. While
television companies try to highlight higher numbers or niche
audiences being exposed to their particular channels and their
114
respective programmes, media strategists or advertising agencies try to
spot audience viewing trends to advertise or plan campaigns on
television channels for their clients and products.

The Indian context

TAM Media Research, a joint venture between AC Nielson and Kantar

Media Research/IMRB, provides the quantitative data or the gross
analysis on audience and viewership to the Indian television industry
and also the advertising market. The company collects audience data
and viewing patterns by placing monitoring boxes in cable television
viewing homes. This data is then loaded onto Media Express, a
computer software that offers customers (television companies,
advertising agencies, etc) different and tailor-made ways to look at the
numbers (to conduct cumulative analysis).45 Data collection is an urban
phenomenon and boxes are placed only in towns that have a population
of 100,000 plus. The states of Jammu and Kashmir, Bihar and the seven
states in the North-East of India are excluded from this survey. All
towns that are surveyed are divided according to population into two
groups: under or over a million.
The gross data records audience sizes and includes three key
parameters: ratings, share and gross rating points (GRP); the last being
of interest only to advertisers. I discuss them briefly here before
contextualising them in an MCCS scenario where this exposure data is
used repeatedly in diverse combinations to generate the type of
information the Sales team can use to pitch the channels to advertisers;
the Marketing team to promote certain specifics of the channels; and
the Editorial team to understand audience reactions to programmes.

Ratings: The most well known measure of an audience is the ratings. It

basically means a count of the number of people exposed to a
programme. Exposure data is collected at 15-minute cycles. Webster
and Lichty define ratings as “the percentage of persons or households

45
At the time of writing, the company had 4500 monitoring boxes in India. The cable
television audience in India is estimated to be 69 million
115
tuned to a station or programme out of the total market population”
(1991: 255).
For example, at a given point of time, 50 per cent of the sampled
population might be watching television. If a programme broadcast at
this time receives a rating of 10, it means that 40 per cent of the sample
was watching something else while the remaining 50 per cent was not
watching at all. The ratings indicate the percentage of the sample
watching a particular programme. By themselves, ratings are just
figures and mean nothing. They therefore have to be understood in
comparative analysis along with other channels and programmes. The
research teams at MCCS do such analysis to make this data relevant.
The second and more useful context to analysts is “share” or
what in the Indian television context is known as market share. For
example Star News and Star Ananda focus on different markets: the
former focuses on the Hindi Speaking Markets (HSM) 46; the latter on
Bengal. A generic ratings number in these cases is unhelpful, as it will
include regions which both channels are not focussing on. For example,
a general 10 rating will include television viewing homes in South India
which is not the target area of either of the news channels and is
therefore meaningless. Market shares also allow niche channels, here
news, to compete with other channels of the same genre. For example a
sudden drop in Star News’s viewership at a particular point could be
explained due to a cricket match on a sports channel and shares of all
news channels are expected to go down. The drop therefore needs to be
contextualised. Market shares numbers allow region- and niche
audience-based analysis for television producers and advertisers.
The third concept in gross measurement rating is of interest only
to advertisers and it will not be dealt with in detail here. “Gross Rating
Point” measures the number of times an audience is exposed to a
particular advertisement.

The Research team

46
This includes 15 states concentrated around North and West India and some of the
East.
116
Job definition: The research team is an integral part of the corporate
department within MCCS and its primary job is to analyse the
quantitative data provided by TAM and provide inputs to the editorial,
sales and marketing teams. Since this chapter is concerned with
corporate influence on the editorial, I will mainly discuss the research
team in terms of its impact on editorial matters. The particular ways the
TAM data is analysed and understood, termed “cumulative analysis,”
will be picked up in detail in chapter on audiences, to highlight how
ratings and understandings of the audience influence content.

Data analysis and editorial input: To analyse the data, MCCS focuses on
“15 markets” for Star News which constitute the Hindi-speaking
markets (HSM). Star Ananda, catering to its audience base, focuses on
the Bengali market in West Bengal. Not only are audience targeted in
specific regions, niche audiences within these regions are also
“imagined.” Jyotsna, head of Research, told me in an interview:

In a broad sense the genre is news, but within news it is amazing

what are the
possibilities. It could be a news show based on automobiles, a news
show on finance, or it could be a news show targeting the women or
youth. So programmes are completely slotted based on viewership
data, and also on past experience and on what the competition is
showing at that time. (09/05/2006)

Analysis of TAM data for news channel audiences throws up different

profiles for depending on the time of day. Accordingly the research
team advises the editorial for programmes which targets these
particular groups. For example, housewives are the target audience in
the afternoons as data shows that women who are not working in
offices tend to watch television after 2pm. The popular news
programme in Star News based on television soap operas and
highlighting the lives of soap opera stars Saans Bahu aur Saazish
(Mother-in-law, Daughter-in-law and Conspiracy) is aired at 2pm. Star
Anando does a Bengali equivalent: Hoi Ma Noito Bowma (Either the

117
Mother-in-law or the Daughter-in-law) Similarly, Star News tries to
provide ‘hard news’ between 8am and 9am, targeting the office-going
male. The attempt is to provide a tailor-made product targeting a
specific audience.
The TAM data shows how programmes have fared on ratings
over a period of time. It also takes into account what the competition,
the other news channels, are providing to the audience. Jyotsna gives an
example. A crime show at 11pm might not attract the best viewership if
Zee News is showing a popular Bollywood based programme at the
same time. The research team might ask the editorial to shift the timing
or to come up with a similar programme to counter Zee News. Or it
could also ask the marketing team to adopt various strategies to
promote the programme. The team, Jyotsna said, might ask for the
programme to be scrapped or suggest improvements.

Sales, Marketing and Research Analysis: Though not a particular focus of

this thesis, it is necessary to state that an important function of the
research team includes providing data analysis to the sales and
marketing teams. The data and spending profiles of companies
spending on advertisements are collected by TAM through monitoring
of the advertisement schedules in the various news channels. A
computer software, Ad Ex, is used to analyse the data and how clients
are spending money and on which television channel.

“That data also comes weekly so not only do I know who the spenders
on my channel are but I can also actively monitor what are their
spending patterns. I also know what the spenders are spending on our
key competition so that we can actively target them and try and divert
the money they spend in other channels to ours,” (Jyotsna,
09/05/2006).

While there is an obvious logic to the fact that a news channel

has to sell advertising slots to survive in mainstream media, the active
participation of the corporate in newsroom policies and decisions (and
to a certain extent, editorial in the corporate), is new. In Paper Tigers,

118
Coleridge (1998) identifies this trend in India in the Bennett and
Coleman Group, which publishes The Times of India (TOI). Samir Jain,
the owner of TOI, removed newspaper editors and replaced them with
corporate heads, making the Editor a managerial position rather than
journalistic. But it was not until 2003, with the sudden explosion of
private news channels, that selling, branding and concepts like ‘core
audience’ started to be taken seriously by the editorial and journalists. 47
The human resources (HR) management department ensures
that corporate values are imbibed and incorporated into editorial
practice. Responsible for recruitment and promotions, the department
has control over punishment and reward and it is important to
understand the functioning of HR and its policies at MCCS to understand
how editorial practices are controlled by the corporate.

Human Resources, recruitment and policies

Anyone studying news organisations or working in them understands

the classical divide between the corporate and the editorial. In a sense,
it is taken for granted. The vice president of human resources at MCCS,
Sanju Saha, told me however that he actively seeks to discourage this
notion. The company now tries to have periodic workshops, which
bring together heads from both corporate and editorial to promote the
idea of ‘team.’48

There should be no differences between us to the extent that the corporate

objectives need to be met. We should have open and free communication
with each other, we should be able to access information, we should share
information with each other, we should share knowledge and we should
build the spirit of togetherness, bonhomie and all of that, so that we can
rise up to any challenges.” (Sanju Saha, 14/06/2006).

47
I was a correspondent and editorial head of West Bengal with NDTV from August
2000 until January 2003. I never met any sales personnel or advised on TRP ratings
nor did any of my colleagues in the editorial in New Delhi or elsewhere. But
programmers and journalists in NDTV are now acutely aware of selling their
programmes and are conscious of the TRP ratings of their shows.
48
The conferences are managed by McKenzie, one of the top management firms,
leaving no doubt of the corporate structure which MCCS is trying to achieve..
119
The corporate objective, which Saha spoke about, is focussed on
targeting the ‘core audience’, a term increasingly used in today’s
newsrooms. It refers not to the entire audience watching a particular
television channel, but a certain portion which the channel wants to
target. In the corporate world of MCCS, the audience who has the
money to buy the products advertised on the channel is defined as the
core audience. (see Appendix 1 for how the audience is broken up into
various segments in accordance with the income generating capacity of
the chief wage earner (CWE) of a household and his or her educational
status. The criteria has been devised by TAM) For example, a person
from a ‘low income group’ might be watching Star News regularly but
will not have the purchasing power to buy a car. The advertiser is not
interested in him/her and thereby nor is the channel. The ‘problem’ of
people watching the channel and yet not having purchasing power is
being slowly eliminated as increasingly, audience boxes are only being
put in homes above a certain economic criteria.
At MCCS, the HR department is trying to change the profile of the
editorial personnel which it feels is necessary to meet their target
audience group. The logic behind this, according to Saha, is that
personnel hired from the same background as the core audience will
have a better understanding of the audiences’ tastes, likes and dislikes.
With this in mind, Hindi news channels set a precedent by recruiting a
substantial majority of their editorial personnel from the rural Hindi
heartland of North India, the target region of these news channels.
However, MCCS is now making a conscious change to the concept
of core audience by targeting an upmarket clientele that was not
previously associated with the Hindi speaking belt. Saha wants a
significant proportion of the new recruits to be from the affluent classes
and from big cities, to fit in better with MCCS’s new audience focus. Saha
said he also felt that this would reduce the schism between the
‘product’ which can sometimes be “LS” (low society) and help the ad
sales to sell it their upmarket clients like car and lifestyle
manufacturers. For example, as stated earlier, despite being highly

120
watched, Sansani, the crime based show on Star News is considered an
“LS” programme and top advertisers are not keen to associate with it.

“Of late we realise that even within our top target audiences or target
consumers, there is a certain niche. There are a lot of English speaking
people who watch news; hence what is relevant to them requires a little
change in the sort of profiling of our editorial people. We need journalists
who are able to understand lifestyle, who are able to understand big city
issues, big city stories, and stories which are of interest to a different mass.
I will have a very hard look at the profiling of people, in terms of
background, classification; define them as per the TAM classification. 49 I
will have to do that. For example, if I am looking at SEC A, I will be looking
at someone with a good academic background, has English speaking
capability, has gone to respectable college, has had a fair bit of influence of
party circles and then see how they perform.” (Sanju Saha, 14/06/2006).

The ‘corporatisation’ of the editorial is also achieved at other levels;

especially the way rewards and bonuses are handed out. These are
what the HR at MCCS term as ‘key result areas’: how many stories a
reporter files; how many exclusives; what the ratings to particular
stories are, and particular programmes. The HR proposes to link firmly
the increments and annual salary hikes to a corporate structure of
bonuses and performance based indices and says that the ratings of
stories and programmes should be the measurement of the journalist’s
worth. This means that if the viewer does not watch a news story or
more specifically, a story does not get a high viewer rating, it’s worth is
diminished, at least within MCCS. This also means that editorial
judgement of a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ story, however erroneous, is being done
away with and the ‘worth’ of a story is being decided by ratings which
prima facie, has little to do with news values.

“We are actually now taking the key result area concept right to the last
employee in the organisation. By defining key goal areas. Or telling you at
the beginning of the year, what you are supposed to be doing. If I take a

49
TAM classification of audiences is done keeping the socio-economic criteria or SEC in
mind. The richest audiences fall in the SEC A category, the middle classes in the SEC B
and B + category and so on. MCCS by seeking to recruit the rich, aim to target the rich
audience. Also see Appendix 1.
121
 reporter, he is supposed to have five niche stories say, hypothetically
speaking, in a month. He is supposed to do things different from what the
others are doing. We are going to build parameters for assessing these. I
am clearly not going to reward employees for doing what they are
supposed to be doing anyway.” (Sanju Saha, 14/06/2006).

In the following chapters on editorial, content and audience, I will show

how journalists in MCCS, have come to view the worth of their stories
and programmes through the ratings system. While a few dissenting
voices might have scoffed about ratings with me in private; come Friday
morning when the numbers come in, almost every senior journalist in
MCCS is anxious to know how their particular shows or programmes
have fared in the unpredictable world of TRPs.

Conclusion

The primary purpose of this chapter was to argue that the sphere of
newsroom ethnographies must expand beyond the editorial to include
corporate practices which have direct bearing on news content. By
providing detailed empirical evidence of corporate practices and how
editorial responsibilities are now taken up by sales and marketing
teams, this chapter aims to interrogate the “orthodoxies” in media
theory generated by the first wave of news ethnographies. (Cottle,
2000) When news is generated by a marketing manager, how can we
understand theoretical formulations around notions such as
journalistic objectivity and news values? Who now is the audience and
how is it understood? In the concluding chapter of this thesis, I shall
review the empirical material from this chapter and the next three and
discuss how new practices in television news production can call into
doubt what has become taken for granted categories or orthodoxies in
news media theory. (For more on the orthodoxies, see Chapter 2 or
Cottle, 2000)
This chapter also provides the first bit of data towards this
research’s ambition of understanding the construction of nationhood in
the genre of news television in India. The empirical data provides

122
evidence that the affluent, those with money to buy the products
advertised on television, are a news channel’s core audience. The HR
team now is attempting to recruit journalists from the same section of
society as that of the core audience. An affluent news producer, it is
presumed, will better understand what an affluent audience wants to
see. Not only does this throw conventional understanding of what
makes news out of the window, it also shows how the elite in India are
constructing a nation relevant only to themselves and their kind. How
this vision finds expression in newsroom practices is the subject matter
of the next chapter.

123
 Chapter 5
Editorial Processes: Star News and Star Ananda

Production processes necessitate control and domination. While power,

its loci and its use are easier to study for assembly-line production
processes, (say a car manufacturing unit), in a television news channel
manifestations of power are more nuanced and subtle. Both the news
channels Star News and Star Ananda are headed by the same parent
organisation, MCCS. Their relationship, their similarities and differences
and how they operate within the broader corporate structure of MCCS
are critical for our understanding of their newsroom practices. In the
previous chapter, we analysed how the corporate division enters the
domain of the editorial within MCCS. In this chapter, we look at how
corporate policy influences editorial decisions and work flows and how
journalists understand their role of profit maximisation for the
organisation. Such understandings alter, at times dramatically,
sometimes in more subtle ways, how news, news values, its ethics and
its role in the public sphere have come to be viewed. While academics
have questioned journalistic agency in news production, this thesis
agrees with Schudson that “there is no question that members of the
media have some autonomy and authority to depict the world
according to their own ideas” (2003: 18)
As in the previous chapter, this too brings empirical evidence of
journalistic practice to the foreground to question categories of
“orthodoxies” (Cottle, 2000). Answering the central research question,
this chapter also asks: who articulates nationhood in the newsroom, for
whom is it articulated and what are the modalities of these
articulations? It therefore builds on the previous chapter to understand
the imagination of the nation and the construction of the idea of ‘India’
in news television. As it is impossible to go into every editorial detail of
two news channels in a chapter, I will focus on the processes of content
selection and how corporate strategies influence these processes and
journalists’ understanding of ‘what makes news’.

124
 In Discipline and Punish, Foucault identifies the crucial link
between power, the control over discourse and the social construction
of spaces (1979). Though not developed to any degree in this thesis, I
make spatiality the entry point into my present investigations, starting
with an examination of the physical space of the two editorial offices.
This, I hope, will elucidate the power structures and relationship both
within and between the two channels.

Description of workspaces

Mumbai50 is the financial capital of India; Kolkata, under a communist

government for over thirty years, is only just beginning to invite and
attract capital investment. The physical fact of being present in
Mumbai51 means that Star News is housed in the same office as MCCS,
within the Star India premises in Mahalaxmi in Central Mumbai. The
difference in the buildings which house the office of Star Ananda in
Kolkata and that of Star News in Mumbai could not constitute a clearer
illustration of the power relations between the news channels. Star
News enjoys the amenities of being housed with Star India while Star
Ananda occupies a floor in an office building called Business Towers in
downtown Kolkata. In Mumbai, one walks into a spacious reception
area where two young receptionists meet you and you are seated in
plush, comfortable leather chairs and two plasma screen television
channels broadcast the Star News channel; in Kolkata, by contrast, there
is no designated reception area. The veranda has been converted into a
makeshift reception, which is crowded with journalists smoking and
security guards doubling as receptionists.
The senior personnel: the CEO and Editor Uday Shankar, the
Managing Editor Shahzi Zaman, the deputy Managing Editor Milind
Khanderkar, sits in Mumbai along with the entire corporate division
which has close personal links with the Star News editorial staff, being

50
The Bombay Stock Exchange and the glamorous world of Bollywood are situated in
this city as are most of India’s millionaires.
51
At the end of 2006, Star News shifted its headquarters to Delhi, rather its suburb, in
NOIDA, Uttar Pradesh. Every national channel has its headquarters in Delhi and Star
News had started out with being an exception.
125
housed only one floor above them. Kolkata’s corporate wing consists of
a sales division for area specific work but major decisions and the daily
work practices of the editorial team in Kolkata are controlled from the
Mumbai headquarters. Senior Mumbai journalists make several trips to
oversee work in Kolkata. No one in Kolkata, however senior, is in
charge. And Mumbai lets Kolkata know this by despatching journalists
to the city to take charge before any big event, like the elections in West
Bengal or the football World Cup. Several of the reporters in Kolkata
have never been to Mumbai and are in awe of the city of dreams and
films. The pay packets of the Mumbai journalists are discussed in
hushed tones and sometimes take fanciful proportions. The arrival of a
temporary boss from Mumbai to the Kolkata office results in a change of
work pattern. Everyone seems more wary and quiet. In response to my
question regarding the change in people’s behaviour during one such
visit from a senior journalist in Mumbai, Yuvraj Bhattacharya, the
Assignment Head of Star Ananda told me: “It is very similar to how
school children will behave when a headmaster arrives.” The metaphor
of a classroom situation which Yuvraj uses brings to the fore the system
of control and order within this newsroom and the knowledge that the
power lies with the Mumbai journalist or manager.
The different ways in which the offices reacted to my presence in
their midst is indicative. The Mumbai office, assured of itself and its
position was far more welcoming towards my research and scrutiny. In
Kolkata, I did not get a permanent place to sit. 52 In Mumbai, I had a
workplace in the CEO’s office with computer and phone connections.
Journalists and corporate heads in Mumbai were friendly and informal
while in Kolkata they were more wary and officious. The difference I
felt between the two offices is highlighted in a diary entry I made after
starting work in Mumbai, also mentioned in the Methodology chapter,
but worth coming back to:

24th May, Third week in Mumbai

52
This also has a lot to do with the fact that Kolkata has far fewer resources in terms of
space and work stations than Mumbai.
126
 I have not been keeping a diary or going through my notes as much as I
had in Kolkata. I just keep jotting down as much as I can. The reason must
be that I have much more to do here. Star Ananda had given me access but
I was not really welcome. I had to push my way through. Though I must say
Yuvraj tried after our marathon drinking session. Star News is a contrast.
Almost everyone smiles. You are a part of this. Carol, Aditi, Gopal, everyone
has made me feel a part. Shahzi has been more than cooperative. He has
introduced me to people regularly and taken me in for the morning
meetings. I have sat through several of these. I have attended assignment
desk sessions, through the evening as stories are planned and then a night
seeing them work. This week I am going to be with Gopal and his team in
IKT.

The diary extract highlights the energy I felt on arrival at the Mumbai
office, where the ‘action’ was. I had spent four months in Kolkata
previously and was feeling that my research was stagnating since
decisions were being taken elsewhere.
As we start examining the daily practices of journalists in both
cities, it will be helpful to keep in mind the power relationship between
Star News and Star Ananda. I will look at both news centres
simultaneously and examine their news processes in light of both the
corporate strategy explained in the earlier chapter and journalists’
understanding of their own practices.

The Editorial

The editorial department in both cities is divided into two basic

groups: input and output. The input department includes the
assignment desks, reporting desks and programmers. The news
bureaus53 and their reporters around the country and stringers
(freelancers) form part of the input team. Star Ananda has stringers in
several districts of West Bengal and uses Star News resources to tap
into a nationwide network. Reporters from Ananda Bazar Patrika54 also
provide editorial support to Star Ananda and many of their reporters

53
Star News has 13 bureaus across the country.
54
The largest selling Bengali daily.
127
who are well known in Kolkata act as experts in different areas, in
particular sports coverage.
Editors, scriptwriters, and the entire production control team
(PCR) form the output department, which is responsible for producing
the bulletin and the ‘look of the channel’. Broadly speaking, the input is
responsible for gathering news and content while the output is
responsible for putting it on air; its production aspects. Though the
emphasis is on the input department, concerned as we are with the
processes of news selection, I will look at some particular functions of
the output, which are to do with news selection, for example, the
foreign desk,55 as well as anchors. The camera team is part of an
operations outfit and does not strictly come under editorial control
though they work with reporters and producers. The operations team
handle the various technical aspects of television channels, including
equipment and its maintenance, movement of vehicles and outdoor
broadcast vans (OB vans).56
At the heart of the news selection process and its daily ‘routine’
is the assignment desk. As the name suggests, this desk assigns. It
assigns stories; it assigns resources and by default becomes the nerve
centre of editorial operations. The assignment desk literally never
sleeps and has a round the clock manning. As we focus on the editorial,
this becomes the obvious and ideal place to start our description of the
newsroom. After a physical description and detailing the work routines
of the desk, through interviews of journalists, I will analyse how
television ratings, the journalists’ understanding of audience and
corporate responsibility of making profits influence the practices of the
desk. I start with Star News and then Star Ananda.

55
The foreign desk is in the output section. Stories are generally picked from the
agencies and no reportage is involved. The desk helps in packaging, that is rewriting
and editing these stories for the viewers.
56
The assignment desk decides on the movements of OB vans and where they should
be stationed. OB vans are used to link to the studio directly from the “field”. They are
mostly employed for news stories expected to happen at a certain place, for example
parliamentary proceedings or a major political rally, and are stationed accordingly in
advance. Being few in number, their employment is controlled by the assignment desk
in both the channels.
128
Assignment Desk, Star News, Mumbai

A physical description

The news floor in Star News is located on the ground floor and the
assignment desk is immediately to the left as one enters. At any given
time through the day and evening, there are at least four people
manning this desk. At peak times or when a story is breaking, there can
be as many as ten people gathered here. Through the day, as news
breaks or new developments happen, all the various department heads
gravitate towards this place to discuss and decide. Several television
sets are placed here which monitor all the major news channels and
people often just gather here to watch the news, giving the small space
a crowded feel. Though not the only possible way, I thought it best to
break the functions of the assignment desk into a 24-hour cycle to
understand its daily functions and the responsibilities of each of the
shifts.

The Shifts

There are four shifts, which operate in the assignment desk, 57 of ten
hours each. On the night shift, which is the last shift, there is just one
person. The maximum number of people will be on duty between 10 am
till 8 pm, at times five, including the head of the desk.

Morning shift: 7am to 5 pm

Day shift: 10 am to 8 pm
Afternoon shift: 2pm to 12 am
Night shift: 12am to 10 am

Functions of the Assignment Desk:

a) Planning and co-ordination: The main function of the desk is to

co-ordinate with the reporters on the filing of stories and to
57
At the time of research, the assignment desk in Mumbai had 12 people.
129
 follow newsbreaks. It co-ordinates with the reporter on what
s/he is filing and keeps the output desk informed of new
material coming in so the latter can process and broadcast it as
quickly as possible. It will also let reporters on the ground know
of new developments. The reporters also have to be told if they
are going to be on air for a live broadcast so they can be
prepared. It will also ensure that camerapersons are available to
reporters and OB vans are allocated depending on the
‘importance’ of the news.58
b) To monitor all news agencies: At least one person at the desk
will continuously check news wires to keep abreast of
developments. If there is a sudden important newsbreak, the
assignment desk will alert the output desk and the production
control room so a ‘news flash’ can be aired. Depending on the
story and its place of occurrence, a reporter might also be
assigned to cover it.
c) To plan news bulletins every day: The desk has to build the
‘news list’ for the next day and does this through staying in touch
with reporters and stringers across the country and finding out
what each is doing. If there is a story which the editorial bosses
would like a reporter in, for example, Bangalore to cover, the
assignment desk would alert the reporter in that city.

Each shift has its own primary responsibilities and it is important to

understand them separately to see how it all fits in with the larger
purpose of daily news production. Here I will briefly explain how the
shifts work and how responsibility is divided.
I start in the evening around 8 pm, because it is around that time the
next day’s news list starts getting prepared. As explained in the
methodology section, I have spent a lot of time with the assignment
desk covering every shift several times. From my field notes, I describe
a situation that could be any evening in the newsroom.
58
At the time of research, MCCS had 12 ob vans deployed across the country. Two
were stationed in Delhi and Mumbai each and one in Kolkata. Other vans were moved
around from place to place depending on newsbreaks or pre-planned coverage.

130
Assignment Desk, Night Shift (8pm)

It was time to build the run down for the next day. One journalist from
those on duty on the shift between 2 pm to 12 pm would start the
process by calling the different bureaus across the country at random to
get reporters’ story ideas for the next day. For some of the bureaus, the
assignment desk journalist would have story suggestions. Most of these
ideas had emanated from the bosses in Mumbai, been told to the
assignment desk, and then conveyed to the reporter. The assignment
desk journalist could refuse a story idea suggested by the reporters;
reporters could disagree with the views of the assignment desk; and at
times, a senior journalist on duty might have had to intervene and
decide. The final decision, however, rested with Mumbai. While a
certain amount of ‘routinisation’ was bound to develop in practices that
occur every day, it is germane here to remember that inter personal
relationships played a considerable part in such processes. A lot
depended on who was making the calls and who was taking them. If it
was a junior person in Mumbai, s/he would not be able to refuse a
senior reporter’s story idea and vice versa. Daily evening conversations
also meant that some became friends and it was easier for a reporter to
push his or her story ideas through. Personal dislike could ensure that
story ideas got blocked. Speaking from my own experience as a
television journalist, it is also important to remember that reporters
were loath to come up with story ideas and most relied on ‘news
breaks’. This would result in some reporters avoiding the evening
phone calls, particularly if they had no story ideas to put out.
Sometimes, if a reporter was unavailable, they either called back or sent
their story ideas via email. Delhi, however, had a separate bureau
meeting each evening after which they sent their story ideas directly via
email to Mumbai. The process of calling up each bureau, locating the
reporters, asking for story ideas and approving them, finding out at
what time of the day the story could be expected, giving story ideas to
reporters, suggesting possible follow ups, calling back reporters who

131
could not be contacted or were busy the first time, could take from one
and a half hours to two hours and sometimes even more.
A preliminary list was then drawn up and handed over to the
journalist that would be taking over at 12 am for night duties. Besides
tracking stories through the night on news agencies 59 and monitoring
what the other news channels60 were showing,61 the person who took
over for the night kept ‘building’ the list. Besides the continuing
preparation of the news list for the next day, the night duty journalist
on the assignment desk had several other tasks. They had to prepare
fresh stories for the morning bulletin. A list of unedited stories which
had come in from the bureaus but had not yet been aired would be
given to them by reporters from the earlier shift. They would co-
ordinate with the output desk on getting these stories edited and
readied for the morning bulletin. None of the Star News bureaus had
editorial facilities except Delhi so unedited footage and scripts sent in
by reporters were edited in Mumbai. Quite a few of these stories were
‘readied’ through the night and the assignment desk journalist kept a
track on this with the night editors. Besides stories from the bureaus,
the assignment desk journalist would also select stories from the wire
agencies for broadcast. These stories also needed to be edited and the
assignment desk and the output desk would coordinate to get the
stories ready for the morning bulletin.

Morning Shift

The morning person on duty at the assignment desk came in at 7 am

and would check on the main developments of the day. The night shift
reporter would be in office until 10 am and would co-ordinate and
bring the morning duty person up to date with the expected events of
59
All the major news agencies like Reuters, APTN, AFP and AP are constantly
monitored. Indian news agencies include ANI, PTI and UNI.
60
All national channels are monitored, though closer attention is paid to the other
Hindi channels that are in direct competition for viewers with Star News. There is no
national equivalent yet for Star Ananda and the local Bengali channels are monitored
by the Assignment Desk in Kolkata.
61
The last live bulletin in Star News is telecast at 12 pm, after which recorded
programmes are telecast until 5 am in the morning when live broadcasting takes over
again. Of course, in case of any major news break, live bulletins will be recorded.
132
the day. The morning reporter would have to keep an eye on the big
news events of the day, how the cameras and camerapersons would be
deployed62 along with the outdoor-broadcast (OB) vans. The OB vans
which can broadcast directly from the ground are used only for major
events. The events could either be a breaking story or a story or event
which was planned for coverage. In the case of breaking events,
assignment desk personnel would have to take the call of assigning the
OB vans. At times, this might have meant mean moving it away from a
pre-decided event to somewhere else. 63 While the morning journalist on
the assignment desk got the handover from the person on night duty,
s/he would have to check on what was happening to decide whether
changes needed to be made to the list. S/he would then advise the night
person who is still finalising the news list of the day for any changes
that needed to be made. The news list was ready by nine am when the
morning meeting took place. The journalist who had been on night duty
would leave by 10 am.

Day Shift

Three to four more people joined the assignment desk at 10 am for the
day shift. The morning person would also be on duty until 2 pm. The
news agenda had been decided at the 9 am meeting of the editorial
heads. The assignment desk would follow the progress of stories from
the various reporters in Mumbai and the bureaus, keep checking for
news breaks by monitoring agencies and other channels and coordinate
with the output desk and with ground reporters for live coverage of
events. One person at the desk would be constantly working in tandem
with the production control unit which aired the shows, and the Link
Room, which handled the live feed, and connected all the reporters on
ground to the PCR. Since only four live feeds could be taken at one time,
it was the assignment desk’s job to co-ordinate and ensure that the

62
Shortage of camerapersons seemed to be a constant in both Kolkata and Mumbai
and it was for the assignment desk to juggle them between different reporters and
stories.
63
Mumbai and Delhi have two OB vans each. Eight others are stationed around the
country and move from one destination to the other depending on situations.
133
most important feeds, that is those which needed to be aired the
quickest, got priority.

Evening Shift

At 2 pm, the evening reporter came in. S/he would work with the main
team as the morning reporter leaves. Around 8 pm, the evening
reporter would start building the news bulletin for the next day and the
cycle would be repeated.
A look at the structure of the 24-hour schedule of the assignment
desk team makes it amply clear how crucial they are to the functions of
the editorial team in Star News. They are at one level the “gatekeepers”
deciding news selection; they are also situated as the interface between
output and input, besides being the managers of resource allocation.
Being the fulcrum around which editorial practices revolve, how do the
journalists at the assignment desk understand their own practices, how
do they articulate them, what are the assumptions behind their
routinised chores and how much, if any, pressure does the corporate
arm of MCCS generate? Do the journalists internalise such pressure or is
there resistance and subversion?
To proceed with answering these questions, some key tropes
must be identified and journalists must be allowed to articulate their
understandings towards such. As we are examining a news channel and
news production processes and practices, it is convenient that we start
by examining what journalists mean by “news” and “news sense”. We
have already identified in a previous chapter on the corporate division,
news is seen as a product that is to be sold. We must therefore examine
journalists’ understanding of the audience or consumer. In other words,
what is news and for whom is it produced?

News:
News and what makes news can be significantly different in their
understandings. News can be any event which makes its way into
newspapers, television, internet and any other mode of delivery by

134
which an event can be conveyed to a larger audience. However, what
makes news or news sense is dependent on several factors: the political
economy, production conditions and as we discuss here, the journalist’s
understanding of it.
Both in Star News and Star Ananda, I found that journalists’
response to both news and news sense was derived from their
understanding of what the audience likes. How they make this link
needs further examination. In the chapter dealing with the corporate
section, we saw that the brand positioning of Star News (Aapko Rakhe
Aage) advocates an audience centric policy. We can thus start to
understand the internalising of the corporate goals by the journalists.
Head of the assignment desk, Rajnish Ahuja describes news sense thus:

As a news channel we have to communicate with the people in a manner

they want. We are here to provide information in the way they want.
News sense is giving people what they want. There is a new generation of
viewers who have come up. They are so stressed out in their jobs in
BPOs64 (Business Process Outsourcing) and stuff that when they want to
watch TV, they want to relax and have some fun. (03/07/2006)

His deputy, Utpal states:

Today news is based on whatever the consumer likes. If we show

something that people do not like, something that is too political, then
the channel ratings suffer. If we open a bulletin with a hard political
story and another channel opens with a story on Abu Salem [a well
known Mumbai gangster and an accused in the Mumbai blasts case of
1993, who was recently been deported from Portugal to India], it is
evident that viewers would look at the other channel. (06/06/2006)

From both the above responses of the heads of the assignment desk, it
is clear that the notion of news and what makes news in the channel is
dependent on what the journalist thinks the audience wants. While
Utpal makes the case that crime sells more, Rajnish assumes that the
audience wants to “relax” when they watch television. Both indicate
towards a dumbing down of content. Besides crime, Rajnish adds
64
The most common examples of BPO’s are call centres.
135
another category to what sells in news channels: cricket. Political
stories, he states, have taken a backseat to cricket. However, he
indicates that the concept of news keeps changing and what is
important today may not be so tomorrow.

A political reporter finds it difficult to get his stories on air. People want
to watch cricket. That has become more important than politics. If I had
my way, I would say that if we have twelve political correspondents, we
should also have twelve cricket correspondents who will cover all
aspects of cricket. Today I do not need political correspondents as much
as I need sports and entertainment reporters.
We have a research team, which collects data. We know which time is
male viewership, which time is female viewership. We take their
research. News keeps changing. Till even last year, all channels focussed
on crime stories. That is changing. How much crime will people watch. I
think the more crime you show, the more crime you have. When we have
the next elections in February, people will again watch politics. So news,
idea of news keeps changing. (Rajnish Ahuja, 03/06/2006)

The assumption of what the audience likes is based on TRP data and it
has become the defining factor in determining which story does ‘well’,
and what does not. While the mechanics of TRP data collection and its
impact on journalists will be discussed in the next chapter, here we will
look at how the journalist understands his/her ‘audience’ to show how
the corporate goal of getting more eyeballs becomes the primary
editorial policy.

The Audience of Star News

The “imagining of the audience” has been an important debate in both
production and audience theories. In this thesis, I have approached the
notion of the mass audience as it is understood by news producers,
hoping thereby to shed some light on how this “missing link” can
influence news content (Schlesinger, 1978: 1). Cottle states:

‘Mass audiences’, by definition, are ‘unknowable’ whether to news

producers or news academics, notwithstanding the production of
institutional audience research ratings or academic surveys. In other
136
 words, large audiences are always going to prove elusive as empirical,
complexly differentiated, objects of inquiry; and research instruments, at
best, are destined to produce blunt findings only. This is not to say
though, that ideas of ‘the audience’ cannot, or do not, feature within the
journalists’ thinking and professional practices. Approached as a
discursive conceptualization or typification inscribed by the news
producers into their particular news form, rather than as an empirical
object ‘out there’, the ‘imagined audience’ of the news producers may
well literally be ‘at work’. As such this ‘imagined audience’ is worthy of
ethnographic inquiry and can reveal much of interest about the different
constructions and appeals of different news forms as well as their
selection and inflection of particular news stories. (Cottle, 2000: 35)

During interviews conducted with journalists in both Star News and

Star Ananda, I asked every journalist who they thought the audience
was. The responses from the journalists were identical in both cities.
Every journalist described the ‘self’ and their immediate surroundings,
family and friends, as the audience. News sense therefore became
producing what the ‘self’ or the family would like to see.

I think of what I would like to see, what my family wants to see. I forget
that I am a journalist. I think of what I would want to see as an ordinary
viewer or I think of what my wife wants to see. One has to remember
that the woman of the house has the most control over the television set.
So if we can think from the angle of a woman, it will be the best to garner
more TRP ratings. (Utpal, 06/06/2006)

Utpal’s response highlights two things: that audience and the self
are closely connected, and that there is an unequivocal focus on TRP by
the journalists. Even when there is no direct reference to ratings and
profits in my question, it becomes a part of the journalist’s answer.
While both the notion of news and audience articulated by the
journalists in the assignment desk seem to flow seamlessly from the
corporate objectives of MCCS, there are resistances. Though journalists
seem keen to work towards higher ratings, they themselves do not
seem to like the idea of an obsessive focus, at least in Mumbai as the

137
next quote from an interview with the deputy head of assignment in
Star News, Utpal, indicates.

Rating the Ratings

It [rating] is very important. After all, this is a business. But I feel bad
when we give superstitious stories prominence. Aaj Tak recently did a
story on someone who claimed to have died and went to heaven. Yamraj
(the God of Death) took him to heaven on a golden staircase and then
told him he was brought there by mistake and sent him back. Now this
story also came to us. I refused to carry it. I said whatever happens, I will
not carry it. But when we saw the ratings for that day, that story got the
maximum. From that day, I started thinking that we have to change. The
game is all about TRP ratings. We keep showing stories of Dawood
[Mumbai gangster allegedly living in Pakistan and recently declared an
international terrorist by US], which are meaningless, but it sells. For
example, Dawood has started smoking 555 cigarettes, this becomes a
half hour programme in our channel. This is wrong, but we have to do it.
Viewers like it. No one wants to know what the politburo is discussing.
(Utpal, 06/06/2006)

Once I switch my recorder off at the end of the interview with Rajnish
Ahuja, the head of the assignment desk, he states his disappointment
with television news in India. While I could not take notes of the
conversation, I make a note later in the diary:

Met with Rajnish. The real interview really started after I

switched my recorder off. He feels journalism has been
compromised. There is no direction and everyone is running
after what the other is doing.

Analysis:
There are some key points that come to the fore in the above interviews
that need to be expanded here and analysed. They highlight both the
pressures of selling news as a commodity and a resistance to the idea
amongst the journalists in Star News, Mumbai.

138
 a) TRP ratings and the audience: Both Rajnish and Utpal talk about
the pressures of getting high ratings. The audience is understood
in two ways. One is the quantitative element, provided through
the ratings data. The second is imaging the self as the audience
and producing news for it. Utpal mentions that he imagines
himself as an ordinary viewer, or thinks what his wife would
want to see. The important thing to remember here is that the
audience or consumer is uppermost in the minds of both men
and this obviously has an effect on the kind of stories selected
and aired. The effect of the corporate department is evident. As
stated earlier by Yogesh Manwani (head of marketing), Star
News has taken the position of an audience centric channel with
the catch phrase “Aapko Rakhe Aage” (“Keeps you Ahead”). Here,
we see how news selection processes and routines are directly
affected by such an approach.
b) What is news: In any beginner’s guide to media studies or a
similar reader swamping the book market, the most frequent
question which the writer addresses is: what is news?
Journalists in Star News, while agreeing on certain key
parameters like “what the audience/self wants to see”, “stories
which sell or get ratings”, confirm that in a fragmented market
where television news channels fight over a limited audience,
the concept of news keeps changing and evolving. News, what
should be aired, what sells; these notions are never constant.
They differ in different times and even from person to person.
Utpal gives high credence to crime as a genre for news coverage.
Rajnish, feels that crime stories are not as popular anymore 65
and talks about the popularity of cricket. Both also lament the
lack of political coverage but feel that it does not sell.
c) Dissatisfied journalists: Both Rajnish and Utpal express
dissatisfaction with the quality of news in Indian television,
especially in Hindi channels. When asked if he had a wish list,
Utpal said:

65
Though they may be at another point of time.
139
 We always have to keep an eye on the TRP. Sometimes one should force
oneself away from these ratings. If we could move away from TRPs, say
for two months and just focus on stories, on being reporters, then we can
experiment. No one should say a word if ratings go down. That would be
great. We have internalised the ratings. We feel bad when ratings go
down. I do not know how it happened, how we got so involved in ratings.
(06/06/2006)

This was something that I found throughout the Mumbai editorial

office. While Rajnish initially spoke of what news should be and how
one must communicate with the audience, once the recorder was
switched off he told me that there was no direction in Indian news
television today and every channel follows the other. Utpal kept
mentioning that how at times the journalists in Star News told each
other of doing “some hard stories” and felt embarrassed by what was
being aired on the channel. 66
Rajnish and Utpal’s dissatisfaction with news values in Star News
must be understood in the context of press history in India. While
television journalism in India is a relatively recent phenomenon with
imported technology and almost no precedence to fall back upon 67,
newspapers in India have a long history rooted in the freedom struggle
and the anti-colonial movement. In post independence India, the press,
closely aligned with the Congress Government during the pre-
independence years, was a prime vehicle for the task of nation building.
Its own independence severely tested by the declaration of a state of
emergency by Indira Gandhi’s governance in the early 70s, the Indian
press had to survive both a battle of legitimacy as a watch dog against
governmental excess and also a ruthless governmental campaign which
attempted to control the news media.68

66
I have noted several times in my diaries journalists laughing at Star News stories
within the office. There are no illusions about their own practices; rather they are
sarcastic of the stories aired.
67
While NDTV asked us reporters for a BBC-like diction, MCCS has Fox News as a role
model, given Rupert Murdoch’s influence. This is not to say that television news
always follows western models. On the contrary, vernacular channels in India have
developed, experimented and survived very much on their own with no role models
or tradition to fall back on.
140
 When television channels and news agencies started proliferating
across the Indian skies in the mid nineties, most of them relied on and
recruited experienced newspaper journalists to give direction to a
new medium.69 Needless to say, with print reporters defining and
charting television news’ path in India, much of the inherited values of
the print tradition seeped into television news. However, the
corporatisation of news channels, prioritising a profit oriented
approach, as described in the previous chapter, seeks to overturn this.
So when Rajnish Ahuja laments where television news is headed, he is
comparing a news culture which is at odds with his own background
as a print reporter. Utpal, speaking of “hard stories”, is also relying on
his print reporting experience where political stories took precedence
over others.70
The growth in the television industry in the last fifteen years has
meant that several hundred journalism schools have spawned across
India. While recognised universities have started offering mass
communication degrees, private colleges have spurted in big cities and
small towns alike. Television channels like Star News and Star Ananda
now recruit directly from such institutions. Such recruitment sits in
with the MCCS Human Resources department’s policy – mentioned in
the earlier chapter – of recruiting youngsters from the affluent classes
who “understand the audience better” and can afford the higher fees in
private institutions. Importantly, there is a presumption that these
young recruits will have no “ideological baggage” of the earlier print
reporters. Yuvraj Bhattacharya, head of the assignment desk in Star
Ananda, tells me that he “prefers youngsters with a clean slate as a
mind, which I can mould how I want to. I do not want baggage.”

68
The Indian Express earned its crusading anti-establishment newspaper status mainly
during the emergency years by refusing governmental diktats.
69
The most well known faces in television news are people who had their reporting
skills honed in the print medium. CEO of MCCS, Uday Shankar was a reporter in The
Times of India,head of CNN-IBN, Rajdeep Sardesai was a correspondent with The
Telegraph and Arnab Goswami, Editor- in-Chief of Times Television is an experienced
print journalist.
70
This is not to suggest that the print medium in India remains unaffected by the new
political economy in India. As Coleridge has suggested in Paper Tigers (1998), Samir
Jain, the owner of The Times of India was the most market oriented newspaper baron
he had met. Both the journalists here are idealising or harking back to a pre-
liberalisation era in Indian newspapers that no longer exists.
141
 d) If Utpal and Rajnish and the rest of the journalists are aware and
cynical of their own practices, can they be unwitting,
unconscious agents, the mere cogs in the wheel, “reproducing
the dominant ideological discursive field.” (Hall, 1982: 82).
Simon Cottle argues:

Journalists arguably do what they do for the most part knowingly and
purposefully, which is not to say they are on an ‘ideological mission’ or,
in idealist terms, that they somehow escape the structures in which they
work. But it is to argue that they are more ‘consciously’ and ‘knowingly’
involved with, and purposefully ‘productive’ of news texts and output
than they are often theoretically given credit for. (2000: 24)

My aim is not to argue for the existence of a heroic “journalistic

agency”. Rather, it is to question the often-quoted academic position of
condescension towards journalists as people who do not know what
they are doing or to put it more academically: “unconscious agents.”
Several of the senior journalists I interview have adapted remarkably
from print to television, have spent several decades in their profession
and are seemingly intelligent people who move from one news
organisation to the other, quickly understand the demands and work
accordingly. They are critical of their own practices yet, understanding
the demands of their jobs, perform as is required of them. Not
unconsciously, but being aware and critical and sometimes sarcastic of
the news values and news production, they practice of their profession.

I next start a comparative understanding of news values, news

and editorial processes between Star News and Star Anando, to tease
out the differences in approach between Kolkata and Mumbai
journalists. As stated earlier, Kolkata - under a Leftist Government for
thirty-five years - has recently opened up to capital investment, while
Mumbai has been India’s financial hub since independence. This has
meant that journalists in Mumbai have naturally more job choices and

142
opportunities.71 Also, given the plethora of channels in Hindi, in
Mumbai, journalists frequently change jobs. This also means that there
is competition amongst employers to retain journalists or poach them
from other channels. Journalists in Kolkata have less options of moving
from one channel to the other. Star Ananda was the first ‘national’
channel72 and until it started broadcasting, news channels in Bengali
were hourly broadcasts in the evening on general entertainment or
state channels. Consequently, a journalist in Mumbai is paid a much
higher salary than his Bengali counterpart. Given the paucity in
opportunity, I assert that a Bengali journalist is more compliant to
corporate demands. The resistance that we see in the journalists in
Mumbai, however muted, is in contrast with its total absence in Kolkata.
To work towards a comparative analysis of the two news channels, in
Star Ananda too, I start with the assignment desk.

Assignment Desk, Star Ananda, Kolkata

While the assignment desks in both the cities have similar shifts, the
desk in Kolkata has more responsibility. The head of the assignment
desk in Kolkata is Yuvraj Bhattacharya who effectively runs the daily
activities of Star Ananda’s editorial section in Kolkata, though there are
frequent visits from senior personnel in Mumbai. 73 The work practices
of Star Ananda journalists in Kolkata revolve around the assignment
desk. Suman Gharai, a journalist at the Desk whom I interview,
explained the functions and responsibilities of the desk:

71
Every national channel has its main headquarters in Delhi, the capital being the
political hub. Star News also moved its headquarters to Delhi in 2007. However, all
news channels have their largest bureaus in Mumbai which accords more job
opportunities for journalists.
72
The understanding of “national” is open to interpretation. Given that every news
channel now has target audiences, there is no pan-Indian channel. The English
channels, to a certain extent cut across language barriers but are also targeting an elite
population. The journalists understanding of the “national” in Kolkata means a
channel with a better quality of production, pay and reach.
Rajnish Ahuja, when I asked him whether he considers Star News to be a national
channel replied: “No, I do not think so. I think we are a West and North India centric
channel. We do not even take the audience data of other regions or English channel
audiences into account.”
73
This is also because the former Executive President of Star Ananda defected to a
new venture and took with him several key players. This vacuum means that Yuvraj
and the Assignment team have more responsibility.
143
 We understand from the reporters, local or national, the stories they are
filing. We tell them then what to do with the stories, how they should do
it. We also give them our contacts to do particular stories. We tell them
what questions to ask, how to go about it. Once they send the footage, we
take it to the Output or what we call the Copy Desk. We explain to the
writer how to write the story, what angle to be taken and how we are
presenting it, how we are planning. Then the story is aired.
We also decide on which stories should have live chats, which stories
should be given precedence. Now when a reporter is going live, hour
after hour, we provide him with all the information, tell him what to say,
how to say it, tell him what questions will be asked. The assignment desk
is at the heart of the editorial functions in Kolkata; it runs the channel’s
daily activities.74 (07/02/2007)

From Mr Gharai’s observations, one can understand the centrality of

the assignment desk in Star Ananda’s editorial processes. An
understanding of how the Assignment Head, Yuvraj Bhattacharya views
his own practices and that of the channel, therefore assumes
significance. Yuvraj and I had several meetings, informal chats and
social evenings, but here I make use of the formal interview to highlight
some key themes.

On Star Ananda and its relevance: Customising the news

For the Bengali living in Kolkata, national news and whatever is

happening in the Hindi heartland is of less importance, unless there is
something earth shattering happening. So for them, Kolkata news is not
there [in national channels], they have to go through local newspapers
[for Bengali news]. For the up market Bengali, they find it through
English newspapers. Therefore, in Kolkata there were a whole lot of
people who did not have any source of relevant television news. So when
we were moving into a 24-hour news genre, we found a space easily as
we were delivering relevant news. (Yuvraj Bhattacharya, 04/04/2006)

Like Utpal and Rajnish in Mumbai, Yuvraj also talks of particular kinds
of news for particular sets of people. What makes news therefore is not
74
One of the first impressions I had of Star Ananda is that it confirmed to a classic
assembly line news production house. The reporters get the footage, the copy desk
writes the story, the assignment desk decides content and structure of the story and
when and how it should be aired.
144
the event, but depends on who the target audience is. Who is the
audience in Kolkata and how is it understood in the newsroom?

The Audience and Ratings

The channel has its own data on this (TRP Ratings). Let me give you a
simple anecdote on how I think of it. For the last ten years, I was in
Mumbai. I never got any Kolkata news despite having access to internet,
radio and all the news channels. I got only Kolkata news only when I
called home. The national news channels never gave me any news or
rarely. Imagine people, all these software guys who stay abroad, all the
women who get married and go away; there was no Kolkata news for
them. I used to come back during my vacations and get surprised to see
how quickly this city is changing. So I felt this vacuum. When I was
joining this channel, I knew there was this vacuum to be filled. Last week
data showed that we have 51 per cent market share. (Yuvraj
Bhattacharya, 04/04/2006)

As with Utpal, Yuvraj defines the self as the audience and brings in the
notion of a certain economic class of people who are the target of the
channel: the software engineers, the non-resident Indians (NRIs). In
short, the target audience of the channel is the middle class and the rich.
While we already see a pretty strong identification with the corporate
aims in Yuvraj’s notion of news and audience, it becomes firmer when
we move to understanding on what the goals of Star Ananda are.

Star Ananda: The Plans

We have filled a certain vacuum in the market. Now our challenge is to

do it better and then the challenge will be to go deep. For example, if you
take Anandabazar [Bengali newspaper which has majority stakes in
MMCS] for example, the Bengali language that is written is of a very high
quality and because it is written, it requires a certain amount of
education to understand it. But see the depth of the paper. If you see the
readership data, everyone from A1 to B [These are socio-economic
criteria based on monetary power to classify the audience and used by
ratings agencies], everyone reads it. Ultimately this should be the aim. It
is like Coke, to build a brand like coke, that everyone refers to it as the

145
 gospel [sic]. Though because the vacuum was in the middle and upper
middle class, that is where we have gone in. Gradually definitely we
would want to eat up ETV [a rival news channel] and everybody else, we
would want Star News to be representative of entire Bengal. That is our
secondary target group, we will also target the non-Bengali people in
Kolkata who so far have not been represented. We are familiar with their
lifestyle. So we want to catch them. (Yuvraj Bhattacharya, 04/04/2006)

It is important at this stage to consider the background of Mr

Bhattacharya. Given that he practically runs the show, owing to the
importance of the assignment desk in Kolkata, his professional
background takes significance in understanding the editorial practices
of Star Ananda. He is a chartered accountant by profession and has been
successful in the corporate world of Mumbai. He had not been a
journalist before his posting at Star Ananda and thus is devoid of the
‘ideological’ baggage carried by Rajnish Ahuja and Utpal. His
understanding and positioning Star Ananda as a brand and comparing it
with Coke are significant. Terms like “eating up ETV” are stated without
irony and with utmost earnestness. In Yuvraj’s understanding of his
own practices with Star Ananda, the corporate and the editorial of MCCS
have merged.

Analysis:
a) The workflow description of Star Ananda represents an
assembly line production. The reporter, writers, editor are all
performing specific functions for a news story with no one really
owning it. Journalistic agency is deliberately taken away.
b) Yuvraj Bhattacharya’s background as a corporate professional is
mentioned earlier. His insistence on journalists having a “clean
slate” of mind and no ideological baggage reflects an irritation
with anything coming in the way of MCCS’s corporate goals, least
of all journalists.
c) The assignment desks in Mumbai and Kolkata have similar
understandings of news and news sense. For both, news
depends on the audience and what the audience likes, and

146
 should be customised through understanding viewer
preferences. Preferences can be understood by examining the
self and what it wants to see. The self also extends to family and
familiar surroundings and Yuvraj applies an economic definition
to “familiarity”.
d) In Kolkata, however, there is no visible sign of the self-reflexivity
which we identified in the Mumbai journalists. This marked
difference becomes manifest in the work practices of journalists
in both the cities. Star Ananda, like Star News, employs senior
journalists with print background. However, my assertion is that
the limited opportunities available in the city and a rise in salary
mean that journalists in Kolkata prefer to embrace the MCCS
corporate direction even more than journalists in Mumbai. We
will examine this further in this chapter.
e) Both Star News and Star Ananda refer to themselves as national
channels. However, as Rajnish Ahuja states, he understands Star
News as a North and West India centric channel. Yuvraj
Bhattacharya talks about targeting specific audiences, especially
the Bengalis living in West Bengal and other parts of India. He
also makes classifications according to the socio-economic
criteria of television ratings. Leading from this, a question we are
constantly dealing with, and will pay specific attention to in the
content analysis and audience chapters, will be that if there is
indeed a “split audience” why is there homogeneity in news.

News Programmes
Attempts at Audience Loyalty

As mentioned in the previous chapter, news channels in India being still

a nascent industry, appointment viewing is not widespread. Unlike the
BBC where a Newsnight will have a guaranteed loyal audience, news
channels in India are still trying to establish programmes that ensure a
reliable returning audience. From the analysis of weekly television
ratings, there is a presumption that it is easier to create appointment

147
viewing with programmes than with general news bulletins because
retention of programmes in audience memory is seen to be higher. The
advantage of a loyal audience base for particular programmes means
that a channel can demonstrate this to an advertising agency and clients
with products for the particular audience base can advertise on the
channel on that particular time.75
News bulletins and programmes have generally been regarded
as two separate genres in television channels. Given the importance
attached to creating a loyal audience base through appointment
viewing, successful programmers who can garner high TRP ratings are
highly valued within MCCS. For the purposes of this thesis, it becomes
crucial to understand how the programmers understand their own
practices, their work patterns and how they visualise what is expected
of them at the workplace.
This chapter will now try to understand what the differences are
if any, between programmes and general news, as understood by the
MCCS personnel. It will then attempt to contextualise these
understandings by focussing on two highly rated programmes and their
producers in Star News and Star Ananda.

Programmes or News
Technological changes, the incredible pace of change in the Indian
television industry, and competition amongst television channels have
opened up new questions on content and content format. What are the
differences now between a news bulletin and a programme in a news
channel in India? Are there any? If so, are they changing? I start with
quotations from the interviews of Uday Shankar and Rajnish Ahuja, in
that order.

The differences are getting blurred and I think that is the way it should
be. Such categories have become completely irrelevant. They go back to
75
However, as we saw in the earlier chapter, a high returning audience for particular
shows does not necessarily guarantee advertisers. Programmes, like the crime show
Sansani, could mean a branding for the channel which the advertiser would not want
to associate with. In the British context, Channel 4, despite garnering very high ratings
for Big Brother, saw several sponsors dropping out after the Jade Goody/Shilpa Shetty
race row.
148
 the pre live, pre 24x7 news days. Why did we need to tell people that this
is a news bulletin and this is a programme? Because news was where
you told them the day’s happenings. You did that in the days of
Doordarshan. It was one channel and then a few others, which were all
omnibus channels primarily viewed for entertainment and then there
was a couple of news bulletins. There was this 8.30 news bulletin on
Doordarshan, which for several years’ people used to make an
appointment and watch. But before and after that people were watching
entertainment programmes. But in the days of 24x7, it doesn’t really
matter what people are watching. People know they are watching a news
channel. The primary identity of Star News, Aaj Tak, NDTV are that these
are news channels; the viewers do not sit down and make those subtle
differentiations. In fact, I have got impatient of those differentiations.
These are meaningless intellectual exercises that journalists get into in
most newsrooms and are only useful for academic and research value.
They do not actually mean very much in terms of creating a programme
from the point of view of a journalist or offering a programme from the
point of view of a viewer. It does not really mean anything to me. It
doesn’t really matter. Why are we talking about it? (Uday Shankar,
05/07/2006)

I don’t think there is any difference left today between programmes and
news. Earlier we had programmes like “The World This Week” 76 on
Doordarshan. It was a round-up of the weekly events. But now I have the
resources to put such programmes everyday. What happens now? You
take the main news of the day. Look at it from all aspects, get the
background and put together a half hour programme. Now I can make a
“World This Week” everyday. I have enough resources. Today in Star
News everything is news cum programme. (Rajnish Ahuja, 03/07/2006)

24-hour news television channels are still relatively new to India. It is

not very difficult to recall the days of state-run television and news
viewing at appointed hours to which Uday Shankar refers. 77 Both Uday
Shankar and Rajnish Ahuja’s arguments about a blurring of lines
between programmes and news are derived from changes in
76
A popular weekly programme on world affairs that revolutionised the concept of
primetime television viewing in India.
77
I can easily remember that the evening news bulletin on Doordarshan would be
broadcast at 7.30pm, while programmes, few that there were, had their own viewing
timetable. The 9pm serial each weekday was the big draw and several years later, I
can remember most of the programmes well.

149
technology. However, it is important to note that journalists will be less
aware of the differences in the making of news bulletins and
programmes, as their bosses seem keen to encourage the ending of such
divisions. This has given rise to a category of news programmes, which,
while having weekly or daily schedules, deal with ‘newsy events.’ Their
treatment is more stylised than daily news bulletins; they have certain
themes and easily identifiable features like regular anchors and
dedicated promos.78
One such news programme, which we shall analyse along with
its Bengali counterpart, a programme that Star News has claimed as its
own ‘concept’ and which has got spectacular ratings is “Saans, Bahu aur
Saazish” (SBS) (“Mother-in-law, Daughter-in-law and Conspiracies”).
The name is inspired from a popular long running serial on the
entertainment channel, Star Plus,79 “Saans bhi kabhi bahu thi” (The
mother-in-law too was once wife). It started on 11 th October 2004 and
Star News became the first news channel in India to dedicate a news
programme exclusively to television soap operas, stars and their
lifestyles.
The programme is aired in the afternoons, keeping housewives
in mind, and is a good example of targeting particular sets of audiences
at different times depending on viewing habits. 80 According to TRP
reports, audience research in India shows that it is mostly women who
watch television during the afternoons and are fond of soap operas. SBS
targets this category. Following the success of the show, several other
Hindi news channels have adopted similar news programmes. But how
do journalists working in news channels reconcile to reporting or
making news out of soap operas on television? I took this and other
questions about news channel programming to Bivha Kaul Bhatt, the
producer of SBS.

78
Promos are short clips inserted between news cycles to advertise particular
programmes and their schedules. They also help fill gaps if no advertisement is
available.
79
Part of Star India.
80
In the preceding chapter on the corporate section, the research team head refers to
similar tactics of targeting particular audiences based on quantitative data.
150
 Initially I thought it was a very stupid idea. In the sense that how can you
show serials and all that. I mean, a news channel is supposed to be
serious. But understanding the kind of market you have now, you have to
understand that there are different sets of viewers. Women would not be
interested in news. (Bivha Kaul Bhatt, 01/06/2006)

Bivha’s response to her own practices highlights first disjuncture and

then reconciliation with her work. She aligns herself with the corporate
goals of securing advertisement and viewership. We must remember
that when SBS was being conceived, inputs from the research team
regarding viewing practices of women and timing were taken into
account. As the producer, Bivha has formed an imagination of her
audience (the house wives) who would not like to see ‘news’. I asked
her how she could know this.

I will tell you from personal experience. My mother when she watches
television, she watches news and all that but she would like to know
about it in bare headlines. She would not want details. Given a choice
between news and these kinds of programmes, I am sure she will go for
SBS. You have to understand that women are also very important. If you
want them in your fold, then you have to give programmes which are
exclusively for them. You have news throughout the day. Why can’t you
give half an hour, which is totally dedicated to them. It is an appointment
viewing. Sales show that right from 2pm till 3pm people switch on Star
News. The women have their lunch at 2pm and then from 2.30pm they
have SBS. And if you have a 3pm breaking news then they sit through
that too. (01/06/2006)

Audience is again the ‘familiar’ mother; an extension of the self.

From Bivha’s earlier reaction of such programmes being
incompatible in a news channel, there is a move towards justifying
the same. The necessity of such programmes is legitimised by
their saleability. If it sells, it must be right, and the initial
hesitation is brushed away. The alignment with corporate goals
and the editorial is a process and we can see the gradual shifts in
Bivha’s responses. By taking on corporate goals and prioritising
the need to sell a “product”, there is guilt in Bivha’s responses. She

151
needs to justify her work and how and why it should be part of a
news channel.

At the end of the day, everybody has to remember that this is a business
we are doing. Fine, you need to be a very good journalist, but at the end
of the day if I make a very good thing, but it doesn’t sell then what is the
point of doing this. The ground floor always has some kind of a grudge
against the first floor where all these people sit, the marketing, research
and ads, they say that you have to sell this and you have to understand
that you have to sell it and you have to give those features. We feel that
we need to be creative and all that but if you can’t sell that thing, even if
it is the best thing that you have done so far, and it gets you a TRP of 13
or 14, then what is the use. It is very sad but it is true. Uday has
introduced the concept of “teams” for all the programmes and all of them
are TRP driven. Initially nobody was bothered. Earlier, I used to give my
story and that’s it. Now as a producer, I feel the need to know that it is
adding value to the channel’s TRP. It has to be good quality but it has to
sell. For everything there are teams who are responsible for their TRPs.
Even if TRP goes down by one, the whole team is so depressed. They take
it on themselves that ‘shit, we haven’t delivered and that is why TRP has
gone down.’ (01/06/2006).

Bivha’s response prioritises ratings. We see the corporate influence

directly affecting the editorial personnel and how members of each
team “take it on themselves” to produce programmes which can garner
high ratings. Despite this internalisation of corporate goals, Bivha
continues to talk about the “grudge” the ground floor (editorial) has
against the first floor (the corporate).
Continuing the comparative analysis, I now look at the Bengali
equivalent of SBS on Star Ananda: “Hoi Ma Noiba Bouma” (HMNB)
(“Either the Mum or the Wife”). As I have mentioned earlier, in Kolkata,
journalists identify with MCCS’s corporate goals more easily than
journalists in Mumbai. The producer of HMNB finds it easier to justify
her work and the tension, already muted in Bivha Kaul Bhatt’s
response, is absent from Moumita Tarafdar’s. I asked her how she felt
about a programme like HMNB on a news channel.

152
 “Finally it’s a product. You are not here for social services. Only thing I
understand is that if TRP is down, money is down, that means you are a
bad producer.” (Moumita Tarafdar, 30/01/2006)

Moumita’s response refuses to even entertain the notion of news as a

social tool for disseminating information. In fact, she is speaking
against it in saying “You are not here for social service.” Her
identification with the corporate goal is complete and the
understanding of the “good” and “bad” producer is firmly linked to the
ratings.
As mentioned earlier, in Kolkata the coming of Star News as the
first major news channel provided journalists not only with a job
opening, but also the “professionalism” of an international media
organisation, besides the name recognition or branding factor of Star
which, as the journalists told me, gave them access to celebrities who
would refuse a less well known news channel. For journalists in
Mumbai, working for big news organisations had become routine,
whilst journalists in Star Ananda were still entranced by it, as
Moumita’s following response suggests:

Here the quality is important. I know what I am supposed to produce which is a

television programme, which is my jurisdiction and no one is going to poke
their nose in it. If there is any problem, my higher authorities in Mumbai will
talk about it and if the quality is good then again the higher authorities will give
me a positive feedback. That’s very important. In my earlier work places, I
never got such guidelines whether my work was good, bad, ugly. Also things,
here it is very gender friendly. In my last place, I got an appointment letter
addressing me as Mr. They could not believe that they were giving such a high
designation to a woman. Here it is not like that. (30/01/2006)

Analysis
a) Bivha’s response to imagining the audience is no different from the
responses of other journalists and we will find a similar thought
process through most interviews. The “familiar” and the “self” is for
whom news is produced.

153
b) Bivha also indicates a strain of remorse for a TRP driven news
production house, though she understands the necessity of it. However,
Moumita remains convinced that a news channel is not for “social
services.”

c) Moumita expressed exuberance at working for Star News that is

reflected in every journalist interviewed in Kolkata, unlike Mumbai,
where several journalists, especially reporters and news editors,
express dismay at their work practices.

d) Both journalists again highlight how the corporate goals of higher

TRP, targeting audience through research ratings, and linking the
understanding of good journalistic practice to high ratings have been
firmly etched into editorial practice.

News Bulletins and Reporters

From programmes and programmers, I will now examine the practices
of journalists who work on the regular news bulletins. I continue with
the comparative and start with the reporting section. The reporter is an
important link in the news chain as it is s/he who physically goes out to
get the story. How do they understand and perceive news, news sense
and their own role in producing it in the two channels?
As is the case in every newsroom, reporters are assigned news
beats. A perpetual shortage of reporters, however, has meant that in
most television newsrooms in India, reporters cover other areas
besides their principal beats. Also, covering night shifts, Sundays and
other holidays where only one or two reporters are on duty, means that
a reporter in a television newsroom has to be far more versatile and
more broadly connected than their counterparts in print journalism.
This also means that reporters have to share their sources and contacts
with other reporters, something they were traditionally shy of doing, as
they remain in print journalism.

154
 Crime reporting has emerged as the single most popular genre in
television news in India. I examine how the crime reporters of Star
News and Star Anando understand their work in this section and try to
analyse them in the context of editorial choices and the corporate
influence of MCCS.

Mumbai Bureau
The Bureau Chief of Star News Mumbai is also one of two crime
reporters in Mumbai.81 My interactions with Jitendra Dixit went beyond
formal interviews; our conversations took place in tea stalls, during
assignments, lunches and dinners. It is pertinent to mention here that
we saw each other as colleagues 82 and often he would forget my
position of being the researcher. While I did not record interviews with
Jitendra, he was happy to let me jot down notes and points.
The primary feeling that Jeetendra conveyed to me was of
disappointment with Star News. He spoke of the sensationalism that
grips news television, especially Hindi television channels. This is an
interesting point because crime reporting has generally been seen to
cater to sensationalism. He told me of an incident where he heard the
CEO Uday Shankar telling a female anchor to acquire sex appeal while
on camera. Jeetendra termed this as “deplorable.”
Several television journalists who started their career in
newspapers or magazines construct print journalism as a utopian world
to which they will return one day. Several journalists I spoke to in
Mumbai state that once they earn enough money, they want to return to
print journalism. Jeetendra was no exception. He said that he was
already looking for openings in print where he feels that there is more
space and time for research. Jeetendra mentions that the forced rapidity
with which television journalists in India are asked to churn out stories
leaves no room for research or introspection. Given the competition,
frequently stories are followed just because they appear on another
news channel. He tells me of an incident when a story was aired on a
81
This shows how important a crime reporter’s post has become. I started as a crime
reporter and was the junior-most in the newspaper’s hierarchy.
82
I have spent some time reporting in Mumbai on organised gangs and the
underworld.
155
rival channel about a bus full of school children that had met with an
accident resulting in several casualties. Star News felt forced to carry it
as it was being flashed as a breaking news story. One of the reporters
ran the same story without cross checking and it was later confirmed
that there were no casualties. Several other channels followed the same
story and made the same mistake.
Jeetendra kept mentioning that journalists in Star News got
almost no time off and even valid leave taken is frowned upon. He
mentions that he had taken five days annual leave to go out of town
when a top Mumbai police officer was arrested on corruption charges.
The second crime reporter, Umesh, was also unavailable and Star News
was late on the story. Jeetendra was served a show cause notice for
being out of town on sanctioned leave.
While Jeetendra, two years after our conversation, continues
with his job at Star News, he made several mentions of going back to
print journalism which would allow him more free time allowing him to
write a book on the Mumbai underworld.

Kolkata Bureau
My meeting with Bitonu Chatterjee, deputy head of the Kolkata Bureau
who handles the crime beat in Star Ananda along with another reporter,
was formally arranged. One evening, after several requests, we met in
the office and I recorded the interview.
If Dixit seems unhappy with the way things are at Star News and
editorial policies, Bitonu Chatterjee is at the other extreme as far as
loyalty to the company is concerned. This is a trend, which I have
mentioned above, and which we will continue to see through the
interviews and observations.
The notion of objectivity and its “rituals” is an integral part of
how a journalist, especially a reporter, understands his or her work. I
asked Chatterjee what his position on objectivity was. Chatterjee stated
that company policy should be a reporter’s objectivity. To be clear on
whether Chatterjee had confused ‘objectivity’ with ‘objective’, I
rephrased my question.

156
 “Every media company has a policy. That policy should be any journalist’s
objectivity. I must remember that I am first an employee and then a journalist,
never the other way around. According to me, there are two points to being a
good employee. First, to never do anything that harms the employer.
Secondly, to work as hard as is possible.” (Bitonu Chatterjee, 30/04/2006)

While Chatterjee continues to misunderstand an academic query on

objectivity, his loyalty to the company is unflinching. Such expressions
of loyalty, surprising at first, became commonplace amongst Star
Ananda journalists in Kolkata. Still intrigued, I asked Bitonu what
happens when a company has no objective on a story, what will
objectivity then mean for the reporter.

“Then it must be about maximising sales. After all, this is a business we are in
and we must never forget that.” (30/04/2006)

Bitonu refused to entertain questions about journalistic commitment

and integrity saying that “these ideas are from another age and here we
are in a business.”

Analysis:
As we examine the responses from journalists in both the news centres
across the departments, there are some clear patterns that emerge,
patterns, which we will continue to find as we look at the other areas of
the Editorial team.

a) Journalists in Mumbai are more prone to voice their

dissatisfaction with editorial policies while in Kolkata there is a
general feeling of euphoria about working for Star Ananda, the
first major 24-hour news channel in the city. Chatterjee’s
response again highlights how much he is in sync with the
corporate goal of selling a product and maximising business. The
delight at working for Star Ananda is evident in his comment on
the ideal employee. Jeetendra, however, seemed critical about
choices of stories, presentation and the profit maximisation
157
 ethos of Star News. We will see and examine further this point of
difference between the two offices. The above point is further
reinforced by Jeetendra’s complaint of no time away from work
compared to Bitonu’s stated desire to work hard as possible.

b) Jeetendra’s comment that news channels follow each other echo

the sentiment of Rajnish Ahuja who earlier told me that he felt
television journalism in India was without any direction, with
channels running after each other’s stories. The frustration with
working for Star News continues to reveal itself.

c) The interviews of both the journalists highlight the changing

values of news reporting in an increasingly competitive scenario
like Indian television. Basic journalistic values of cross checking
facts are giving way to coming out with stories as quickly as
possible. The competitive edge is being defined by the best
researched or correct story but by those that come out the
quickest. Both Rajnish and Jeetendra decry this.

Output
Our work on the editorial has until now focussed on the Input
department, which decides on the selection of stories in the offices of
Star News and Star Ananda in Mumbai and Kolkata. By showing the
work patterns of various divisions within this department, I hope to
have established how the corporate goals have infiltrated editorial
decision making and policies.
The Output department, which includes several key areas,
including Production Control, editors and writers, is concerned with the
production of content and plays a key role in the general news bulletin
that we are now discussing. There are some desks within Output which
also work on story selection, for example the foreign desks in both
Kolkata and Mumbai.83 I will contextualise the different departments

83
Given that the foreign desk does not have reporters and selects stories from the
wires, one team in both the cities covers both input and output. Specialised areas like
the sports desk will select their own stories and then decide how to produce them.
158
within the Output desks, following the same method for both in Mumbai
and Kolkata, and then examine the responses from the journalists in
both offices.
In media theory, the imagining of the foreign, here “international
news,” has been much theorised. In the context of Star News and Star
Anando, this imagining of “what makes international stories” is closely
linked with the journalist’s understanding of audiences and the larger
goal of MCCS. In the beginning of this section, I examine the practices of
journalists who deal with international stories in both channels and
how they understand their work.

The “foreign” in Star News

Desh Videsh (At Home and Abroad) is a one and a half-hour programme
from 5pm to 6pm and then from 7pm to 7.30pm each evening. The Star
News website (http://starnews.indya.com/programmes.htm)
advertises the programme thus:

Desh Videsh captures the essence of national as well as international

news happenings in a unique two-host, two-hour format. An early
evening bulletin, its stylised delivery and racy format provides a heady
synopsis for the viewer on every domestic and international news
happenings until that hour.

We will discuss the different aspects of the programme in detail in the

content analysis section of this thesis. Here I look at the work practices
of the desk and how the journalists understand their work.
I spent three working days with Assistant Producer Manish
Kumar, who is a former print journalist and has been working on Desh
Videsh for six months. Here I sketch out his average workday routine.

Work Routine
Manish comes in around ten am in the morning and goes through all the
news rundown or news list of the morning. The rundown comprises of
all the stories that are being aired. For example, a 10am to 11am
rundown would have all the stories which are aired during that hour.

159
This gives Manish an idea of the news stories that are being currently
shown and are viewed as important by Star News. He then reads the
newspapers and looks at the stories coming in from Indian news
agencies or wire services and makes a list of what he thinks are
important but not being aired. From the Assignment Desk, he then gets
the news list and “agenda”84 for the day, which has been decided in the
morning meeting. After this, he looks at the international wire copies
from APTN (Associated Press Television Network). He also checks the
BBC website for important stories. Manish looks particularly at stories
in APTN that have good visuals. He then selects some stories and gives
them for ingesting85 while he writes the voiceover for them. He will also
then talk to the Output Desk head, apprise him of the main international
stories and get feedback on what can be included in the programme.
Around 3.30pm, he starts building the rundown and at 5pm the bulletin
Desh Videsh starts.86

Reflections on practice

“News is that piece of knowledge which makes people aware of their

rights, of their society, it tells them of what is going on in this global
world” (Manish Kumar, 06/06/2006)

Manish’s response to what he understands by “news” is classical and

almost textbook in nature but diverges widely from what he
understands to be the news practices of Star News, which is explained
in terms of his own background of being a print journalist.

“I was aware that the people from electronic media do not have in-
depth knowledge of anything. But in Hindi print media, I was less paid
and only due to money factor, I shifted here. It has been almost six
months and I have not understood what according to my bosses is

84
In the morning meeting, it is decided what will be the main story or stories and
its/their “treatment” for the day.
85
Ingesting puts the story in the server from which it can then be edited and aired.
86
Putting stories in the rundown in no way ensures that they will be aired. The final
choice of stories lies with the bulletin producer who chooses what s/he wants to air
from the rundown prepared or from previous rundowns. The producer can also ask
for stories to be included in the rundown.
160
 news. Maybe it is their compulsion, ratings compulsion or whatever.
This despite knowing that we are not giving our viewers any added
information. According to me, there is no clear-cut definition of what is
news according to Star News. Anything that will fetch ratings can be
shown as news.” (Manish Kumar, 06/06/2006)

“Every person in a news channel will realise that a four-rupee hike in

petrol will affect the common man. But we did not give much coverage
to it because people here believe that it will not fetch high ratings.: 87
(Manish Kumar, 06/06/2006)

The disillusionment which we saw in Jeetendra Dixit with work

practices in Mumbai, is reflected in Kumar’s understanding of Star News
and its editorial policies.

“Producers here have no right to think or decide what is right or what

is news. For example, even if I think that something makes a good news
story, I am told that it will not go.” (Manish Kumar, 06/06/2006)

International stories are not a priority for Star News. While the details
of content will be analysed in a later chapter, it is sufficient here to say
that in a programme of one and half hour titled “Desh Videsh” (“At
Home and Abroad”) at an average has no more than five minutes of
international stories.

“Since I have joined here, I have been moulded or motivated by my

seniors to selects stories, especially international stories, with an eye
on good visuals, even if there is absolutely no news peg to the story.
Initially, I tried to get good stories, which were headlines in the BBC,
into the rundown. But I soon realised that these stories will not be
carried. No point wasting energy and time on things that are
unproductive. So I do what is expected of me now.” 88 (Manish Kumar,
06/06/2006)

87
A day before the interview, petrol and diesel prices were raised by the Indian
Government.
88
The day I interview Manish, the international story on Desh Videsh was on a oil
depot in Cairo where a fire erupted. There were no casualties nor were their huge
losses. The visuals, however, were striking.
161
To draw out a comparative understanding between the two desks in
Mumbai and Kolkata, I will now look at the Bengali version of “Desh
Videsh”: “Baire Dure” (Abroad and afar). The work routine is similar to
Mumbai. In Kolkata, however, a trainee nineteen-year old journalist,
Oly, handles the work, which is indicative of how much importance is
given to international stories. While I will examine Oly’s responses to
analyse how she reflected on and her practices, I also look at the
responses of Soumik Saha, senior producer in Star Ananda’s Output
desk, to understand the wider practices of the department. Oly, like
Manish, looks for colourful stories for her bulletin.

“I go for colourful stories, which have several different kinds of

pictures. I also try to find scripts which are small so that I can fit in
more stories in the rundown. This, I think, gives variety to the news-
wheel.” (Oly, 07/03/2007)

In the interview, Oly gave an example of a skiing story in Switzerland.

She justified the selection by saying that there were lots of snow shots,
which looked “very pretty.” [oh god]She gave another example of a
fashion show story in the United States that she chose the day I met her.

“Fashion shows are always very colourful and I found a news peg too.
There was a designer who was over seventy and still going strong.”
(Oly, 07/03/2007)

Oly is supervised. A senior producer will have a look at her selection of

stories. She tells me that recently she had omitted a story in regards to
the attack in New York on September 11, 2001 and was told to include
it.

“I thought I would do it after I finished editing a fashion show story, but

I was told to do the September 11 story first,” (Oly, 07/03/2007)

Oly’s understanding of the audience is no different from the other

journalists I have spoken to in both the cities.

162
 “I myself am an audience. Before I became a journalist, I used to watch
television so I know what people want to see. I never wanted to see
something that is too heavy. That’s what I try to do here. I try and keep
it very light. If it is too heavy with information, it will not take a minute
for the people to reach for the remote.” (Oly, 07/03/2007)

Oly was a trainee journalist and her views might not be indicative of
wider practices in the news channel. It was therefore important to
understand the views and responses of other senior journalists in the
Output Division in Star Ananda to analyse their understanding of
audiences and how they reflect on their daily work practices.

“Target audience for Star Ananda is very urban, though we would like
to penetrate the districts in Bengal. So our primary target is the urban
Bengali. Before Star Ananda started, Bengal did not have a 24-hour
news channel. So we first had to inculcate a news viewing habit in the
Bengali viewer.” (Soumik Saha, Senior Producer, Output, 20/12/2006).

“I understand what the viewer would like to watch by asking the

question ‘would my mom, the retired people in my house, would the
kids who watch television, want to watch this story.’ Thus you have the
answer. If you have got a very clear view about your viewership
throughout the day, which part of the day who is your target audience,
then the business because very easy. For example, from six to eight in
the morning, news watchers are mainly working people. So political,
economics, more of hard stories, those would cater to them. At the end
of the day, they want a wrap up. So between nine and ten at night, news
should be very fast and informative and wrap up the day’s event.”
(Soumik Saha, Senior Producer, Output, 20/12/2006)

Soumik’s notion of the target audience reinforces the notion of tailoring

news for “sets of audiences”. As a senior producer, he is in tune with the
corporate goal of maximising viewership. That apart, his own
imagination of the audience is similar to other journalists I have spoken
to: the “self” and the “familiar”.
As I have noted earlier, journalists in Kolkata are happy with
Star Ananda; happy working for it and excited at the prospects. Such

163
allegiance to the organisation has also resulted in wanting it to do well,
in other words, empathy with the corporate vision.

“It all depends on the schooling. I think it is the mantra of modern day
business where an employee grows with the channel. So we are all in a
way working for ourselves. If the channel does well, we do well. I think
that is why we are so bothered about the ratings. Not everyone
understands the numbers but whenever the ratings are up, our bosses
are happy. So we know we have to keep the ratings up. It’s told to us
from the very first day we are here. “(Soumik Saha, 20/12/2006)

Analysis

An analysis of the Output Department in Mumbai and Kolkata,

specifically the Foreign Desk throws up some interesting points besides
reinforcing some of the trends that have already started to emerge.

a) The importance given to international stories is evident by their

lack. Not only are junior personnel employed at the desk, the
time given for international stories in a news bulleting
purporting to cover them is scant.

b) Manish’s dissatisfaction with the Mumbai office and its practices

are not different from crime reporter, Jeetendra Dixit while Oly
and Soumik echo Bitonu’s sentiments on Kolkata.

c) Soumik makes a case for target audience, maximising viewership

and aligning the success of the company with his own. His view
of his own practices highlight an internalisation of corporate
goals, and on the other that news is now being looked at as a
commodity that can be tailored depending on the imagining of
the audience by the television producers.

164
Anchors
Television news anchors are the latest living room celebrities and this
has resulted in a proliferation of young professionals aspiring to join
news channels. In this section I look at the practices of news anchors in
Mumbai and Kolkata and then, as I have done previously, examine their
responses to their practices and finally compare and analyse them.

Practices
Anchors in Mumbai are more experienced in their craft than their
Kolkata counterparts. This is not due just the simple fact that Star News
has been around for longer than Star Ananda, though that is definitely
an important factor. When Star News was launched in 2002, Hindi
private television journalism had already been around for some time.
Aaj Tak had set the standards in fast paced, breaking news television
reporting. NDTV, though, primarily branded as an English news channel
had half hour Hindi news cycles. Doordarshan, the state-run television,
had its evening news bulletins in English and Hindi for a few decades.
Star News, prior to its launch, tapped into this talent pool of
experienced news practitioners and launched an advertising campaign
wherein it invited senior anchors and journalists to apply for jobs.
Several of the top anchors of Star News had ample previous experience
and brought in their own sensibilities to the job; Star Ananda,
conversely, relied on recruiting freshers. As I mentioned above, Yuvraj
Bhattacharya, head of the Assignment Desk in Kolkata, told me in
interview that he wanted people with no “baggage”; young people who
could be “moulded.” This means that anchors during the shows in
Kolkata have to be prompted constantly by the panel producers to ask
the right questions during chats shows and other live formats of news
television.89

89
Panel producers are responsible for producing the particular bulletin and sit in the
production control unit from where every bulletin is aired. They have a talk back
facility with the studio anchor.
165
 “We keep telling the anchors that they must at least read the morning
newspapers before coming. They are the faces of the channel, if they do
not know it looks as if the channel does not know.” (Soumik Saha,
Senior Producer Output, Star Ananda, 20/12/2006)

During several days that I spent in the PCR in both cities, I did see that
in Kolkata, all anchors, except the chief of bureau Suman Dey who is an
experienced reporter, needed questions they could ask guests or their
own reporters who were reporting live. In fact, before a guest or a
reporter came on, a panel producer would quickly brief the anchors on
the story and then give them the questions they should open with. And
as the guest responded to a question, the panel producer would give the
anchor the next one. This was almost always the case. In Mumbai,
anchors seemed far more informed on the stories. They formed their
own questions as much as panel producers prompted them. 90
Besides their role as anchors, several employees at Star News
double as senior correspondents. They thus have their own
understanding of how a story should be reported. In Star Ananda,
however, though several anchors want to go out to report stories, they
are inexperienced compared to their Mumbai counterparts.

Reflections on practice
Shazia Ilma is a Special Correspondent and also an anchor of prime
time shows. She is a graduate of the prestigious Jamia School, a premier
media studies institution in New Delhi. Describing what makes news
and news sense in Star News, she states that the primary criteria in Star
News for news is how many “eyeballs” a story will catch.

“It is the three c’s formula, crime, cinema and cricket. Anything related
to these three sells really, really well. Crime sells like nothing else does.

90
But experience has strange side effects and produces a kind of cynicism towards
news. At least one anchor would regularly play solitaire on her computer through the
bulletin. Just as soon as she finished reading an anchor link and the story would start,
she would start playing solitaire on the computer before being told to get ready to
read the next link.
166
 We choose news thinking what will sell. We go by that rather than
what we ever thought news was.” (Shazia Ilma, 23/06/2006)

As with Manish Kumar, Shazia’s professes a different notion of “news”

or what “news” should be.

“Anything which is newsworthy should impact all of us, be it social,

political. Everybody has a different bent of mind but where I come
from, (I am from Jamia),91 we were told that if we are in the media you
are supposed to critique policies, bring information to the people,
create awareness, create consciousness about right to information,
create awareness about injustice. But some of the things do not work.
Like developmental journalism does not work.” (Shazia Ilma,
23/06/2006)

The pressure of ratings is always lurking. Being a senior journalist,

Shazia has some say in how her bulletin is presented but has to keep
the ratings in mind.

“Every week there is a review. Friday is a bad day, because TRP ratings
come in. People see what did well and we see stories of superstition,
ghost stories, film stories and cricket comes again and again. I can only
decide on how to play the story, what to say, do I tone it down, do I
sensationalise. But, that’s all. It does not work at the assignment level. I
cannot decide what story to do or get done.” (Shazia Ilma,
23/06/2006)

The target audience is defined by its purchasing power. Shazia’s notion

of “news” and a certain amount of self-chastising guilt cannot and does
not override the concerns of the Corporate Division, which has to get
“eyeballs” and so the “three c’s” if it can get viewers becomes news.

“Although I hate the word, it is frequently used here. Quite a few times,
a story is mentioned as “low society” and dropped. For example, an
incident that happens in the slums will not be reported while a similar
incident occurring in Marine Drive will be played up. We cater to the

Jamia Millia Islamia is one of the most reputed media schools in Delhi.
91

167
 cable-viewing households and it shows in our programmes.” (Shazia
Ilma, 23/06/2006)

Considering Shazia’s concern about targeting a particular social

class as audience, her self-image of the anchor in Star News is
interesting.

“An anchor is someone who is upmarket, educated and aware,

concerned. We have to dress formally. I do political shows. I am the
only woman who does serious political shows so I have to dress
formally and therefore the upmarket feel.” (Shazia Ilma, 23/06/2006)

Mehraz Dube, another senior anchor, echoes Shazia’s notion of the

upmarket clientele and by the now familiar way the audience is viewed.

“Understanding audience is simple. I just think of my nephews, my

sister, my mother in the kitchen, my friend who is a chartered
accountant and I think of what they want to watch, what should they
be informed about.” (Mehraz Dube, 29/06/2006)

Concerning what is news sense and who is the audience, he says

“The BBC knows its audience, they produce for it. We do a similar thing
here. Who is the audience? What does it want? The answer is news
sense.” (Mehraz Dube, 29/06/2006)

With the audience defined as the “self” by the journalists, news sense is
delivering what the “self” wants. Journalists in both Mumbai and
Kolkata seem to concur on this, but what are the other points of
departure or similarities between anchors in the two cities?

Work Practices in Kolkata

During my four month stint at the Star Ananda office in Kolkata, I have
often thought an assembly line news production house would look
exactly like this. Everyone doing their bit and the final product is
television news. In one sense, one could call it well managed; in

168
another, you have reporters and anchors who all seem to play a bit part
in every story with no one really owning it.
Anchors in Kolkata read the news, they do not write the anchor
links. A minute or two before they go on air, they practice the delivery.
Since they do not know most stories well, the panel producer is
required for constant prompting on what questions to ask. The news in
Star Ananda is not actually live. It is done in sections, recorded and then
put together for half hour bulletins. This means an anchor can read all
the anchor links at a go, reread them if necessary and then put together
with particular stories during the bulletin, allowing the channel to keep
producing fresh stories in between bulletins. Anchors can just read a
link for any new story that has just come in without having to read
through the entire bulletin again. Various clips, therefore are inserted
together with the stories to form a news bulletin cycle.
Keya Ghosh is one of the more popular young anchors in Star
Ananda and also does entertainment reporting, which means she
reports on celebrity events and film stars. She is a hotel management
graduate and also runs a confectionary business. She says that being an
anchor in Star Ananda means she gets “direct access to the celebrities”:

“You can know them very well and they talk and give exclusive
interviews to you. Also, I feel I enjoy the power of being a journalist. If
you have a problem, I can tell someone I am from Star Ananda, and my
work gets done quickly. I realise it can be said to be misusing power
but I think journalists enjoy it. It feels nice. I also like that we anchors
are also celebrities and people come up to us for autographs and invite
us to events.” (Keya Ghosh, 04/02/2007)

Star Ananda pays a lot of attention to celebrity news and has employed
senior producers to cover this.

“Celebrity news is important because it sells. People want to know

what the stars do beyond the television serials, what is their daily life
like. We bring it to them. People recognise us. No one refuses to give us
a byte. It is these two big groups, Star and Anandabazar whom

169
 everyone knows here. This is a very professional place. It is prompt, it
is fast.” (Keya Ghosh, 04/02/2007)

On an anchor’s role:

“You have to make people believe. They must believe that you are
telling the truth; that you are not bullshitting. I read from the anchor
link and depend on them but I have to read a political story differently
from an entertainment story. That comes with experience.” (Keya
Ghosh, 04/02/2007)

Analysis
Despite the obvious differences in attitude towards “news” and news
values, Shazia and Keya share similarities.

a) Keya is open about enjoying the trappings of celebrity status. Shazia

too, sees herself as well dressed, informed and upmarket.

b) The discontent with “news” in Star News is not stretched or does not
cross over to professional practices for Shazia. Both she and Keya
perform very similar functions for the particular news channels.

Conclusion
As in the previous chapter which tried to establish how the corporate
section of MCCS performs editorial functions and influences decisions,
this chapter emphasised how editorial decisions are taken and
influenced by corporate objectives. Through an examination of the
Input and Output divisions of both the channels, the work processes of
the various departments and interviews with journalists, I have
emphasised the ratings driven content production in both channels.
I have argued that given their particular economies, journalists
in Mumbai and Kolkata react differently to this corporatisation of the
editorial. In Star News, both senior and junior journalists express regret
over news values and news standards. In Star Ananda, however,
journalists feel complete empathy with this corporatisation.

170
 In both channels however, with or without the complete
approval of the editorial, the corporate goals of MCCS are the prime
driving factor behind news selection. The disgruntlement of the
Mumbai journalist in no way spills over to actual editorial content or a
difference in news production.
The journalists’ understanding of audience in both channels
drives the production of content. News value and news sense are
derived from an understanding of what the audience wants to see. This
understanding is validated by the ratings industry and its quantitative
approach to news content. To comprehend the news content in Star
News and Star Anando more substantially, the next chapter focuses on
the perception of the audience in the two channels and the ratings
industry.

171
 Chapter 6
Audience Matters

In this chapter, I approach, in greater detail, the television journalist’s

understanding of the term ‘audience’ and how such an understanding
affects news content. Therefore, classical audience studies; the
competing definitions of the audience and the various methodological
tools employed by social and media theorists to understand the
audience, are not part of this study.
I start with the presumption that mass audiences are by
definition unknowable.92 Given this, television producers must imagine
their audience. I argue that this imagination of the producers of their
audience has an impact on the content produced and therefore
deserves serious empirical study. “Approached as a discursive
conceptualization or typification inscribed by the news producers into
their particular news form, rather than as an empirical object ‘out
there’, the ‘imagined audience’ of the news producers may well literally
be ‘at work’.” (Cottle, 2000:36) The emphasis, therefore, is not on the
fact that the mass audience is imagined, a position which is now an
“orthodoxy” in media studies but how this imagination works to
produce content; in this context, news content in Indian television.
This chapter concerns itself with the various ways through
which a television journalist imagines his/her audience. I term these as
processes of “knowing the audience.” I shall argue that the Indian
television news journalist, because of these processes, claims an
intimate knowledge of the audience, its likes and dislikes and defends.
News content is defended as “this is what the audience wants. We
simply produce what they want.” I will argue that the journalists’
certainty of knowing the audience results because the journalist
imagines the audience in terms of his or own “self” and that of the
“familiar”.
This chapter will chart out the different processes of knowing
the audience: the television ratings system in India; the management

92
See Chapter 2, section three.
172
practices of MCCS and its interpretation of the ratings, and finally how
the newsrooms of Star News and Star Ananda internalise these ratings
as the marker and rationale behind news stories and news programme.

Television Rating Points (TRP), TAM Media Research and Indian

television newsrooms

The privatisation of Indian television since the 1990s, and the

phenomenal rise in the number of channels ushered in a phase of
commercialisation of the media market that necessitated audience
measurement. As in the US in the 1920s, the commercialisation of radio
almost immediately established a need for audience measurement,
because advertisers and programme sponsors needed to know how
many people were listening to justify their advertising expenditure.
(Ross and Nightingale, 2003, 21)
In the Indian context, advertising revenue constitutes almost
seventy per cent of the total earnings of television companies. 93 With
the continued rise in the number of channels and an increasing
competition for advertising revenues, audience preference and their
demonstrated loyalty to particular channels through ratings (TRP) have
become important markers by which television channels attempt to
corner the advertising market.94
Given that the term TRP has come to symbolise so much in
Indian television newsrooms, including efficiency, programme quality,
saleability, branding and marketing, it is pertinent to understand the
dynamics behind the production of these numbers and contextualise
their meaning through case studies.

TAM Media Research

A company called TAM (Television Audience Measurement) Media
Research controls almost all of the ratings in Indian television and
93
Figure quoted by Yogesh Manwani, Vice President, Marketing, MCCS.
94
Such selling strategies are detailed in chapter 2.
173
advertising and nearly every television channel subscribes to them. 95
The company profile in TAM’s official website begins thus:

A joint venture company between AC Nielsen & Kantar Media Research/ IMRB,
TAM Media Research is the TV Viewership analysis firm of India. Besides
measuring TV Viewership, TAM also monitors Advertising Expenditure through
its division AdEx India. It exists in the PR Monitoring space through another
division – Eikona PR Monitor.96

The company’s claim of being the “TV Viewership analysis firm of India”
cannot be faulted if merely statistics are taken into account. It has near
complete monopoly over a lucrative Indian market and television
channels, advertising agencies, corporate clients and public relations
firms all subscribe to the TAM television ratings. However, such
monopoly over the market has opened them to accusations of data
manipulation; stories of leaks and subterfuge abound. The data
collection procedure of TAM Media Research also is much criticised and
being directly linked to this chapter’s primary concern with “the
process of knowing the audience”, needs to be discussed here.
CEO, MCCS, Uday Shankar states:

TAM is inadequate, completely inadequate. I don’t think either the

methodology or the physical resources for data gathering is adequate or
representative of Indian viewing behaviour. Also there are other serious
issues with TAM. It is only telling you things when the television is on. TV has
a lot of background activity. TV may be on but it does not mean that someone
is seeing it. (05/07/2006)

Shankar makes two important points regarding TAM’s data collection

procedure. The first point regarding “methodology” is a general critique
of the rating system as a tool for understanding audience response.
Television, as Shankar points out, has a lot of “background activity”. A
television might be on, but might not be viewed by the people in the
house who could be pursuing other interests. An audience monitor does

95
Zee Television is the only company which states that it does not subscribe to TAM
ratings.
96
http://TAMindia.com/TAMindia/Company_Profile.htm
174
not take this into account. The remote control through which the
monitor is controlled is ill-equipped for several reasons. For example,
the adult male of the sample house might switch the television on
through the use of the appropriate button on the remote that identifies
him as the audience. But his wife or children could be watching the
television after he has left and again the data collected will not reflect
this change in audience.
Shankar’s second point is the particular “physical” dynamics of
TAM’s data collection procedures which is directly related, I argue, to
how journalists in Star News and Star Ananda construct their audiences.
This therefore, needs elaboration and analysis.

Critique of TAM’s Data Collection Processes

TAM’s data collection procedures have been much critiqued by

prominent media practitioners (such as Shankar above) and scholars. I
present four points of critique, which I argue, results in a skewed
understanding of the audience and affects news content produced
keeping this audience in mind. At the time of this research, Indian
homes fitted with cable television had exceeded 69 million. TAM
records audience activity through their “people monitor” in just 4,500
homes. “..., the sample size is too miniscule for a country as diverse as
India” (Mehta, 2008: 180). Though TAM claims that “[I]t is the largest
such measurement system in the world, but it is still fairly inadequate
as a barometer for a heterogeneous country with over a billion people,
six major religions, 18 official languages – with an additional 96
documented ones – and hundreds of dialects” (ibid) This incongruity
between population and sample is the first point of critique. The sample
size cannot account for the most of India’s population and yet the
ratings have become the sole marker of audience judgement of
television content. Journalists and media managers also see the ratings
as indicative of editorial quality. With ratings deciding good and bad

175
stories, journalists produce for an audience the sample size of TAM,
ignoring rest of the country.
The second critique is that TAM sample measures only urban
areas. “India’s entire rural population, consisting of an estimated 145
million households, is totally ignored” (ibid: 180. 181) Moreover, even
in urban areas, only towns with a population of more than a hundred
thousand are taken into account. This focus on an urban audience
results in content which marginalises vast regions of the country and its
population. Mehta points out that till 2007, TAM “reserved 25 per cent
of its meters outright for SEC A householders, defined as the highest
earning socio-economic category” (2008: 181). TAM’s focus on the
urban rich and the television news producers’ obsession with the
ratings has created an imagined India of affluence and prosperity,
oblivious to the material and physical surroundings of the millions who
live in poverty and squalor.
The third critique is that while the cable viewing homes are
spread across all the twenty-five Indian states and seven union
territories, TAM, till 2007 excluded ten Indian states from its survey.
Predictably, the states excluded are amongst the poorest in India and
most of them are geographically peripheral like the seven states in the
North-East of India. Along with Kashmir, which has a history of
separatist movements, these states are considered too volatile for
survey. Bihar and Orissa, the other two excluded states are amongst the
poorest in India. This focus on particular states helps not only in
producing the myth of the affluent nationhood but also creates a nation
where certain groups or languages achieve dominance while others are
marginalised.
These three points of critique about TAM’s physical resources of
data collection indicates a certain understanding of audiences which the
company’s sampling procedures create and which the television
journalists, given the importance accorded to ratings, inculcate. The
geographical area and sample size excludes peripheral areas and the
poor. If we consider that the ratings system evolved as a need for
advertisers to have an understanding of audience responses, it is logical

176
that advertisers want to understand the responses of that part of the
audience who are able to afford their commodities. (see Ross and
Nightingale, 2003: 21) The poorest states of India therefore do not
interest the advertising market and TAM keeps them out of their
survey. TAM Media Research targets a specific audience group; the
affluent Indians residing in the big cities of the country. All television
producers across the various channels, dependant on ratings, produce
for this particular audience, and a homogenous content emerges where
the “the nation is a community of citizens who are enfranchised by
freedom of choice, consumption and material gratification and a
lifestyle of enjoyment and pleasure” (Chakravorty and Gooptu, 2000:
91). The emergence of this singular narrative is a result of the
importance given to the ratings and produces a homogenous content
across television channels.

Ratings and the newsrooms

As detailed in the chapter on editorial processes, journalists rely heavily
on the ratings and associate the success or failure of a programme
through numbers. Here I quote from some of my interviews with
journalists to reiterate their positions regarding television news,
ratings and the purpose of news channels.

Today news is based on whatever the consumer likes. If we

show something that people do not like, something that is
too political, then the channel ratings suffer. It (ratings) is
very important. After all, this is a business. (Utpal, Deputy
Head, Assignment Desk, Star News, 6/06/2006)

Even if TRP (Television Rating Points) goes down by one, the whole
team is so depressed. 97 They take it on themselves that, ‘shit, we
haven’t delivered and that is why TRP has gone down.’’’ (Bivha Kaul
Bhatt, Senior Producer, Star News, 10/6/2006)

97
TRP ratings are done in percentage points and a drop of a single digit can symbolise
a massive down turn in audience numbers. With increased competition, sales team
now highlight movements to a few decimal points to signal advantage over a rival
channel.
177
 Both Utpal and Bivha’s comments highlight the fundamentals of
news production in Indian television today. Firstly, news has to be
tailor-made for an audience, the sample size of rating companies.
Secondly, the success or failure of news programmes is linked to these
ratings and not any intrinsic editorial judgment or value, and the
journalist has internalised this. Journalists from Star Ananda go a step
further than those in Star News in reasoning the purpose of a news
channel. The insistence that it is a market product to be sold and from
which profits should be made is intrinsically linked with the television
ratings that aid this selling process.

“Finally it’s a product. You are not here for social services. Only
thing I understand is that if TRP is down, money is down, that
means you are a bad producer.” (Moumita Tarafdar, Producer, Star
Ananda, 30/01/2006)

“…it must be about maximising sales. After all, this is a business we

are in and we must never forget that. “(Bitonu Chatterjee, Reporter,
Star Ananda, 30/11/2006)

The methods of data collection, the ways in which the numbers

are interpreted within the newsrooms and how journalists and the
MCCS management internalise this play a major part in constructing the
journalists’ imagination of the audience and thereby news content,
which is tailored for it. Understanding these will help us in
deconstructing the journalists’ processes of ‘knowing the audience’. It
will also help to understand how the journalist’s notion of the “self” and
the “audience/viewer” are equated.

The TRP analysis and its surrounding practices

TAM’s sample homes are fitted with a ‘people monitor’ or ‘meter’ and a
remote control used by the family records viewing modes and
preferences. These are transmitted to a central TAM database for
analysis. Data is collated through the week, and sent to customers on
the following Friday. The first week of the year, starting the first
178
Sunday, is termed Week 1 and so on. Software called Media Express
allows customers, the various television companies and advertisement
agencies to customise this data depending on their particular needs and
relevance. For example, Star News would only look at the audience in
the Hindi Speaking Market (HSM) and not bother about the rest of the
country while Star Ananda would take into account the Bengali
speaking population. Media Express allows such customisation.
The ratings come in early each Friday morning when, across the
media industry and television organisations in India, analysis of the
numbers begins. As mentioned in the chapter on the corporate
structure of MCCS, it is the research team, which handles the TAM data
and analyses it for the editorial and the corporate. On this analysis, the
future of programmes, news, marketing and selling strategies are based.
I spent several Friday mornings with Aditi Nayak, a member of the
research team in charge of the first analysis. From the notes in my diary
and interviews with Aditi, I reconstruct two consecutive Friday
mornings, in contrast to each other in rating performances. 98

The first Friday: May 12th

Aditi comes in twenty minutes later than her promised 7 am. She greets me and goes
off to get a coffee after starting her computer. She is back in five minutes and begins
looking at the numbers. She looks at me and smiles wryly saying, “Today is a bad day;
we are down to 16 per cent.” She calls the Research team head, Jyotsna, to let her
know and tells me that her boss is very tense. In half an hour’s time, there is a text
message from Uday Shankar on Aditi’s phone. The message is a general one to
everyone at Star News, which states “Hi, we seem to have taken a beating in last
week’s ratings. I am sure we will bounce back this week. Cheers”
Bivha Kaul Bhatt, a senior producer, comes in at 8.20 am. She asks tensely of
Aditi: “How is my programme doing?” Aditi gives her the ratings which are apparently
low. Bivha, who was standing, slumps and sits down on the floor. She is very upset.
Gopal Kaushik, another producer comes in a bit later and after getting his figures,
looks at me and says that it is time he started looking for a new job. Aditi finishes her
preliminary analysis around 9.20 am and sends it to the different department heads.

98
Since the analysis took place in Mumbai, the reactions of Star News journalists were
immediately available to me.
179
The second Friday: May 19th

Aditi is at her desk when I come in at 7 am. She smiles and says she has good news.
Star News ratings are 21 per cent.99 I pull up a chair and she lets me know that the
channel is number one in Delhi. She says it has been an average news week and there
have been no big stories. This has helped the channel. When there are several
newsbreaks, she says Aaj Tak, a rival channel, which is perceived as the “fastest with
the news” gets high ratings. At 7.30 am, Sanjog, (Producer, Sports Desk), calls up to
find out the ratings for his programme. Aditi tells him that it is 21 per cent. He
screams a “wow” on the phone which I could hear. They chat for a minute. Aditi then
calls up Jyotsna, her boss and head of the research team to convey the news. Jyotsna
says she is very happy. Aditi, looking at the numbers for the highest rated programme,
clutches her head and says, “thank God, the top programme is Sansani” which is a
telecast by Star News.
She tells me that the Input Editor Rajnish Ahuja used to sit with her during
the analysis which she found extremely irritating, and to avoid him, she has started
coming in earlier. As more and more numbers show up, Aditi is gleeful. She tells me
“Star News is very ratings oriented. It was not like this before but now numbers is a
motivating factor.” At 8.40 am, Vinod Capri, head of the Output team calls and is
delighted. I hear his voice over the phone screaming “What? Really?” as Aditi gives
him the overall figures. He asks the figures of other rival channels. Immediately after,
head of Input, Milind Khanderkar calls and has very similar reactions and questions.
By 9 am, the report is complete and Aditi sends it to the various department heads.

Analysis
The two Friday morning scenarios sketched above make it amply clear
how important the television ratings are at MCCS. What is interesting to
note is how the employees, the journalists in particular, have
internalised this. People call from early mornings, text messages are
sent back and forth and even a slight change in numbers can mean
mood swings. The CEO has to send messages of encouragement to
bolster spirits after a bad week of ratings. As journalists like Bivha have
stated in their interviews, the entire production team feels depressed
when ratings are down. Gopal Kaushik reveals the pressures when he
says, only half jokingly, it is time he found a new job. Journalists whose

21 per cent is the market share Star News has garnered in comparison to other Hindi
99

news channels. The numbers are relative to how other channels in the same genre are
performing. On this particular week, Star News was the leading channel in its category.
180
performance seemed excellent one week can, like Bivha Kaul Bhatt
appear “slumped on the floor” in another.
However, along with this concern for ratings is juxtaposed
another sentiment which I found in Mumbai: a healthy disregard for the
practice. People admitted that they chased the numbers; they wanted
programmes to garner high ratings, but somehow felt it diminished and
made them lesser journalists. As I had mentioned before Utpal, the
Deputy Head of the Input Desk made plain his reservations:

The game is all about TRP ratings. We keep showing stories of

Dawood,100 which are meaningless, but it sells. For example, Dawood
has started smoking 555 cigarettes, this becomes a half hour
programme in our channel. This is wrong, but we have to do it.
Viewers like it. No one wants to know what the politburo is
discussing. (06/06/2006)

And Manish Kumar, producer of Desh Videsh, the programme which

claims focus on international stories, had stated:

Every person in a news channel will realise that a four-rupee hike

in petrol will affect the common man. But we did not give much
coverage to it because people here believe that it will not fetch high
ratings. (06/06/2006)

Bivha Kaul Bhatt, producer of one of the most successful programmes

on Star News, links performance with ratings, but does so with regret:

We feel that we need to be creative and all that but if you can’t sell
that thing, even if it is the best thing that you have done so far, and
it gets you a TRP of 13 or 14, then what is the use. It is very sad but
it is true. (10/06/2006)

The CEO of MCCS, Shankar himself wants to believe that he does

not accord much importance to TRP ratings and spoke of the practices
surrounding it in derogatory terms:

100
Mumbai gangster allegedly living in Pakistan and recently declared an international
terrorist by US
181
 It is completely irrational and broadcasters are themselves to
blame. I do not think television should be seen as a weekly game
and frankly I am not interested. In my previous job I never did that.
Here I am forced to be a little more responsive because of external
factors and as a challenger, you have to take a bit more notice. 101 In
my previous job, my team was given the ratings briefing only every
quarter. I do not think journalists should behave like stockbrokers,
sell now because ratings are high or buy because they are down. My
only job is to create good programming. The only benchmark we
should have is to create our own qualitative parameters or filters to
understand the television viewing audience in India. (05/07/2007)

Impressive as Uday Shankar’s claims are to disregard ratings and

concentrate on “qualitative parameters”, this is not borne out in
practice. Bivha Kaul Bhatt tells us that Shankar has created teams of
programmers who are responsible for the ratings of their shows.

Uday has introduced the concept of “teams” for all the programmes
and all of them are TRP driven. Initially nobody was bothered.
Earlier, I used to give my story and that’s it. Now as a producer, I
feel the need to know that it is adding value to the channel’s TRP.
(Bivha, 10/6/2006)

Uday Shankar’s journalistic disregard, even contempt for the ratings in

theory, and yet the importance accorded to them in practice, is a
contradiction which faces most editorial staff in Mumbai’s Star News.
Mr Shankar does not want journalists to behave like stock brokers but
has created a situation where quantitative analysis is the only way a
programme’s value is judged at both Star News and Star Ananda. I have
discussed this in detail in the chapter on editorial processes and will
pick up on this again a bit later. But before I move on further in
understanding a journalist’s reaction to ratings and their resultant
practices, it is important to understand the intricacies of the figures
thrown up by TAM and how Star News and Star Ananda interpret the
figures and customise the data.
101
Uday Shankar was earlier working with Aaj Tak which heads the ratings game in
Indian Television news.
182
Television Ratings and their interpretation
To understand how MCCS interprets ratings data, a brief understanding
of audience measurement and how ratings research works, is required.
Two types of analysis are used: gross and cumulative. 102 Aditi’s
interpretation of figures each Friday is a gross analysis while
cumulative research involves tracking audience figures and movements
over a longer period. The research team in MCCS performs cumulative
analysis on the gross figures and gives advice on programme planning
to the editorial.
Gross measures, which record audience size and will be our
main focus here, are described in Webster et al. (2000: 46) as
“snapshots” of the population and reference to audience viewing is
termed as “exposure”. Ross and Nightingale (2003: 46) describe
“exposures” as taking “snapshots of audience button pushing, and
extrapolating general pictures of programme and channel selection
from that data.” “Exposure data”, Ross and Nightingale continue, “is
used in diverse combinations to generate the type of information
advertisers or broadcasters need for media planning and programme
scheduling.” (2000: 47) We will discuss the various combinations used
by MCCS to understand the data a bit later in this chapter.
Gross measures include two key concepts: ratings and shares
and a third, which is of interest to advertisers: gross rating points.
Ratings, the most publicised concept, are described as “the percentage
of persons or households tuned to a station or programme out of the
total market population.” (Webster and Lichty, 1991: 255) Taken alone,
a rating is just another number and makes no sense. It only becomes
meaningful in comparison with other ratings. Aditi’s analysis only
became meaningful for MCCS as ratings of other channels come into
play.
While rating figures are based on the whole television viewing
population, a more useful concept is share, which looks at the
percentage of the population watching television at a particular time

102
For more on ratings, see Chapter 4, under section on the research team.
183
and works out a channel’s share of that audience. As audience numbers
change through the day, media analysts find share a more useful
concept to understand programme ‘health’ or how a programme is
faring in comparison with others.
Gross Rating Points (GRPs) are “the gross impressions of an
advertising schedule expressed as a percentage of the population.”
(Webster and Lichty 1991, 250) Only of importance to advertisers and
not part of our study, GRPs record the number of exposures an
audience has to certain advertisements over a particular period of time.
Again, Ratings, Shares or GRPs by themselves are mere numbers.
To understand the particularities of analysis conducted by MCCS on the
data collected by TAM Media Research and filtered through Media
Express, I will examine the various permutations and combinations
applied to the figures by Aditi Nayak every Friday morning. There are
several sheets of paper, which present the data in different ways. Here I
examine the various categories.

Points to be noted
When it comes to a comparative analysis, only those considered
competitors are taken into account by MCCS. Thus Star News will only
look at other Hindi news channels and Star Ananda at other Bengali
news channels. In the Star News chart, besides Star News itself, the
closest competitors Aaj Tak and NDTV India are highlighted. For Star
Ananda this practice is not followed as it heads its competitors by a
comfortable margin. There are slight differences in the ways the figures
of both the channels are analysed and I will look explain these
individually. The days of analysis are always from Sunday to Saturday
of the previous week. (The next section is to be read in conjunction
with appendix 2 where, as an example, I have included the TRP data of
Week 23 of 2006 for both channels as a point of reference)

Page 1:
Star News

184
The first page, termed the “daywise analysis” is divided into two
categories. The first section shows the channel shares of all the channels
being looked at. This means the average share of Star News in
comparison with all other channels including the General
Entertainment Channels (GECs) are taken into account. These are
shown according to the days of the week and an overall weekly average.
The second section, which is more relevant to the research team
in MCCS for programming, looks at the market share of the channels.
This means the share that channels have got compared each other in
their own categories. So Star News figures are looked at vis-a-vis other
Hindi news channels, the average market share is worked out for each
day of the week, and a weekly average is also given.
The big stories Star News is covering for particular days of the
week are provided below these averages. This helps in understanding
how these stories or the “Star News agenda” for particular days have
done in comparison to other channels. If there is more than one story
followed at different times of the day, a time band is also provided to
look at the different stories being tracked.

Analysis
For the editorial department, the most important feedback from the
first page is how their big story (or stories) of the day has fared in
comparison to other channels. In the morning editorial meeting, the top
bosses decide on a particular story to follow and give prominence to it
throughout the day. Sometimes more than one story becomes part of
the “day’s agenda”. Of the several factors that influence their choice, a
significant one is what has got high ratings in the past. If a story has
worked, several similar stories follow. Another important factor is what
stories have garnered high ratings for rival channels. With each channel
wanting to replicate the other’s ‘successful stories’, news channels start
to look similar. For example, Star News’s successful programme Saans
Bahu aur Saazish (SBS), a programme based on popular television soap
operas has spawned numerous similar programmes on other channels.
Similarly, rival news channel, Aaj Tak’s success with cricket-based

185
programmes has resulted in Star News and other news channels
producing similar programmes.
The point to note is that “success” in ratings decides on what
stories are given prominence. Certain kinds of stories, as I shall show in
the next chapter on content, are welcomed. News is not necessarily
about the events which unfold, but what journalists believe will work
well with their audience. The belief is based on past ratings and thus a
cycle of similar stories develop.

Star Ananda
The first page of the Star Ananda analysis, similar to Star News, looks
first at the channel share and then the market shares of Bengali news
channels. Immediately below that are further two sections. Under both
channel share and market share, two new sections are added. The first
one looks at the shares in towns with a population under a million and
the second one looks at the share of channels in towns with more than a
million.

Analysis
Star Ananda analyses the two new sections for marketing and sales
reasons. By dint of being the first Bengali channel, it has already
captured the urban market of Kolkata and the other major towns of
West Bengal. Given that the majority shares of the channel are with ABP
Group which is the leading publication house in West Bengal and has a
reach all over the state, the news channel wants to emulate this
performance. As the assignment head of Star Ananda, Yuvraj
Bhattacharya told me, the channel’s bosses wanted to capture the entire
Bengali speaking market.

Ultimately this should be the aim. It is like Coke, to build a brand like
Coke, that everyone refers to it as the gospel [sic.]. Though because the
vacuum was in the middle and upper middle class, that is where we have
gone in. Gradually definitely we would want to eat up ETV [a rival news
channel] and everybody else, we would want Star News to be
representative of entire Bengal. That is our secondary target group, we

186
 will also target the non-Bengali people in Kolkata who so far have not
been represented. We are familiar with their lifestyle. So we want to
catch them. (04/04/2006)

By making a demarcation between towns of a million plus (the bigger

towns) and less than a million (the rural areas), MCCS wants to make
sure that the numbers in the rural areas are clearly reflected and that
any increase or decrease in either category is noted by the strategy
teams.

Page 2
Star News
The second page is a “story wise” analysis that looks at the main story
of the day across different time bands and sees how it has been rated in
comparison to competing channels. Two different time bands are used:
the first one looks at stories after 5pm, while the second looks at
stories, before 5pm, that is, through the day.
On this page, we see the main story (or stories) at different times
highlighted in green and below that the ratings of other channels
viewed as competitors, indicating how the story fared in competition to
the other channels. In certain sections, when time bands are not
mentioned, they are replaced with the name of the particular
programme that is aired at fixed times in the evening. For example,
after 7pm, the next mention is of “National Reporter” which goes to air
at 8 pm and then the 9pm band is included. This page helps the analysts
understand what kinds of stories do well in particular time slots and
whether there is a need to shift programmes to different time bands to
maximise viewership.

Analysis
For the research team, which gives advice to the editorial regarding
programming, this page is of particular interest. It shows which stories
do well at what times and also indicates which stories work for rival
news channels. Based on this information and tracking this page over a
certain period of time, advice is given to the editorial teams to shift
187
programmes, develop programmes on lines which seem to be working
for rival channels or scrap programmes which are consistently doing
badly.

Star Ananda
The second page of Star Ananda looks at the various programmes
across the week in all the Bengali news channels and their different
ratings. Again, the focus is on the rural/urban divide; towns that have a
population of under a million and those that are over a million are put
in two separate columns.

Analysis
As with Star News, this particular page focuses on individual stories and
how they have fared in the ratings. A focus on the rural/urban category
allows the analysts to help in strategising emphasis on the rural market
on the basis of stories that have fared better in towns with less than a
million in population and to try to have more of the same.

Page 3
Star News
Entitled “Programme Health”, this page looks at all the programmes on
the channel (regular news stories and news bulletins are excluded) and
sees how they have fared in the ratings compared to other channels
across particular time bands. This is not looked at in terms of individual
weekdays, but a weekly average is shown. Some programmes, which
come only on weekends, are looked at separately. To keep track of the
consistency of a programme, data of the previous week and some from
previous months are also included. There is no mention of other
channels’ programmes on this page.

Star Ananda
This is similar to the page 3 of Star News except that data from the
previous six weeks are also available for tracking a programme’s
performance.

188
Analysis
This page in both channels allows for a cumulative analysis. Unlike news
stories which are decided every morning and are also dictated by daily
happenings, programmes and their performance ratings need a longer
time frame for analysis. Programmes take a longer time to plan and
build audience loyalty, or what is known in television parlance, for the
audience to begin “appointment booking”. In this page, the strategy
team of MCCS seeks to understand which programmes are working well
across which time bands and whether there is a necessity to shift them
around, shelve or plan new programmes.

Page 4
Star News
This page looks at the top 100 programmes and their ratings across
channels in the Hindi news universe. There are several different
categories into which the analysis is subdivided, including target
audience for particular programmes, “reach” 103 of the programme,
market share and the various genres.

Star Ananda
Star Ananda for Week 23 (which is included in the appendix) also has a
special analysis of the football World Cup programmes across the
Bengali channels which are examined in this page. 104 The rest of the
analysis is similar to Star News.

Analysis
For the Research team, after having concentrated on programmes on
Star News and Star Ananda, this page offers a comparative analysis
where programme ratings of other channels are also shown. Seeing
how competitors are doing across the various channels allows MCCS

103
When the audience stays with a particular channel for more than a minute, it is
described in marketing parlance as having “reached the audience”.
104
Football is very popular in Bengal and thus the special focus.
189
analysts to plan and advise the editorial staff and re-think programme
schedules.

Quarter-hourly audience movements: Star News and Star Ananda

and their analysis
In addition to the above-mentioned ways of looking at audience ratings,
Star News and Star Ananda also look at graphs of audience behaviour
every quarter of an hour for each day of the week. These are looked at
in relation to other channels of the same linguistic genre: Hindi news
channels for Star News and Bengali for Star Ananda. Each day of the
week is shown in these graphs, tracking figures from 5am every
morning until 1am at night. These particular pages allow analysts to
track audience behaviour at any given point of the week and also see
how other rival channels are faring. Any sudden movement in the
graphs can lead to an examination of its reason. For example, if there is
a sudden upsurge in viewer ratings at 7.15pm on Aaj Tak on a Monday,
Star News analysts will look at the news patterns on the channel and
what the channel aired to cause the change.

Making sense of ratings and their importance in India media

One of the first things to note as we try to understand the ratings
analysis is that it is tailored for specific audiences. Both Star News and
Star Ananda advertise themselves as national channels. When it comes
to understanding their audiences, however, they either look at the Hindi
Speaking Market (HSM)105 for Star News and the Bengal market for Star
Ananda.
The ratings also look at target audiences. News is viewed as a
25+ male viewing genre.106 Star News and Star Ananda, trying to create
a market amongst the younger generation also look at the viewing
habits of 15+ males from the data that TAM provides. News content,
especially programmes, is made keeping these specific audiences in
mind. Saans Bahu aur Saazish in Star News and its Bengali equivalent,

These include 13 out of 25 states in India.

105

The Deputy Head of the Sales team at MCCS tells me this and it is mentioned in the
106

chapter on the Corporate team.

190
Hoi ma noi ba bou ma, are examples of high ratings garnering
programmes, which have done well targeting women audiences. The
surprising thing that comes across after speaking to the journalists and
media planners is that while almost no one seems to believe in the
efficacy of the rating system, the entire media industry is dependent on
it. Uday Shankar states:

There is no alternative to this (TAM) because nobody wants to create an

alternative. The broadcasters very stupidly for their own short-term
games have fallen for it. When Aaj Tak was up, their ad sales team was
shouting these figures from the rooftop. That is the time they should
have moved away from these quantitative methods to qualitative
parameters. Everybody has made the same mistake: Star, Sony. If you see
any marketing communication in this country, it is sad that it is only
quantitative. While quantitative marketing communication is important
because that is the only way delivery can be measured, qualitative
parameters can give you quantitative value. (05/07/2006)

This dependence on TAM generated figures has resulted in advertising

agencies and cable operators assuming tremendous importance, as
Shankar emphasises.

The real concern is the complete skulduggery that the advertising

agencies indulge in based on the TAM data. The competence of
Indian media buyers is so pathetic. There is so much laziness that
goes into it, there is so much bureaucracy involved. Most of the
advertising agencies want to buy the silence of the client. They
could not care less what values they offer as long as they can throw
some numbers at the client which will lull the client to be quiet.
Regardless of what you are told this is how it is. Discount anything
else you are told, because we deal with them every day and that is
how it is. It is because of these ad agencies that the power of TAM
has been so disproportionately hiked, this power, which is so
unscientific and has got such rickety legs to stand on. Because it
suits them and they just save their backsides. (05/07/2006)

Ninety per cent of media advertising in India is routed through

advertising agencies, which act on behalf of the clients. (see Chapter 4

191
for more on selling strategies of MCCS) Post liberalisation in the 1990s,
and with the media boom in the country, agencies have developed
which also act as media planners for big corporate houses. Media
planning for a client is a long term process and at the very minimum
will be a twelve month contract with an agency and can go up to five
years. This means that agencies have funds to plan the company’s
media strategies, a large chunk of which will include buying
advertisement slots in television channels.
As Uday Shankar indicates in his comments, these agencies wield
enormous amounts of power, as media houses have to keep them happy
to get advertisements. Advertising agencies rely on ratings, as Shankar
states, which they can show their clients to justify their choices for
advertising in certain channels and leaving others out. Getting a
favourable rating thus becomes important for the television companies
and therefore the importance of TAM. But despite claims of a scientific
basis for the research, the methodology of data collection has attracted
severe criticism which I have recorded above. Along with the criticism
of the “physical” aspects of data collection, TAM’s integrity has also been
questioned.

The opacity of information from TAM and Nielson is very

disturbing. The method is not completely transparent. The sample
is not up for scrutiny. For any scientific statistical process, it should
be in the public domain. The muscle that the cable operator has
acquired is largely because of TAM because TAM doesn’t tell you
where those boxes are, but every cable operator seems to know.
(5/07/2006)

The credibility of TAM’s data collection process rests on this one moot
point: that no one knows where the boxes which monitor audience
behaviour are placed. This is to avoid being able to influence the
audience through any direct methods from television companies. But as
Uday Shankar points out, every cable operator seems to know this. This

192
knowledge gives cable operators enormous clout over television
companies.107

The cable wallahs

To understand the importance of knowing where the audience meters
are placed, the cable operator system need to be explained. Here I give a
brief background on how they operate. (For more on the cable
operators in India see Thomas, 2005: 118-124).
Neighbourhood cable operators, known locally as “cable
wallahs” were around long before the satellite invasion happened in
India. Providing cheap entertainment to a mostly urban population, the
cable industry in India has been operating since 1984. A lack of laws
governing their operations accentuated their growth and by the mid-
nineties, when Star and Zee entered the Indian market, cable wallahs
were in control of a delivery system to individual homes. “Cable
operators had created the market for Star TV and Zee TV and were
considered able to ruin their market if the satellite broadcasters did not
accede to their demands.”108 In theory, cable operators have to declare
the number of their subscribers and pay television channels for every
house they connect to. In practice, cable operators routinely under-
declare their subscriptions and pocket the money directly from their
subscribers without passing it on to the television companies. If a
television channel protests or threatens to take action, the channel is
blocked. Owing to solidarity amongst cable operators black out by one
operator would certainly mean a black out by most other operators in
the same state. This results in significant drops in ratings as audiences
are unable to see particular channels. Thus, the television industry

107
Not only cable operators, but even marketing personnel of television companies
claim to have knowledge of where boxes are placed and when they are moved to new
locations.
108
In the past couple of years, the television companies have been pushing the Direct
to Home (DTH) satellites to viewers in an attempt to break the cable operators’
monopoly. Cost of individual satellites was the reason for the cable operators’ success,
but with prices falling, the television industry is hoping that customers will take the
option for better quality broadcasting.
193
follows a general rule of appeasement towards cable operators despite
knowing that they are being cheated.109
The clout of cable operators and under declaration of
subscription results in a corresponding increase on the dependence on
advertising agencies and advertising revenues. Being unable to make
money through subscription, the television industry relies on
advertising and therefore ratings assume an increased significance.
Continuing this policy of appeasement, while launching two new
channels in 2003 - NDTV 24x7 and NDTV India, NDTV decided to pay
cable operators “carriage fees”. Carriage fees are an undertaking
between a television company and a cable operator through which the
company’s channel will be kept on a particular bandwidth for higher
visibility. The higher the money paid, the greater the bandwidth a
channel will receive, resulting in more visibility. Following NDTV’s
policy, other channels, to remain competitive, were forced to follow
suit. The money a cable operator charges is not fixed by any law. It
depends on a combination of market factors that create the “weightage”
of the cable wallah.
The “weightage”, which literally means the importance of a cable
operator, is worked out through the complex dynamics of TAM
classification, market knowledge, claims and counterclaims and of
course, the omnipresent factor in Indian television markets: rumours.
a) To start, TAM assigns a “weightage” to every cable operator
depending on the demographic area the operator serves. The
demographic factor is dependent on a TAM calculation of
average income and education of the area’s population. The
higher the income and education levels of residents in a
particular area, the higher the “weightage” of the cable operator
of that area.
b) If TAM classifies an area as having high weightage, cable
operators will then start making claims on how many TAM boxes

109
I was present at a meeting between an influential cable operator in Mumbai and the
Vice President of Marketing at MCCS Yogesh Manwani. During the meeting, Manwani
cajoled the operator to show a slight increase in the number of subscribers. After
some good natured bargaining, they settled on a number. What was evident was both
Manwani and the cable operator knew that the number declared was incorrect.
194
 are in their area. The higher the number of boxes, the more
channels will pay to be visible on your bandwidths.
c) Every channel employs their marketing team to pick up
intelligence on the “actual” number of boxes in areas and where
they are deployed. Between cable operator’s claims, intelligence
gathered by television houses and the demography of particular
areas, a carriage fee is negotiated between the cable operator
and television channels.

The clout of the cable operator is also intrinsically linked, as I explained

earlier, to the fact that s/he can black out any channel, a power that is
frequently exercised. If a cable operator with a high number of boxes in
his or her area blocks a channel, TRP ratings plummet. If this happens
to be an area which advertisers target, that is a high-income group,
channels are in trouble as far as ratings and revenues are concerned.
However, even if all television companies paid money, not all could be
accommodated in the most visible bandwidths. Here, I offer an
explanation of what it means to be on particular bandwidth or
frequency.

Understanding the bandwidths

Every television channel operates on certain bandwidths provided by
the cable operator. Depending on which bandwidth a channel is shown,
a channel’s visibility can go up or down.
These are the different bandwidths:

Prime: This is the best bandwidth to have a channel on, as all television
sets have this bandwidth. The first 11 channels on a television will
generally be on this band. The fight for this bandwidth is intense as
numbers are limited. Out of the 11 slots, 3 are reserved for
Doordarshan; at least three of the top channels 110 select themselves
because of viewer demands; the cable operator keeps two bands for

110
These would usually include two general entertainment channels and, in some
areas, one news channel. This varies from state to state, depending on language and
viewer preference.
195
showing movies privately and the fight is on for the remaining three
channels.

Colour: This is the second best along with S Band. This bandwidth has 6
channels and also comes at a high premium depending on the cable
operator’s weightage.

S(pecial) Band: Most television channels will have these bands. 17

channels can be viewed on this bandwidth and it usually commands the
same price as the colour band.

Known as PCS, Prime, Colour and S Band are the most sought after
bandwidths on which channels want to be aired. This has resulted in a
price war or hike in carriage fees. Generally channels will have a one-
year contract with cable operators and a lump sum of money will be
paid as carriage fee for an annual contract.111

There are two other lower bandwidths or frequencies:

Hyper band: Quite a few of the old colour television channels will not
have hyper bands. The quality of reception is poor on this bandwidth.

VHF: Black and white television will generally not have these bands.
Again, reception quality is poor and some of the channels are on radio
frequency, which means the quality of visuals is detrimentally affected.

Most television companies, depending on their budget, will balance

visibility, target audience, and monetary factors before deciding on
carriage fees to cable operators. In areas of low weightage or areas
which are not the primary target areas (for example, areas outside the
Hindi speaking market (HSM) for Star News), television companies will
generally not pay carriage fees.

111
The contract is not legally binding. Cable operators are known to renege on
contracts if some television channel offers more money than the one with which they
have a contractual obligation.
196
The Marketing strategy for ratings:
The way that ratings data is gathered makes it clear that if the sample
size is watching a particular channel, ratings for that channel will be
high. The difficulty in ensuring this, and the credibility of the ratings,
lies in the fact that the location of the audience monitor meters remains
secret. CEO of MCCS, Uday Shankar, makes no bones in his interview
about that fact that “every cable operator seem to know” where the
meters are placed. Most marketing personnel in television channels, as
gathered from my conversations with Yogesh Manwani, Vice President
Marketing in MCCS, and his team will also have a fair idea or make
“informed guesses” regarding the location of the meters.
Going by their own guesses, the claims of cable operators,
analysing previous data on how boxes have been placed, and
understanding the demography of the audience, the marketing team of
MCCS will target the specific areas where they think the boxes are.
Lucrative target areas will be where the audience profile is fairly
wealthy. Cable operators in these areas are lured by high carriage fees
and care is taken to see that visibility is high. This involves a complex
process of negotiations and dealings between marketing personnel
from the channels and cable operators. Limited bandwidths mean that
visibility comes at a premium and every channel vies for the same
spaces. Moreover, the cable operators can be quite unscrupulous in
their dealings and make multiple offers that they are unable to keep
later. It is a continuous process.
The marketing team at MCCS, while trying to improve visibility,
will pay extra attention to where the boxes are believed to be placed
and try to ensure that the channel is placed in premium bandwidths in
those areas. Higher TRP depends on how successful they are in this
particular endeavour.

Analysis
Given the data collection procedure of TAM, the obsession with ratings
and dependence on advertising revenues, one can presume that a very

197
small minority amongst the general cable viewing population in India is
the target audience of television companies. Even within this small
minority, a higher weightage is accorded to demographically affluent
areas, which are of particular interest to the advertisers. The editorial,
concerned with ratings and equating them with the success and failures
of news stories and programmes, concentrate on this miniscule
minority and produce content targeting them.
But how much does audience taste and choice, and therefore
content, matter? I recount below an incident at the corporate office of
MCCS in Mumbai which will help to highlight the importance of news
content when every channel produces news which looks similar.

A story: July 3rd, 2006

Star Ananda, which since its launch had been heading the ratings simply
because there were no other comparable 24 hour Bengali news
channels, came in for a fair bit of competition during the football World
Cup, 2006. Two new Bengali news channels had been launched a month
previously, and one of them, 24 Ghanta (24 Hours) had shot up to
number one in the midst of the tournament. This was taken as a huge
setback as Bengal is a football obsessed region and MCCS was hoping to
capitalise on this. The ratings showed a spectacular fall in Star Ananda’s
numbers and a corresponding rise in those of 24 Ghanta.
An emergency meeting was held in the corporate office in
Mumbai. head of the research team, Jyotsna, head of marketing, Yogesh
Manwani and head of sales, Prabal Ganguly, attended the meeting. The
Kolkata assignment head, Yuvraj Bhattacharya was on the phone. The
meeting was to try and assess why there had been a sudden swing in
the ratings. Yuvraj blamed the World Cup coverage, saying that his
reporter was in another town while matches were taking place
elsewhere and because of a lack of money, the reporter was not being
allowed to travel. Several other theories were being thrown in the air.
At the end of the meeting, Yogesh Manwani, marketing head, claimed
that he would get the ratings sorted by the following week.

198
 The next week’s ratings indeed showed that Star Ananda was
back at number one position while 24 Ghanta had dipped to its previous
levels. Yogesh explained to me why Star Ananda’s ratings had dipped
and, equally suddenly, shot up again. According to him, the contract
with the main cable operator in Kolkata was coming to an end. To put
pressure on MCCS and to hike carriage fees, the operator changed Star
Ananda’s bandwidth to a lower visibility frequency, while placing 24
Ghanta on the higher one. Viewers watched 24 Ghanta given its higher
visibility and their ratings went up. Once Yogesh Manwani concluded a
new deal with the cable operator, Star Ananda regained higher
bandwidth visibility and the ratings went up.

Analysis
This incident brings to the fore the question, do particular news
channels matter? Given that all television channels target a similar
audience, imagining them in similar ways, content hardly varies. This
homogeneity in content allowed Star News and 24 Ghanta to be
switched, while the audience continued to watch unperturbed.
Yogesh Manwani used the above incident to justify to me that
what matters is the “visibility” of a channel. As news content hardly
varies across channels the audience hardly distinguishes one from the
other and therefore the lack of audience loyalty.

“I am the audience” - A journalist’s imagination

TAM data collection methodology; the analysis of this data by MCCS and
other television companies; the importance of advertising agencies and
cable operators; journalists’ obsession with numbers: all these factors
rarefy the imagined audience to a very small, affluent section of the
Indian cable viewing population.
Ratings are meant to inform advertising agencies and their
clients of particular channels' audience profile and behaviour and thus
the viability of advertising in them. Advertisers are interested in
consumers with spending power and there is definitely a strong feeling
amongst media commentators in India and also its practitioners that it

199
is the more affluent middle class and the rich that become the sample
for data collection. The poorer areas are less represented or ignored
entirely. This claim is given credence by the fact that the poorer states
of North East India: Orissa, Kashmir and Bihar, were not part of the
sample. As we have already noted, journalists produce news content
keeping this middle class in mind. We revisit a statement from Rajnish
Ahuja by way of example:

As a news channel we have to communicate with the people in a manner

they want. We are here to provide information in the way they want.
News sense is giving people what they want. There is a new generation
of viewers who have come up. They are so stressed out in their jobs in
BPOs112 (Business Process Outsourcing) and stuff that when they want to
watch TV, they want to relax and have some fun. (03/07/2006)

Rajnish Ahuja’s claim of “communicating with the people in the manner

they want” is backed up by a presumption of what he thinks they want,
that is, “to relax and have some fun.” Rajnish presumes this using the
self as an example as along with most journalists, comes from the same
social and economic group which television companies target as their
primary audience. He therefore claims that he “understands” what the
audience wants. This identification with the audience must be seen in
the light of the recruiting policy of journalists at MCCS and here I
reiterate a point made earlier by the Vice President Human Resources
Sanju Saha:

Of late we realise that even within our top target audiences or target
consumers, there is a certain niche. There are a lot of English speaking
people who watch news; hence what is relevant to them requires a little
change in the sort of profiling of our editorial people. We need
journalists who are able to understand lifestyle, who are able to
understand big city issues, big city stories, and stories which are of
interest to a different mass. I will have a very hard look at the profiling of
people, in terms of background, classification; define them as per the

112
The most common examples of BPOs are call centres of which there has been a
flood in most major cities of India.
200
 TAM classification.113 I will have to do that. For example, if I am looking at
SEC A114, I will be looking at someone with a good academic background,
has English speaking capability, has gone to respectable college, has had
a fair bit of influence of party circles and then see how they perform.
(14/06/2006)

The recruitment policy of MCCS is no different from what most

international news networks would pursue. As Ginneken writes “Most
journalists are middle-class in social background, social position and
social aspirations.” (1998: 71). The particularities of the profession
require a certain skill level which in India, as also in most other
countries, are equated with the middle and more affluent classes. The
journalists are middle class; the target audience is middle and upper
class. This gives rise to the situation of the journalist equating his or her
“tastes”, likings and dislikes with that of the audience. Ahuja is not the
only one who claims audience wants rest and relaxation. As we have
seen, his Deputy, Utpal imagines his family and himself when he thinks
of what the audience would want to see.

I think of what I would like to see, what my family wants to see. I forget
that I am a journalist. I think of what I would want to see as an ordinary
viewer or I think of what my wife wants to see. One has to remember
that the woman of the house has the most control over the television set.
So if we can think from the angle of a woman, it will be the best to garner
more TRP ratings. (06/06/2006)

Other journalists also claimed the personal as the basis for

understanding audience needs and tastes. What the journalist wants
therefore becomes what the audience wants and this becomes equated
with good news sense: predicting what the audience wants to see.

I will tell you from personal experience. My mother, when she watches
television, she watches news and all that but she would like to know

113
The TAM classification of audiences is done keeping the socio-economic criteria or
SEC in mind. The richest audiences fall in the SEC A category, the middle classes in the
SEC B and B + category and so on. MCCS by seeking to recruit the rich, aim to target
the rich audience.
114
Socio-economic criteria A (SEC-A) is an audience classification for the most affluent
amongst the audience or of the highest income bracket. See appendix 1
201
 about it in bare headlines. She would not want details. Given a choice
between news and these kinds of programmes, I am sure she will go for
Saans Bahu aur Saazish (SBS). You have to understand that women are
also very important. If you want them in your fold, then you have to give
programmes, which are exclusively for them. You have news throughout
the day. Why can’t you give half an hour, which is totally dedicated to
them. It is an appointment viewing. Sales show that right from 2pm till
3pm people switch on Star News. The women have their lunch at 2pm
and then from 2.30pm they have SBS. And if you have a 3pm breaking
news then they sit through that too. (Bivha Kaul Bhatt, Producer, Star
News, 01/06/2006)

I myself am an audience. Before I became a journalist, I used to watch

television so I know what people want to see. I never wanted to see
something that is too heavy. That’s what I try to do here. I try and keep it
very light. If it is too heavy with information, it will not take a minute for
the people to reach for the remote. (Oly, Producer, International Desk,
Star Ananda, 07/03/2006)

I understand what the viewer would like to watch by asking the question
‘would my mom, the retired people in my house, would the kids who
watch television, want to watch this story.’ Thus you have the answer. If
you have got a very clear view about your viewership throughout the
day, which part of the day who is your target audience, then the business
because very easy. For example, from six to eight in the morning, news
watchers are mainly working people. So political, economics, more of
hard stories, those would cater to them. At the end of the day, they want
a wrap up. So between nine and ten at night, news should be very fast
and informative and wrap up the day’s event. (Soumik Saha, Senior
Producer, Output, Star Ananda, 20/12/2006)

In his extensive writings on cultural capital, Pierre Bourdieu

states how social elites reproduce themselves and consolidate their
positions. Middle class children acquire middle class habitus; for
instance, a habitual way of thinking, feeling and acting which makes it
easier for them to deal with school and other cultural institutions
adapted to middle class norms (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1973). In India,
the middle class consumer revolution started in the early 80’s. The
decade saw a 47.5 percent rise in consumption expenditure (Dubey

202
1992, 150). This process received a further boost following the opening
up of the economy in the 1990s. This confident middle class, animated
by the vision of setting India on a newly liberated path of progress and
economic prominence on the world stage, “assumed for themselves the
role of the makers of the nation in new ways. In the emerging middle
class political vision, the nation is a community of citizens who are
enfranchised by freedom of choice, consumption and material
gratification and a lifestyle of enjoyment and pleasure” (Chakravorty
and Gooptu 2000: 91).
As with any articulation of nationhood, in this case a primarily
middle class one, media becomes a key place for such re-imaginings. In
India, middle class television journalists re-produce their likes, desires
and wants for an imagined target that is also essentially middle class. In
this forced homogenisation of desires, reality has remarkable ways of
biting back. I relate here a story which puts into focus the dichotomy
between a journalist’s imagining and telling of a story and how reality
can contradict such imaginings and storytelling.

A brief background
About 70 kilometres south-west of Kolkata, Nandigram is a rural area
which erupted into violence that shocked the state of West Bengal and
India in mid 2007. On the orders of the Left Government in West
Bengal, the state police were attempting to expropriate 10,000 acres of
land for a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) to be developed by the
Indonesia based Salim Group. The local villagers clashed with the police
and, in a conflict that still continues, several villagers and policemen
were killed. The plans for the SEZ have now been put on hold.
SEZ’s were planned with much fanfare in 2006 when I was in
India. In the next chapter where I analyse content of both the news
channels, Star Ananda gives extensive coverage to the inauguration of
the Nandigram SEZ and the coming of the Salim Group President to
Nandigram in June 2006. Given star billing by Star Ananda, he is
followed on his daily visits and meetings with the government and
villagers of Nandigram. A Star Ananda reporter, reporting live from the

203
village during a visit by the Salim Group President stated that the
villagers were happily giving up their lands for the sake of
“development” which they understood was “necessary”.
A year later, nothing could have been further from the truth. The
villagers refused to give up their lands; the government had to
backtrack on their plans; and reality refused to bow before a middle
class dream of development, articulated by the Star Ananda reporter to
his middle class audience. .

Conclusion
This chapter attempts to understand the concept of audience
discursively, as it is imagined in the newsrooms under study, and how
this affects news content. The imagination of the audience, this chapter
argues, is a result of certain managerial and journalistic practices within
MCCS which is linked to the larger media economy in India. I have
shown how, given increasing competition amongst channels and a
political economy which makes television companies heavily reliant on
advertisements, TRP or television ratings have assumed enormous
significance and journalists at Star News and Star Ananda equate
success and failure of news stories and programmes with the rise and
fall of television ratings. The chapter therefore, adds to the empirical
material on newsroom practices and along with the previous two
chapters provide details of journalistic routines in newsrooms and how
they influence news content. These empirical details, in the concluding
chapter, will help us to critique and analyse the ‘orthodoxies’ of earlier
newsroom ethnographies. Given the paucity of news ethnographies
from the South, it provides details of newsroom practices from areas
where news ecologies are both changing and understudied.
Ratings in India are a monopoly of TAM Media Research. Their
data gathering methodology shows an obvious bias towards a rich
clientele with poor states in India being excluded from their surveys.
MCCS targets a middle class and affluent audience and their journalist
hiring policy tilts towards the same section. Journalists, in turn, imagine
themselves, their families as the audience and produce for the same. In

204
this way, a middle class India produces content for the same middle
class; articulating certain desires, likes and dislikes. This chapter builds
on the previous two, to show the construction of nationhood in Indian
television newsrooms and is part of the answer to the primary research
question of this thesis; how is the notion of India articulated in the
television newsrooms of the country.
The next chapter looks at the particulars of the content produced by the
two channels. It is a culmination of the three chapters which precede it
and argues that corporate aims, journalistic practices and the
understanding of the audience combine to produce a particular kind of
news content in Indian television.

205
 Chapter 7
Cricket, Cinema and Crime: Structures of news content in Indian
Television

This chapter, through an analysis of news structures in Star News and

Star Ananda, investigates how television news channels in India
constructs an imaginary community of viewers who are elite, privileged
and belong to the middle and upper middle classes of the television
viewing audience. In doing so, it further investigates the central
research question of this thesis: how is nationhood constructed in
Indian television newsrooms? It argues through an examination of
news content structures that television journalists construct news for
an imagined community of middle class viewers, thus producing a
middle class notion of the nation.
A number of studies have examined the role of the media in the
symbolic construction of a common identity. Morley and Brundson,
through an analysis of a current affairs programme have shown how
the nation is evoked (1999). Billig has argued that the national press
continuously flag the nation (1995). Dayan and Katz have
demonstrated how media events help in bringing the nation together
(1992) while Scannell has stressed the role of public service
broadcasting in shaping national identity (1989).
As I examine the structures of news content, I argue that news is
determined by what its producers believe the audience wants to see.
The imagining of the audience is partly dependent on where the
audience is understood to be located in terms of both physical
geography and language. Though both the channels call themselves
“national”, Star News focuses on the Hindi Speaking Market (HSM)
while Star Ananda’s primary focus is on the Bengali speaking
community, especially in West Bengal (see chapter 4). Given these
regional identities at the core of the constructed audience, my initial
hypothesis was that there must be a plurality in the imagining of the
nation in television newsrooms. The politics of a pan-Indian identity,
promoted by the state sponsored Doordarshan and All India Radio, had

206
a strong north Indian centre (see chapter 2). I presumed that the power
lines inscribed by New Delhi that had created this strong centre with its
numerous peripheries must now have fragmented under the strain of
multiple channels airing content in the various regional languages of
India. An academic obsession with a post-national imaginary had made
me prematurely celebrate the demise of a pan-Indian, Doordarshan
spun, understanding of nationhood in India. Reality, however, refused
to be coaxed into such theoretical fancies. As I examined the content of
both channels, I was surprised at the similarity of their news structures,
especially during primetime viewing. While there were certain
differences in stories, with Star Ananda including stories from stringers
in the various districts of West Bengal, especially in the afternoons; the
evening bulletins submerge such differences and the main news stories
are strikingly homogeneous in their subject matter. 115 The target
audience is defined not so much by language, but by their Socio
Economic Criteria (SEC) (see chapter 6 and appendix 1), a market
based survey technique devised by television rating companies. The
second reason for homogeneity in news structures, as the empirical
evidence in the chapter 5 show, is that journalists in both the
newsrooms imagine themselves as the audience and produce what they
think they and their families would like to see. Journalists across news
channels come from the same middle class backgrounds as the target
audience. With similar aspirations, needs, wants, likes and dislikes and
producing news for people they believe to have similar tastes, the
content reflects a lack of diversity.

Creating Waves: Journalistic Practice of producing news

Michael Schudson in Sociology of News (2003: 1) narrates the story of

two young and ambitious journalists in New York who at the end of the
nineteenth century, trying to make a name for themselves in the

115
As the Input Editor of Star Ananda, Yuvraj Bhattacharya told me, the channel was
targeting the smaller towns of West Bengal and thus, to be inclusive, they were airing
stories from the districts. The point to note is that these stories were aired primarily
in the afternoons when news viewership, according to the ratings, dipped
significantly.
207
profession and competing with each other, created a “crime wave” in
the city. Crime reporter Lincoln Steffens did a story on a particularly
intriguing crime which other reporters did not know about. The city
editor of a rival newspaper berated his crime reporter, Jacob Riis for
failing to report on the same. Riis, a friend of Steffens, did his own
snooping around and wrote another story which the latter did not
know about. The race was thus on and other crime reporters from
other newspapers joined in to find out more sensational crime stories.
New York City was suddenly in the grip of a crime wave generated by
the mass media.
Writing on journalistic practices in Indian newspapers in the
1990s, I had noted that reporters write for each other (Batabyal, 2005).
Through the experiential, I had constructed how journalists in New
Delhi competed with each other, taking pride in getting more detail on
similar stories while always attempting to file stories which were
exclusive to their newspaper. The imagined audience was the
community of journalists. In the 2000s, a combination of market
factors, detailed in the previous chapters has dramatically altered the
notion of the audience in the television newsrooms in India. The
concept of the core audience has been created to target a particular
segment amongst the 70 million television households, the middle class
elites with disposable incomes who can afford to purchase the
advertised products on news channels. Journalists competing with each
other to get the best stories have been replaced by television channels
following each others’ stories, replicating patterns which have seen
rating success. This has resulted in a similar pattern of stories across
television news channels, privileging stories on cricket, crime and
cinema.

Cricket Crime and Cinema

The “Bollywoodisation” of television news

As noted in chapter 4, the corporate division, particularly the marketing

208
section of MCCS arranges tie-ups with new Bollywood ventures. This
means exclusive rights to footage of the film, interviews with the actors,
directors and producers of the film, besides promoting the film on the
channel. This arrangement suits both film producers who get unlimited
airtime on news channels to publicise their films while news channels
package film promotions as news stories. Thussu notes “The tone of
reporting is unabashedly promotional, the stories about private lives
and public engagements of film stars: how they celebrate religious
festivals, their holidays, their dress and eating habits, their likes and
dislikes, are repeatedly given air time – across the board and on an
almost daily basis (2007: 105).” This particular chapter, analysing news
structures of both the news channels for three days, show how
Bollywood and film gossip are entrenched into mainstream news and
how such an inclusion is justified by journalists and media managers
through the logic of garnering maximum TRPs.

Cricket fever and news television

Mehta in his recent work on television news in India writes how cricket
and its coverage is “embedded within modern Indian politics, culture
and identity (2008: 196).” He further comments that the “Indian
television news industry has consciously ridden on the shoulders of
cricket to such an extent that by 2006, cricket oriented programming
was estimated to account for the greatest expenditure in news
gathering across most news channels (ibid: 197).” In chapter 5, I have
noted how the head of the assignment team, Rajnish Ahuja, instead of
political reporters, feels the need for several more cricket
correspondents who can cover every aspect of the game, including the
private lives of the cricket stars. Cricket programmes get prime time
slots and every news channel competes with each other to provide
maximum air time for the sport. The days of my news analysis
coincided with the football World Cup held in Germany. Despite this
major international sporting event, there was no reduction in cricket
coverage. Star Ananda sent a reporter to Germany to cover the

209
tournament as Kolkata and the Bengali audience is perceived to be
more interested in football than the target audience of Star News, the
Hindi speaking belt of India. It highlights that the event or occasion
does not create the news; it is the perceived audience interest in the
event.

Creating a crime wave in India

The same logic of a perceived audience interest in crime stories have

contributed to every news channel devoting special programmes to its
coverage. “The move towards crime shows can be explained by one
factor: they fared well on the yardsticks of TRPs (Mehta, 2008: 190)” It
was Star News who created a genre of crime story based programming
which made every other news channel follow suit. The crime show
Sansani, produced by Balaji Films116 for Star News was anchored by an
actor, Shrivardhan Trivedi, “who was deliberately styled to look tough.
We did not want a generic anchor. He was a theatre person, had a good
voice and we moulded him to make a statement,’says the producer [of
the programme] (ibid)”. The success of the show spawned several
other such programmes across other news channels. Jeetendra
Srivastava, the bureau chief of Star News and also the crime reporter,
hosted one such programme, Red Alert. This programme, too, was
produced by Balaji Films. It was produced in New Delhi and Jeetendra
flew once a week from Mumbai to the capital to record the show. He
told me that he, as a journalist, had no editorial contribution to the
show. He also said that the spate of crime shows in television channels
and the need to keep on producing more stories had resulted in
reporting stories which would, even a few years earlier, not even be
published in the inside pages of local newspapers. The need for crime
stories by television channels mean that such instances are now blown
out of all proportions creating the crime wave in Indian television.

116
An independent content production company based in New Delhi.
210
Organising the Chapter: Analysing a day of news

The analysis will proceed by examining the content of both channels

simultaneously, each day at a time: from the first early morning
bulletins to the last late night broadcasts. I will analyse the structures of
the news content at different hours of the day for both the channels,
making it easier for patterns to emerge. This will help an understanding
of the audience/content relationship and how the news producers
decide on news content, keeping in mind their imagined audience. It is
important to note here that this chapter does not take a conventional
content analysis approach. There is no textual analysis, nor analysis of
the exact time and length of stories or of the advertisements between
bulletins. What it attempts to emphasise is the predominance of certain
kind of stories to the exclusion of others. News structures, I argue is a
result of production processes. Therefore, as I look at the stories at
different times of the day, I will lay out in as much detail as possible the
practices within the newsroom during those time frames, to explicate
the context under which a certain news bulletin is constructed.  I will
also analyse interviews with journalists and see how far their thoughts
on their practices reflect in the content.

Timeframe
Three complete days of broadcasting in both the channels are analysed
in this chapter. I felt that three days of content were necessary to
analyse to establish the pattern of news content. The days for which I
chose the content were decided at random. The recording of both
channels was done simultaneously in Star News, Mumbai, when I was
conducting my research there. The days recorded depended on when
the person concerned at Star News could free the recording equipment.
Two video recorders had to be set up to record both the channels,
which was done in real time. Given that there were live broadcast for
19 hours a day, I have 112 hours of viewing material: three days from
each channel. The recording took place from the 14 th to the 16th June,
2006. I have divided each day into various time bands; the early

211
morning bulletins from 5am to 7.30am; the morning bulletins until
10am; the mid-morning bulletins until 12pm; the afternoon bulletins
until 5pm; evening bulletins until 8pm; and primetime and final
bulletins until 11pm.

The headlines that dominated

Four main headlines dominated the mid June news calendar of 2006: 
the football World Cup in Germany; a cricket series in the West Indies; a
Bollywood event in Dubai; and the arrest, on charges of taking cocaine,
of Rahul Mahajan, son of a prominent politician who had been recently
murdered by his own brother.

The football world cup and cricket in West Indies: Cricket is a national
obsession in India. The Board of Cricket Control (BCCI) is the richest
autonomous body in the country; the money they generate from
television and advertising rights amount to millions of dollars. A large
chunk of television news is dedicated to cricket. The India versus West
Indies cricket series was on in the Caribbean Islands during the days of
analysis and both channels devoted several hours of footage to the
event.
The coverage of the Football World Cup in Germany in both the
channels is a good pointer towards how the imagination of the
audience by the corporate and the editorial within newsroom affects
news structures. Star Ananda is the poorer cousin within MCCS. Star
News operates in Mumbai, the financial heartland of India, and Hindi
language television earns much more in business revenues than Bengali
news channels. Yet, it was the reporter from Star Ananda who was
assigned to cover the football World Cup in Germany. This is because of
a specific understanding of the audience within MCCS. In West Bengal,
football frenzy is perceived to be greater than anywhere else in India.
Kolkata has the top three football clubs: East Bengal, Mohun Bagan and
Mohammedan Sporting and the rivalry between the three clubs is

212
regular fare for the sports pages of the city’s newspapers. 117 In Mumbai,
football frenzy is perceived to be lesser and this showed in the way the
event is covered in both the channels.

The IIFA Awards: The biggest Bollywood event, its annual awards
ceremony, was being held in Dubai. Both channels sent their reporters
to cover the event. Despite Bollywood being a Hindi language industry,
it is given comparable airtime in Star Ananda with regular special
shows and programmes.

The Rahul Mahajan case: Pramod Mahajan was one of the most
prominent young politicians in India. General Secretary of the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the main Opposition Party in Parliament,
he had been seen by many as potential future prime minister. In June
2006, his brother, Praveen Mahajan, walked into his Mumbai flat in the
morning and shot him. His condition remained critical for several days,
before he succumbed to his injuries. The coverage in the media was
exhaustive and rumours and family scandals abounded. A month after
the incident, Pramod’s son Rahul Mahajan had to be hospitalised for
consuming heroin. He was later arrested for alleged possession and
consumption of contraband drugs. The story and incidents surrounding
it became fodder for a media hungry for celebrity scandals. This story,
which rivalled a Bollywood plot, was thus a prime focus of both the
news channels. My analysis starts as Rahul Mahajan’s bail application
was placed before the court.
It is pertinent to note that despite the days being chosen at
random, and even at this early stage of analysis, a certain news
structure already starts to emerge: that of crime in the Rahul Mahajan
story, cinema in the IIFA awards and cricket with the series hosted in
West Indies.

The Salim Group’s coming to West Bengal: Another story that dominated
117
In 2002, when the previous Football World Cup was being held, I was stationed as a
correspondent in Kolkata with NDTV. The channel spent considerable airtime looking
at Kolkata audiences for preview stories on the football frenzy, quite a bit of which
was manufactured when people see the camera and perform for it.
213
Star Ananda during this period, and six months later became a national
issue, started innocuously enough on the first morning of our analysis.
Explained here in some detail and with the hindsight of what happened
six months later in West Bengal, the story reaffirms the claim of the
previous chapters that journalists are both articulators of news as well
as its audience.
The story starts on the morning of June 14 th 2006 with the state
government planning to acquire land for the Indonesia based Salim
group for a petro-chemical hub in Haldia, a district outside Kolkata. As
the news structure of the next three days shows, this arrival of
prospective investment to Kolkata became the most followed story on
the channel. It captured the headlines with live reportage of the arrival
of a high ranking Salim group official. The news coverage included
where he went, the government officials he met, the land he looked at
for investment and his interactions with local villagers.
The Salim Group came to Kolkata, invited by the West Bengal
Government. The group promised huge investments and the state
government agreed to hand over thousands of hectares of agricultural
land for the petro-chemical hub. Star Ananda coverage deified the Salim
Group representative in West Bengal and photos of him being
garlanded by local villagers whose land was about to be taken away
flooded the television screens. A reporter on ground where the land
acquisition was proposed said that there were no protests from
farmers who were happily giving their land away, realising it was for
their own prosperity and progress. Six months later, in January 2007,
rural West Bengal erupted against the land acquisitions. Clashes
between the police and villagers claimed scores of lives. Government
estimates are in hundreds while villagers claim that the police
massacred thousands of peasants. The government was forced to
cancel the land acquisitions and what was portrayed as a rosy deal
went awry. While I will examine this story further a bit later in this
chapter, there are some important points that need reiterating. I have
suggested in previous chapters that the reporters in Kolkata embrace
the corporate culture of MCCS whereas in Star News, cynicism is more

214
pronounced. This, I have argued, is largely due to the fact that a Star
News reporter in Mumbai is financially far more secure as s/he has
more job opportunities than their Bengali counterpart. The present
state government in West Bengal has been trying to attract corporate
and foreign investment and middle class journalists, long since seeking
more job opportunities in the state, are more likely to identify with the
government’s policy. As MCCS focuses on the same middle class and
affluent audience as their target group, a perfect matchmaking takes
places. Six months later however, given a peasant uprising, ground
realities refused to match their news articulations.

Early morning news production practices at Star Ananda and Star

News
5am to 7.30am

Both Star News and Star Ananda started broadcasting live half an hour
earlier than other national news channels, going to air at 5am. Star
Ananda started with Prothom Khobor (First News) and Star News with
Paheli Khabar (First News). The news structures of Star News and Star
Ananda displayed a range of stories in the morning bulletins that
gradually vanished as the news producers sought to enforce a news
agenda for the day. The morning bulletins also aired several stories
filed by news agencies, especially international stories. The reasons for
this must be understood in the light of the practices of the night editors
and producers who prepared the morning bulletins the night before.
The logistics of production also play a role in this and I use my observer
participant experience to tease these processes out, having spent
several nights in both newsrooms observing how morning bulletins are
made.
At 12pm, the final live bulletin in both the channels was aired.
This was the final bulletin that will then be broadcast repeatedly
through the night until 5am unless there is a major newsbreak which
calls for live telecast to resume. This five-hour lull gives the night
producers time to start preparing for the early morning news and the
rest of the day. Manpower is depleted; a single person attends to the
215
assignment desk in Star Ananda and not more than two editors are
available for editing stories. In Mumbai, owing to a larger scale of
operations, the number of journalists working, though frugal, is more
than in Kolkata. For both the channels, a night reporter is present and
will attend to any newsbreaks. It is the duty of the journalist on the
assignment desk to coordinate with the editors to get stories ready for
the morning bulletin. As I noted in the chapter on editorial processes,
the person on duty at the assignment desk in the evening, hands over a
list of possible stories that can be aired for the morning to the journalist
who takes over for the night. The person on duty at night will continue
to build on the list for the morning bulletins. (see chapter 5)
Since news flows are slow at night, night producers work with
stories which are on hold; that is, stories which have been filed by
reporters but not thought as urgent or important enough and therefore
put in the leftover bin to be used later. These stories are edited and
readied for the morning bulletins. Quite a few of these stories are
treated as ‘fillers’, to be used if there is nothing else or to add some
variety to the bulletin. Newsroom politics will also play a role in this. If
producers do not like stories but are forced to take them, because a
reporter is likely to complain or create a fuss, those stories can be
‘buried’ in the night or early morning bulletins. Yuvraj Bhattacharya,
Assignment Head of Star Ananda told me that he used this method
regularly if reporters did not file stories the way he wanted them to. It
was his way of forcing reporters to conform. Also ‘burying’ stories in
the night bulletin takes away the edge of the reporter’s complaint that
his or her story has not been aired. Besides this, at times certain stories
are put on hold as they become relevant only on the following morning
or even later. Such stories are generally based on events which are
scheduled to take place in the future, and the morning bulletin is a good
way to start a preview of these events which will be followed up during
the day. 118

118
An obvious example of this would be a scheduled political rally or a sporting event.
216
June 14th, 2006 (Day 1): 5 am to 7.30 am
Star Ananda
The Star Ananda news format includes a section called Shironaam
(Headlines) that are played before and after most advertisement
breaks. This short section spells out the main stories of the news
bulletin. Most bulletins will have between four to six headline stories.
On 14th June 2006, the first day of our analysis of news
structures, there were four headline stories at 5am: stories from the
Football World Cup, the cricket test in West Indies, the IIFA awards and
a petrol price hike announced by the Central Government. The
bulletin’s World Cup coverage concentrated on various stories:
capoeira dancing of Brazilian fans in Germany, the result of the
previous day’s games and a story on English footballer Wayne Rooney.
The last story was about local Kolkata fans holding a prayer ceremony
for Rooney’s recovery. Each day, there was a World Cup related story
filed from Kolkata on supporters of different teams from the city. This,
the sports desk reporter Ratna informed me, was to create an
identification with the event in Germany amongst news viewers in
Kolkata. The petrol price hike story in Star Ananda was treated as a
political development, unlike in Star News, and concentrated on the
dynamics between the central government which had raised the taxes
and West Bengal’s leftist government. The latter was an ally of the
government at the centre.
Besides the headlines, there were eight other stories, including
the story on the Salim group of Indonesia, the background to which I
have explained above. This story was yet to become a headline. Of the
other seven stories broadcast between 5am and 7am, four can be
grouped in the category on crime. One of them, on Bollywood’s biggest
star, Amitabh Bachchan, and his income tax problems, also overlaps
into the cinema section. I will discuss this story in detail a little later. In
another case, where the jewellery of Bengal’s most famous cricketer
and former India team captain, Sourav Ganguly, was stolen by a
domestic help, a crime story, encroaches into the category of cricket.

217
The third crime story, which was also picked up by Star News, was the
story of the cook of an underworld don who had just been released
from jail. This too will be discussed later. Another story in the cinema
category was the remaking of two classic Bollywood films from the 70s.
A story on the dip in the stock market can be grouped into the business
category. The last story was about a group of pilgrims who had been
stranded on their pilgrimage because of heavy snowfall in the
Himalayas. As there were several Bengalis who formed part of the
pilgrimage entourage, Star Ananda kept a focus on this story.

Star News
The morning bulletins from 5am to 7am are called Paheli Khabar (First
News). The production conditions were similar to Star Ananda though
with a few more personnel in Mumbai owing to the larger scale of
operations.
Two wagons had caught fire in the Mumbai dockyard on the
previous night. No one was hurt, but shots of raging fire make good
pictures for television, and as the chapter on editorial processes show,
journalists look for striking visuals for a news story. The story was
therefore accorded prominence. The morning bulletin started with this
incident followed by World Cup Football reports and stories on cricket.
Next was the story of a person employed as a cook in Dubai by Dawood
Ibrahim, an accused in the Mumbai blasts of 1993 and one of the most
high profile criminals in India. The cook, who had been arrested by the
police on his return to India, had just been released. This story was also
carried in the morning bulletin in Kolkata, though not as a headline. The
final headline was that of alleged land grabbing by India’s most famous
female pop singer and Bollywood icon, Lata Mangeshkar.
There were three other stories besides the headlines that were
included in the morning bulletin. The first was that of a famous
Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt who had been implicated in the 1993
Mumbai bomb blasts. The story relates to the central government, the
prosecutor, diluting their own case against the actor. Another story,
which was to unfold over the next three days, was of the income tax

218
department of the central government sending notices to Bollywood’s
biggest star Amitabh Bachchan. This same story also appeared in Star
Ananda´s morning section on the same day. The story has a background
that involves the first family of Indian politics, the Gandhis, and all the
ingredients of a typical Bollywood melodrama. The film star Amitabh
Bachchan was a schoolmate and close friend of Rajiv Gandhi, the former
Prime Minister who was assassinated by LTTE guerrillas. Rajiv Gandhi
was the grandson of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and
the son of Indira Gandhi, the country’s only female Prime Minister, who
was killed by her own bodyguards. When Rajiv became Prime Minister,
Bachchan entered the political fray at the behest of his friend and was
elected as a Member of Parliament before things turned murky and he
was implicated in the Bofors scandal which allegedly involved
monetary kickbacks from a Swedish arms firm to Indian politicians to
secure arms deals. Though Bachchan was exonerated, and not a shred
of evidence found against Rajiv, the political dream had turned sour
and Amitabh left politics. After Rajiv’s death, the relationship between
their two families deteriorated and Amitabh joined hands with the
political opponents of the Gandhi family. There were deep insinuations
that his continuing ‘harassment’ by the income tax was at the behest of
the Gandhi family. Amar Singh, a prominent politician belonging to a
rival political faction of the Congress to which the Gandhi family
belongs, is a media declared friend of the Bachchan family. He and his
wife were shortly served with an income tax notice which will become
another prominent news story in our analysis, further fuelling
speculations of ‘harassment’. The third story is of the petrol price hike.
Unlike in the West Bengal coverage which deals with the political
parties and alliances of the Central Government with the Left parties
resisting the hike, this story focuses on the dilemmas of the middle
classes who will be economically affected.

Analysis
If we look at the headlines and the other news stories, besides the hike
in petrol prices, the stranded pilgrims, and a story on the stock market,

219
all stories aired on Star Ananda can be grouped into either the sports or
crime category. I have grouped the wagon fire story under crime simply
because the crime reporter was usually assigned such stories and s/he
would have to do the follow up if necessary. In this case, the story
fizzled out soon after the morning bulletins. To understand some of the
processes behind how news stories are selected, let me divide the
crime stories in two divisions; ones that have been aired by both the
channels and the ones that are exclusive to Star News.
The stories about the cook and the income tax notices to Mr
Bachchan are televised by both channels. Filed by reporters in Mumbai,
they have been translated in Bengali for Star Ananda. The fascination
with Bollywood, despite being geographically distant from West
Bengal, is greeted with as much enthusiasm in Kolkata as in Mumbai or
Delhi. Amitabh´s iconic status, the clash with the Gandhi’s and the hint
of scandal makes the story ‘saleable’. Similarly, Dawood Ibrahim has
achieved iconic status and is easily identifiable. After the Mumbai blasts
of 1993 and then in 2000 when the US government declared him an
international terrorist, stories relating to him abounded in the media,
though this was far more true of Mumbai than Kolkata as I shall
demonstrate a little later in this chapter.
By the above yardsticks, the story of Lata Mangeshkar’s alleged
acquisition of land, and Sanjay Dutt’s case should have got prominent
air time on Star Ananda. Lata is revered in Bengal as she is in Mumbai,
but the story did not feature in the morning and only came up later in
the mid morning bulletins, a non-primetime slot. Not only is Sanjay
Dutt a known film star but the case involving him relates to terrorism,
Mumbai blasts and national security: all easily identifiable tropes of
television news in India. This story finds no mention at all. So why were
these stories not carried?
Several reasons may be attributed. First of all, Star Ananda had more
stories in the morning than Star News on that particular day. Star
Ananda had ten stories compared to seven stories being followed by
Star News. Star Ananda coverage of the World Cup was also infinitely
more detailed than that of Star News, with prominence given to local

220
stories about Kolkata crowds watching the tournament. No such stories
were broadcast from Mumbai. The petrol hike story was also more
politically nuanced in Star Ananda and therefore longer. The story on
the Salim Group investment in Kolkata was also followed with lengthy
reports leaving less time for other stories.
But despite an obvious shortage of time, both the story of Lata
Mangeshkar and Sanjay Dutt could have made the news bulletin at the
cost of two other Bollywood or crime stories. If audience interest was
the sole reason for choosing a story, as the journalists interviewed
seem to articulate, then these two stories were as valid a news story as
the rest. The fact that they did not make the news cycle highlights the
unpredictability of news bulletins which can depend on the producer;
what he or she thinks should be included in a particular cycler; or even
what story is readily available in the news basket from which the
producer makes his or her choices. It could well be that the two stories
which were not seen on Star Ananda were simply not sent to Kolkata;
the server that links both the cities could have been down and
therefore the story not uploaded in time for it to make it to the morning
bulletin. This unpredictability will always make cast iron theories of
news production suspect. Patterns can be discerned but allowances
need to be made for the sheer unpredictability of various situations.

221
June 15th, 2006 (Day 2): 5 am to 7.30 pm

Star Ananda\

For Star Ananda, on the second morning of our analysis, there were
fewer stories than on the previous day, but the World Cup report was
longer with detailed coverage of the previous night’s England game and
joyous celebrations of the Kolkata spectators on England’s win. Six
headline stories were included, with the Football World Cup being the
first. The second headline was the continuing cricket series. The third
headline was the granting of bail to Rahul Mahajan. The next was a
major story that had happened in Mumbai the previous day. An
unidentified shooter entered the offices premises of one of Bollywood’s
most famous directors, Mahesh Bhatt, fired two rounds in the air and
left. The story was a follow up on investigations and reactions. The
penultimate headline was the IIFA awards in Dubai, and the last
referred to the continuing story of the Salim group’s state investment
propositions. Besides the headlines, one more story came up from one
of the districts of West Bengal, filed by a stringer. The story details the
killing of a local political leader by Maoists. This story featured twice
more in the day’s bulletin.

Star News

As with Star Ananda on the same morning, there were also six headline
stories in Star News. The Football World Cup and the ongoing cricket
series made headlines. The Bollywood festival at Dubai was next. The
next two headline stories followed Rahul Mahajan getting bail from
court for possession of cocaine and the alleged killer of his father, his
uncle Praveen Mahajan, giving statements to the press hinting that a
former Prime Minister was controlling the Mahajan family. The final
story concerned income tax notices being sent to Amitabh Bachchan’s
friend and prominent politician, Amar Singh, and his family. Besides the
headlines, as in the Bengali channel, there was just one more story for

222
the morning bulletin. Rats were destroying precious harvest in the
north east of India and the army was helping to curb the menace by
burning the bamboo trees that was helping the rats prosper. This story
was dropped after the morning bulletins.

Analysis

In both channels the concentration on sports, Bollywood and political

scandals and crime is obvious in the morning headlines. However, the
two stories which do not make the headlines: in Star Ananda the news
of a local politician being shot dead, and in Star News, the story of the
rat-infested crops, are indicative of a particular practice in both the
channels.
Earlier in the chapter, I quoted Yuvraj Bhattacharya, the Head of
the Assignment Team, on how he kills stories which do not conform to
his requirements or those he feels do not target the core audience. The
story of the politician being shot dead is from the districts of West
Bengal and is imagined not to be of particular interest to the
metropolitan audience of Kolkata. Yet Star Ananda does want to
penetrate the rural markets of West Bengal, as indicated by
Bhattacharya in his interview with me quoted in the chapter on
editorial practices. By airing the story Bhattacharya didn’t give his
reporter any cause for complaint, but by not giving it much prominence
through primetime slots, he has kept his focus on the core audience in
Kolkata.
The Star News story needs some explanation and context. The
north-east of India consists of seven states and lies in a remote corner
of the country. Audience measurement boxes, as I have explained in the
chapter on the subject, are not placed in this region and therefore the
audience here does not form the core target group of MCCS. To cover
the seven states, just one reporter is deputed – a fact that is indicative
of the region’s significance in the national imaginary. The question
arises: why did this story appear at all and why is a reporter stationed
there if the area is not considered important? Land disputes with China

223
and continuing insurgency movements post Indian independence make
the north-east a violent yet integral part of how the Indian nation is
imagined, much of which is territorial. It might not be important to the
notion of the nation, yet there is a need to claim it as one’s own, and
therefore the posting of the lone, solitary reporter. Not important, but
necessary to flag the territory.
As mentioned above, certain stories that are not perceived to be
of interest to the core audience is “killed” in the early morning or late
night bulletins. The stories, once aired, stifles a reporter’s complaint of
being ignored - but they are not allowed into primetime news bulletins.
Also, the lack of news flow is another reason why stories which do not
make it past the morning bulletins, appears in these slots. Though I am
not doing a textual analysis, it is still important to reiterate the
differences in the way that cricket and football are covered in the two
channels. In Star News, despite the World Cup, football continued to
receive less prominent coverage than cricket, underlining that the
target audience is seen to identify more with cricket in Mumbai and the
Hindi Speaking Market (HSM). Star Ananda, while continuing to pay
attention to cricket and its coverage, gives more importance to the
World Cup and has special programmes around the event. As I stated
earlier, it is a reporter from Star Ananda who cover the event for both
channels.

June 16th, 2006 (Day 3): 5 am to 7.30 am

Star Ananda

On day three, the morning bulletin ran with the headline story of the
proposed petro-chemical hub in West Bengal with reporters filing
reports from villages where land was to be acquired for the project.
Whilst on the first day, June 14th, the story had failed to make even the
morning headlines; the story was now major headline news. The
Indonesian based Salim Group was now proposing large amounts of
money for investment. The second story, on similar lines but with an

224
Indian company, was about the Tata group acquiring land in the district
of Singur in West Bengal for an automobile factory. 119 The Rahul
Mahajan story grabbed the next headline slot with the story shifting to
his homecoming and family reactions after he got bail. The third
headlines were reports on the matches in the World Cup; and the final
story was on the IIFA celebrations.
Three international stories also featured on this morning. One,
filed from Berlin by the World Cup correspondent from Star Ananda,
was on the city’s history; the second was about a blast in Sri Lanka; and
the third was on floods in China. International stories are not generally
given much prominence in either news channel. The sudden
appearance of the two stories on China and Sri Lanka, therefore needs
more attention and I take them up in the analysis section just below.

Star News

This day wore a different look compared to the morning bulletins of

Star News on the previous two days. The number of stories was
astonishingly high. Besides the headlines, which followed similar
patterns to the first two days, two other sections were included: khabre
desh bhar (news from around the country) and khabre duniya ki (news
from around the world). Special note needs to be taken of the latter.
Though on the same day Star Ananda, too used three international
stories, the blast in Sri Lanka was the only story used by both channels.

Analysis

I have shown, in the chapter on editorial practices, through interviews

with the editors of the foreign desk in both channels, the lack of
importance accorded to international stories. The foreign desk editor at
Star Ananda was a trainee journalist (Oly), which shows the importance
accorded. I refer again to an interview with Manish Kumar, the foreign
desk producer at Star News. He said:
119
In a similar turn in events, the Tatas at the time of writing, withdrew from
West Bengal. given peasant protests and uprisings against land. acquisitions.
225
 Since I have joined here, I have been moulded or motivated by my
seniors to selects stories, especially international stories, with an eye on
good visuals, even if there is absolutely no news peg to the story. Initially
I tried to get good stories, which were headlines in the BBC, into the
rundown. But I soon realised that these stories will not be carried. No
point wasting energy and time on things that are unproductive. So I do
what is expected of me now. (06/06/2006)

Observing the foreign desk’s news practices in both channels, it became

clear that while the editor would prepare several agency stories for the
bulletin producer’s consideration, many would not be aired. At times,
when there was a dearth of stories for morning bulletins, these
international news stories were used. The morning bulletin, as I have
said before, was slightly more diverse than the prime time bulletins
which only focused on one or two particular issues.
The international stories selected by the two news channels are
interesting and help us in identifying how the journalist imagines their
audience and hence the self. The first story in the international section
in Star Ananda was on the charity work of Bill Gates. Since the software
boom, Gates has become an easily identifiable name and, given the
success of the Indian middle class professionals in the software
industry, many dream of emulating his achievements. The second was a
bomb attack in Sri Lanka. India and Sri Lanka are neighbours. In the
current political scenario of “global terrorism,” given India’s
acrimonious relationship with Sri Lanka and the role of the Indian army
in trying to contain the LTTE in the mid 1980s, a blast in Sri Lanka is a
concern to India. Most journalists and their audiences would be familiar
with the story. The third story was of Shashi Tharoor, an Indian who
was canvassing for the post of UN Secretary General. This story was
again about desire and articulation; the global Indian aspiring for a
prestigious international position of power and influence.
In Star News, the second story on this day’s morning bulletin
was about the Queen of England celebrating her birthday. India and
England’s shared history makes this story easily identifiable. The next

226
was the bomb attack in Sri Lanka which was also carried in Star
Ananda. The third story was about a prisoner freed in Baghdad. Given
the dimensions of the “War on Terror”, media coverage to it and the
world’s attention, it is an easily identifiable international news story.
The final story was on the IIFA awards in Dubai which had been
included as an international story for this bulletin.
As I move from the early morning bulletins to the later news
cycles, a few points need stressing. The obsession with cricket, crime
and cinema is already visible even in these early stages of analysis. Also,
as I have shown, there is some diversity in the morning bulletins which
lessens as the day progresses and news agendas are established.
International stories not used from the previous day are a part of this
diversity. I have argued that even these stories generally have to fall
into the pattern of that which the news producers imagine their
audiences can identify with.

7.30am to 10am

Star Ananda and Star News

The news bulletins for this next time period changed little for either
channel as not much fresh news feed would come in from reporters.
Some of the key stories or themes would, however, have been identified
as having the prospect of being the big news stories of the day. The
journalist for the morning shift on the assignment desk would come in
at 7am and the handover from the night person would start. S/he
would have started giving the final touches to the morning list of stories
for the editorial meeting.
These hours were crucial within newsroom functions as it was
the time when the news agenda for the day starts being set. The
morning editorial meeting with Delhi took place in Mumbai around
9am when the decision was made as to what the big stories would be
and how they would be projected. In Star Ananda, there was no regular
formal meeting but the head of the assignment desk, the output desk

227
and the bureau chief had morning conversations on the phone to set
the news agenda.
Here we must remember, and as I mentioned in the chapter on
corporate strategies, that the media market treats news as an
essentially male genre; the 25 + male being the prime target. But as
Sonal, the Deputy Head of the Sales Team, told me, “Star News and
Ananda [are] also trying to actively work towards the 15 + category,
that is the school-going children.” Therefore, we can safely assume that
these news bulletins were targeted not only at office-goers but school
going children too.

June 14th, 2006 (Day 1): 7.30am to 10am

Star Ananda:

Ball Pagol (Mad for the ball), the first of the several scheduled sports
programmes, was screened at 7.30. A half hour programme, it focuses
on the Football World Cup and matches from the previous evening with
predictions of how the next few matches will fare. It is hosted by the
sports correspondent of Ananda Bazar Patrika, the Bengali daily and
the parent company of Star Ananda. Another 15 minutes of a scheduled
World Cup programme would be aired at 8.45am. Berliner Lorai (The
fight in Berlin) was hosted by a regular anchor along with a former
Bengali footballer who has played some international football in the
1960s. Besides these programmes, the other stories followed the same
pattern as the early morning bulletins

Star News

Between 7.30am and 8am, the headlines focused on the World Cup and
three international stories: riots in Bangladesh, a train crash in Tokyo
and a story on the Al Qaeeda. There was also a story on the stock
exchange’s performance. Between 8am and 10am, three stories were
focussed on. Cricket headed the list, followed by World Cup and singer

228
Lata Mangeshkar’s alleged land embezzlement story. At 8.30am, a
scheduled programme on cricket Wah Cricket was telecast.

Analysis

The limited diversity which we saw in the headlines and stories from
the first early mornings became visibly reduced as channel producers
started focussing on what they identified as key areas of interest for
their notionally defined audience: at this point office-going males and
school-going students. Yuvraj Bhattacharya, assignment head of Star
Ananda told me “Our audience is in a rush to leave. We give them a
quick pill of all the important things they need to know before they
leave.” These important things that the journalists identified as the
headlines were: updates on cricket, the World Cup and the story on the
Salim Group, sports and imagined prosperity were the main focus. The
rest of the bulletins and the story categories reflected the same
concerns. There were interviews with cricket umpires and coaches
regarding their teams’ performance in the Caribbean; interviews of
football fans from Berlin; a story on Brazilian fans’ capoeira dancing in
Germany; and a story on former Indian cricket captain Sourav Ganguly,
dropped from the national team and now playing club cricket. In the
World Cup stories, effort was made to show that the Bengali reporter
was present in Germany, comfortable with reporting from international
arenas. Bengalis, who are keen on football, were made to feel part of an
international event. At the same time, there were stories relating to the
World Cup from Bengal, whether it was prayers being offered for
Rooney or the supporters of the Brazilian football team in Kolkata.
It is important to note that though the overall structures of
crime, cinema and cricket remained in Star Ananda, there was always
an attempt to connect with the Bengali television viewers who are the
core target audience. An example: Sourav Ganguly, the former Indian
cricket captain, was axed from the national team following a much
hyped media covered quarrel with Australian national coach, Greg
Chappell. Star Ananda led a media campaign against this axing. Even

229
the façade of objectivity was dropped and Yuvraj told me later that the
channel felt that Ganguly was a symbol of the talented Bengali hard
done by “India” and this was an editorial position consciously chosen
by the channel. Star News remained either neutral towards Ganguly’s
exclusion or favoured it.
  Bhattacharya told me that Abhik Sarkar, the owner of the ABP
Group which has majority shares in the channel, rang him to say that
maybe the channel had been over-ostentatious in their support for
Sourav Ganguly. Yuvraj said that he told Mr Sarkar that if the channel
abandoned their position, the public outrage would be detrimental for
Star Ananda’s image. The editorial policy on this matter continued
unchanged.  On this particular day, Sourav Ganguly was playing
inconsequential club cricket in Kolkata. A reporter was placed there
throughout the day and live broadcasts coupled with studio discussions
with former cricketers on Sourav’s batting ensured that a sporting
event which would never be normally covered was given sudden
prominence. Given the way channels follow each other, other Bengali
news channels followed the story and it was made into a media event.
The two other stories on Star Ananda fall into the cinema category and
had been shown in the bulletins before: updates from the IIFA awards
ceremony in Dubai and the remaking of two classic Bollywood films.
Sports, Cinema and Business, the paradigms of interests were already
being defined in Kolkata’s morning bulletins.
Star News showed the same trait of keeping in mind a particular
audience while deciding on the news cycle. Mumbai is a crowded city.
Commuting from the suburbs to the centre where the offices are
situated is a nightmare. Office-goers leave for work as early as possible.
The bulletin between 7.30am and 8am is interesting as this would be
the time the targeted office-going audience and school children might
have a quick look at the morning news while having their breakfasts.
The story on the sensex is important to understand in this context.
Mumbai is the financial capital of India and the stock exchange, its
symbolic centre. A story on the sensex targets audiences to whom the
share market movement is important: the middle and upper class of

230
Mumbai. The next story on the stock market came on the 11am bulletin
when the office-going executive might switch on his/her television set
in the office to find out how the share market is doing. Two of the
international stories again focused on what can be easily identified
with. A bomb blast in Bangladesh was of interest, bearing in mind the
security situation in India, and Al Qaeeda is linked to the same
understanding of security and terrorism. The train crash in Tokyo
provided striking visuals; something which the producers of both the
channels told me was a priority for international stories making it to
the bulletin.
Football, cricket, crime and cinema are the focus of both the
channels.

June 15th, 2006 (Day 2): 7.30am to 10am

Star Ananda

There was no change to the headlines from the early morning bulletins.
Ball Pagol, as usual, came on schedule at 7.30am. World Cup football,
cricket, the Rahul Mahajan story, the shooting at Mahesh Bhatt’s office
the previous day, the IIFA awards in Dubai and the story on the Salim
Group continued as headlines.

Star News

A scheduled cricket programme Wah Cricket went on air at 8.30am. The

Football World Cup and IIFA awards were the main headlines, along
with Rahul Bajaj, an industrialist seeking nomination for the Upper
House (Rajya Sabha). But every other story was dwarfed by the
breaking news that Amar Singh, leader of the Samajwadi Party, had
been served income tax notices. By 10am, reporters were filing updates
and a press conference was held later in the day. I have already
explained the context of the story, Amar Singh’s friendship with movie

231
star Amitabh Bachchan and their rivalry against India’s first family, the
Gandhi household.

Analysis

In Star Ananda, there was not much change from the morning bulletins.
This might have been for several reasons: because producers were still
deciding on what to focus on for the day; there were no fresh updates
on stories and bulletins were repeated with little change; perhaps a
producer was busy with other matters and did not feel like adding
more stories; or even the repeats were due to a lack of personnel. The
story categories are hardly surprising and follow the earlier patterns.
It is clear that Star News had found the story on Amar Singh as
one of its main focus for the day. The story is a developing one and the
channel hoped to keep the audience interest on it. It fulfilled at least
two of the basic structures of news at MCCS that I have highlighted. The
hint of income tax evasion would ensure that the crime reporter is kept
on the job all day while Amar Singh’s proximity to Bollywood stars,
especially the Bachchans, ensures glamour and a hint of scandal.

June 16th, 2006 (Day 3): 7.30am to 10am

Star Ananda

On the third day too, there were no changes in the headlines and stories
from the early morning to these later bulletins.. The patterns of stories
remained similar, with the Salim Group story leading the headline
followed by the story on the Tatas acquiring land for a car factory that
we have already discussed. World Cup, IIFA awards, the Rahul Mahajan
saga continued.

Star News

Vishwa Yudh (World War), a programme based on the World Cup, was

232
broadcast at 7.30. This is not the norm, though sports programmes do
sometimes get played a few more times than planned and the same
programme is relayed again at 9.30am. Wah Cricket came on at 8.30am,
as usual. Famous Bollywood singer Udit Narayan and the case of his
two marriages made headlines and continued as one of the major
stories of the day as it developed. The income tax notices to Amar Singh
continued as a headline story into the second day. But the breaking
news of the moment and the biggest story on the day’s news agenda
was the suicide of a woman army officer in Kashmir. A story on mutual
funds and another on home prices coming down were put in the
business section. Another story, not yet headlines but which would
demand live broadcast and updates later in the day was an
unemployment mela (carnival) organised in Lucknow, capital of India’s
biggest state Uttar Pradesh, by the state’s Chief Minister Mulayam Singh
Yadav. The story was about the Chief Minister offering Rs 500
(approximately 6 GBP ) to unemployed adults of the state. It was aimed
at a Hindi speaking audience, Uttar Pradesh being the Hindi heartland
of North India and India’s most populous state. To further emphasise
how stories are tailor made for “audiences”, this story found no
mention in Star Ananda which caters to the Bengali speaking audience.

Analysis

In the earlier three chapters, I established that journalists

overwhelmingly understand news as what the audience wants. Given
the corporate focus on maximising profits and an editorial obsession
with ratings, news in the two channels were bound to cater to audience
tastes. Middle class journalists construct the audience as an
imagination of the self. Kolkata has lagged far behind Mumbai in terms
of capital investment and financial health and it is the middle class
journalist’s aspiration for increased opportunities that lead to the
extensive coverage given to the Salim Group. The fact that on ground
farmers were unhappy about giving up their land was completely
ignored.

233
 Sports, both cricket and football are high TRP garners. What is
fascinating about the news coverage of both cricket and football on Star
Ananda however are not the sports themselves but how the audience is
invited to identify with them. Sourav Ganguly is one of India’s most
high profile cricketer and a Bengali. His involvement in an innocuous
club level game therefore acquires significance and is promoted
throughout the day. In Star News, this sporting event finds no mention.
The football World Cup reports too, try to situate the audience in a
context through reports of fans in Kolkata. Besides these, the
fascination with crime and Bollywood is evident. The biggest scandal of
recent times has been the Mahajan saga which unfolded like a soap
opera on both channels with Rahul’s tearful return home and
reunification with family, completed with a trip to the temple. Scandals
and deaths, income tax notices, celebrity gossip and sports continued to
set the news agenda on the third day in Star News which, as news
producers like to say was a “newsy day”.

10am to 12 noon: Midday Production Practices at Star Ananda and

Star News

If newsroom processes are taken into account, this is a busy time.

However, if we go by the market evaluation of audiences, then this is
the off peak period, where news viewing is believed to be low.
Television advertising spots cost the least mid-morning and, in the
afternoon the television audience is believed to be mostly housewives
(not perceived as viewers of news channels). Unless a major incident
takes place, news channels do not fare at the top of the audience’s
choice, audience viewing patterns and surveys claim. (see chapter 4)
Within the newsroom, however, things are hectic. Morning
meetings would have finished by now and the various producers and
heads of departments briefed on stories being followed. Accordingly,
reporters would be assigned to their stories. The assignment desk
would also be in touch with the reporters in the different states who
would be going out for the day’s story. Unless there was a story which

234
was breaking or being followed from earlier, the content of the regular
news bulletin would not change much from the early morning bulletins.
News programmes were generally added to the news cycle to lend
variety.

10am to 12 noon: June 14th 2006 (Day 1)

Star Ananda

Stories from the football World Cup, the Salim Group story and IIFA
continued as headlines. To this was added the rail wagons catching fire
in the Mumbai dockyard. It was treated as a voice over 120 and was
definitely being used because of the spectacular shots of fire. A story
from Mumbai on the making of Bollywood film Krrish also made the
headlines. Besides the headlines, several stories made it to the bulletins
in these two hours. The remaking of Bollywood films and the story of
pilgrims suffering on the Amarnath Yatra which was filed by a Star
News reporter was translated for these bulletins. The Star News
reporter, keeping the Kolkata audience in mind, interviewed some
pilgrims from the city who are stranded. Rahul Mahajan’s bail
application found place along with the singer Lata Mangeshkar’s
alleged land grabbing story. Both these stories were shown in both the
channels though the latter story did not make it to the headlines in
Kolkata as it did in Mumbai. The story of Dawood Ibrahim’s cook
continued. There were some international stories too: Maoists freed by
the Nepal Government, a storm in Florida and a report on the fragile
political situation in Bangladesh. There was also a separate section
called Kolkata sharadin (All day in Kolkata) which listed the various
cultural events happening in the city that day.

Star News

A voiceover means that a full story with details and interviews is not filed. Instead,
120

pictures are shown along with an explanatory commentary.

235
The headlines were similar to the morning; the main issues until now
remained Rahul Mahajan’s bail, cricket and the World Cup. The share
market was then looked at in detail. Two other stories - the making of
the film Krrish and Nigerian students being asked to leave Mumbai for
being involved in drug trafficking - were broadcast in these bulletins
besides the scheduled crime programme Sansani (Sensational) and
Saans Bahu aur Saazish (SBS).

Analysis

I have already described in the chapter which looks at corporate

practices how, during the makings of films, news channels tie up with
film producers for rights to exclusive footage and interviews.
Whichever film a particular news group ties up with gets promoted on
that channel. MCCS had a tie up with Rakesh Roshan, the producer of
Krrish, and the film was promoted by both the channels.
Few new stories were added to earlier bulletins, though in Star
Ananda there were three international stories. Nepal and Bangladesh
are neighbours across the border of West Bengal. The political situation
in Bangladesh is a major source of concern for the media in the state as
are the Maoists activists of Nepal. The floods in Florida again made for
arresting visuals. For Star News, there is less variety. The only new
story added was about the Nigerian students in Mumbai suspected of
drug trafficking. This again falls under the category of crime. Two of the
most successful programmes in Star News were repeated from the
previous day in these two hours. At 10.30am, the crime programme,
Sansani (Sensational), was broadcast. The other programme was Saans,
Bahu aur Saazish and was aired at 11.30am. This particular episode is a
repeat of the previous day’s show. The afternoon broadcast at 2pm will
show a new episode but already women were being targeted as the
primary audiences until the men come back from office. Also, for the
office-going male, the share market news features prominently on all
three days during this time period.

236
10am to 12 noon: June 15th, 2006 (Day 2)

Star Ananda

There was little change from the earlier bulletins, though the
international section, Baire Dure, was added at 11.50am. The first story
on this section was on scientists working on the smile of Mona Lisa
(Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous painting) to figure out her body
structure and height. The second was on the auctioning of Prince
Margaret’s jewellery in England. The third looked at spectators at the
Football World Cup.

Star News

The Rajya Sabha (Upper House) elections were looked at in detail, with
reporters filing fresh stories. This was a political story of how various
parties were trying to propel their choice of candidates into the Upper
House. Tax notices to Amar Singh’s family and the sensex movements
were the other headlines. Pravin Mahajan’s insinuation against a
former prime minister and his statements on the murder of his brother
was another story included in these bulletins.

Analysis

It was usually the foreign desk producer of Star Ananda, Oly who
updated Baire Dure (Outside and Afar), the international news section
in the evenings. The stories used in the afternoons, therefore, were
from what was not used the previous evening. The choices of the
stories were interesting, again revealing something about both
producers and audience. The first story was on Mona Lisa. Da Vinci’s
most famous painting is known to most television audiences. The
second is on the auctioning of Prince Margaret’s jewellery in England
and India’s colonial past and Kolkata also being the Capital of British
India until it shifted to Delhi makes the identifications with this story

237
quite possible. The inclusion of the third story on spectators at the
football World Cup is self-explanatory given the hype over the event in
Kolkata. The scheduling of Baire Dure as a programme was not
necessarily fixed. It was inserted quite randomly within news cycles
through the day, and depended on the bulletin producer’s need to
ensure variety into the news cycle. The other headlines during these
hours continued almost exactly from the earlier bulletins. The story on
the Salim Group venture, however, was given much prominence with
the studios doing live broadcast and interviews with reporters and
local people from where the land acquisition was proposed to happen.
Another interesting feature of the bulletin is not in an inclusion, but the
dropping of a story. The firing at film director Mahesh Bhatt’s office was
dropped. The same story was to be dealt at in detail in Star News but in
Kolkata the fascination with the underworld is limited when compared
to Mumbai as the latter is the epicentre of India’s underworld activities,
linked as it is to the Bollywood film industry. However, family sagas and
soap operas must be similar in both cities as the story of Rahul Mahajan
visiting the temples after his release on bail continued.
In Star News, the Rajya Sabha election was then covered with
updates and fresh reports. This story was being ignored in Kolkata.
Rahul Bajaj, who was seeking a seat in the Upper House, comes from
Mumbai and is a prominent industrialist of the city. The ignoring of the
story in Kolkata and its coverage in Mumbai again reflects that news is
produced keeping a focused audience in mind even though the essential
structures remain the same.

10 am to 12 pm: 16th June, 2006 (Day 3)

Star Ananda

The headline addition to the earlier bulletin was an interview with the
film star Amitabh Bachchan at the IIFA Awards in Dubai. The report
was filed by a Star News reporter and was used by Star Ananda. Clips of
the interview, especially Bachchan talking about his tax problems, were

238
put in the context of a news story about the recent income tax notices
to the superstar and his response to it. The interview was billed as an
exclusive. However, variety is added to the bulletin through several
other stories. The final story of the next four bulletins in this time
period was that of a West Bengali artist painting various portraits of
Amitabh Bachchan, for which an exhibition had been organised. The
previous stories were that of Bollywood star Salman Khan jailed for
shooting endangered animals and a strike at the All India Medical
Sciences Institute (AIIMS). The problems for pilgrims at the Amarnath
journey and the story on rats eating crops in the north-east are also
included in these bulletins.

Star News

The army officer’s suicide was clearly going to be the story of the day.
Fresh stories were being filed and reporters had reached the house of
the parents. Interviews with the family were being shown. The other
big story was the unemployment festival in Lucknow. Live broadcast
had begun and a reporter was present at the spot interviewing people.
A new story, that of Bollywood actor Rakhi Sawant who had accused a
singer of molesting her was also broadcast. This story had dominated
the television channels with Sawant, a fringe actor, attaining instant
stardom. News channels had vied with each other to get her in the
studio to repeat her accusations and shots of the party where the
alleged incidents took place were repeatedly shown. Sensex
movements and information on the share market continued. Besides
the headlines, there were stories on mutual funds and their
performance, the possibility of housing prices coming down and a story
of the chairman of Jet Airways, a private airline, not being allowed to sit
on the board of an airline company he had just acquired. The earlier
package of their international stories was also broadcast for one
bulletin.

Analysis

239
On both the channels, the focus was on crime and cinema. Stories on
Bachchan, the recently jailed Salman Khan, and Rakhi Sawant highlight
the fascination with, and the focus on, cinema. The suicide of an army
officer was a scandal and given prominence as a breaking news event.
The business and stock market got continued coverage.

12noon to 5pm: Production Practices at Star Ananda and Star News

The excitement of the morning meetings, the assigning of stories and

the hustle and bustle of people coming and going die out in the
newsrooms during this part of the afternoon. The agenda would be
known (unless there was breaking news), developments were being
followed and reporters out covering stories were being asked for
updates. Editors and script writers would be busy preparing stories for
the primetime bulletins and also keeping a watch on new feeds coming
in from various reporters across the country. These new feeds would
later be edited into stories.
Scheduled programmes were used to break the monotony. In
Star Ananda, between 3pm and 5pm, there was however an enormous
shift in the flow of stories. Stringers and reporters from the remoter
districts of West Bengal filed stories that were aired in these hours. The
stringers were generally local reporters who were not very well trained
and used mediocre quality cameras for their work. Though the stories
were edited in Kolkata, editors frequently complained about the lack of
good footage [from which] to edit a story.
Despite the lack of quality footage, the stories would still be
aired as Star Ananda attempted to move beyond the metropolis of
Kolkata and target rural audiences. The market reasons were spelt out
by Yuvraj Bhattacharya, assignment head of the channel: “The aim is to
penetrate the markets [districts of West Bengal] like Ananda Bazar [the
newspaper] does. Not only the A market [Kolkata] but B, C and D
[progressively poorer districts] markets must be targeted.” Despite the
attempts to penetrate the rural market, the affluent target audience

240
remains in Kolkata. The afternoon therefore became a convenient time
to “dump” stories from the districts of West Bengal.

2 pm to 5 pm: June 14th – June 16th 2006

Star Ananda

There were three scheduled programmes in these five hours, which

already indicates a lack of enthusiasm for regular news bulletins in the
afternoon and an attempt to get the audience by appointment. Of these,
one was repeated twice, which meant that four slots were reserved for
pre-packaged programmes. Two were on the football World Cup and
Hoi Maa Noi to Bou Ma, the Bengali equivalent of the SBS show, was
aired twice. There were no major changes to headlines, except that at
4pm, the Sourav Ganguly story on the former Indian captain playing
club cricket was updated and there were live reports saying that he had
scored some runs in the match. In all the three days analysed here, the
headlines did not change much, though new stories on local issues
made it to the headlines. On the first day, there were five local stories:
some local robberies; a hospital closed in a district because of a lack of
doctors; bail denied to a local politician; a story on soldiers who fired at
their counterparts in Bangladesh near the West Bengal border, and a
plan to manage waters of the local rivers. These were interspersed with
stories of Rakhi Sawant; the Lata Mangeshkar story, and a story on
elephants in Kerala.

Star News

Afternoon June 14th, 2006 (Day 1)

The firing took place at film director Mahesh Bhatt’s office on the first
day at 12.30pm. That turned out to be the main story for the day as all
channels actively sought to get the better of each other. The other story
which was followed was the statement given by Pravin Mahajan.

241
Mahajan allegedly killed his politician brother by shooting him and was
now insinuating that a former prime minister and international
terrorists were involved in the saga. Though the claims were
completely unsubstantiated, the story was followed by every Hindi
channel. Rahul Mahajan got bail later in the day in the narcotics case
and that too made headlines at 4pm. The scheduled SBS was aired at
2.30 targeting the women audience.

Analysis
There is a difference in how news stories were produced in both the
channels during the afternoons. Star News is the more established
channel. The audience research and the market analysis are known and
understood by the journalists. The scope for experimentation is less.
The stories therefore showed little diversity. In Star Ananda, which was
yet to complete a year, the scope for experimenting was more. Rival 24-
hour Bengali channels were few and have yet to establish themselves.
The audience and market research is in its initial stages. The corporate
ambition to penetrate into newer markets and tap into new audiences
allows for a bit more diversity in the news cycles, even if very briefly.
For Star News, the shooting at Mahesh Bhatt’s office was top on the
news agenda. Cinema and crime are winning propositions, news
producers told me, and a combination of both is unbeatable. While Star
Ananda was yet to focus on a particular ‘news agenda’ and was
promoting the Sourav Ganguly story, Mumbai focused on the Mahajan
saga and the shooting. Cricket, crime and cinema, therefore, continued
to be the main structures.

2 pm to 5 pm: June 15th, 2006 (Day 2)

Star Ananda

On the second day at 1pm one of the headlines was on a home science
course being started at the local university. All other headlines were
from the morning bulletins though some of them were updated. Besides

242
this, there were five stories filed by stringers from the districts of
Bengal. They included Maoists killing a local politician, the sexual
assault of a mentally challenged girl, and the removal by the state of
security provided to a girl raped by the police. All three stories fall
under the category of crime. Two other stories, one on the state
government banning political writings on walls and another on a local
university being unable to start a medical college because of a lack of
funds were also aired. Another story filed by the crime reporter in
Kolkata relates to a police officer getting text messages on her cell
phone from an anonymous person who proclaimed his love for the
officer.

Star News

On the afternoon of day 2, the Amar Singh income tax story was the
main focus. A few minutes past 12pm, a press conference was held at
Singh’s residence. His friendship with Bollywood star Amitabh
Bachchan, political feuding with the Gandhi family and allegations of
tax evasion gave the story the right ingredients: crime, scandal and
cinema and made it the top story of the day. The Mahajan family saga
continued with updates; interviews with Rahul Mahajan’s sister and
uncle after he had come home on bail. Cinema was covered in detail
with a news programme Khabar Filmi Hain (Cinema News) at 1.30pm.
This day’s episode was based on the IIFA awards ceremony in Dubai.
Cinema and crime continued with the Rakhi Sawant story. Mika, the
man who had been accused of forcibly kissing Rakhi at his birthday
party, had applied for anticipatory bail. There were two other packaged
programmes besides the scheduled SBS. The first one was on cricket.
The second was Yeh Bharat Desh Hain Mera (This India is my Country),
which is a current affairs programme but does not always play at these
times. This afternoon’s programme was around a new cricket star,
Mahendra Singh Dhoni. Another news based show, Ek Din ki Dulhaan
(Bride for a night), based around a girl child being rescued by the police
from a forced marriage was also aired.

243
Analysis

Star Ananda is evidently trying to straddle two identities at the same

time, that of a “national channel” as also its identity of being a “Bengali
channel.” The latter forces it to compete with newer channels and give
airtime to stories which expand the viewership base rather than
focusing only on its core audience. If, in the afternoons analysed, Star
Ananda burst into a plethora of stories - tick-marking stories from the
non metro cities and towns and torn between a Bengali identity and a
“national” news agenda; Star News by contrast seems to have decided
by mid afternoon what the major stories that the channel would focus
on are. Apart from unpredictable major story breaks, by mid-afternoon,
the channel decided on its primetime programming for the day. The
unscheduled news programme Ek Din ki dulhaan is interesting as it
brings into question what is the difference, if any, between
programmes and news at MCCS. To the journalist, there is supposedly
none. With this in mind, we revisit the words of Uday Shankar, the CEO
of the organisation:

The differences are getting blurred and I think that is the way it
should be. Such categories have become completely irrelevant. They
go back to the pre live, pre 24x7 news days. Why did we need to tell
people that this is a news bulletin and this is a programme? Because
news was where you told them the day’s happenings. You did that in
the days of Doordarshan. It was one channel and then a few others,
which were all omnibus channels primarily viewed for entertainment
and then there were a couple of news bulletins. There was this 8.30
news bulletin on Doordarshan, which for several years’ people used
to make an appointment and watch. But before and after that people
were watching entertainment programmes. But in the days of 24x7, it
doesn’t really matter what people are watching. People know they
are watching a news channel. The primary identity of Star News, Aaj
Tak, NDTV are that these are news channels; the viewers do not sit
down and make those subtle differentiations. In fact, I have got
impatient of those differentiations. These are meaningless intellectual
exercises that journalists get into in most newsrooms and are only

244
 useful for academic and research value. They do not actually mean
very much in terms of creating a programme from the point of view
of a journalist or offering a programme from the point of view of a
viewer. It does not really mean anything to me. It doesn’t really
matter. Why are we talking about it? (05/07/2006)

Rajnish Ahuja, the head of the Assignment Team had stated:

I don’t think there is any difference left today between programmes

and news. Earlier we had programmes like The World This Week
on Doordarshan. It was a round-up of the weekly events. But now I
121

have the resources to put such programmes everyday. What happens

now? You take the main news of the day. Look at it from all aspects,
get the background and put together a half hour programme. Now I
can make a World This Week every day. I have enough resources.
Today in Star News everything is news cum programme.
(03/07/2006)

The programme was unscheduled during this afternoon period. But

given the news peg, the journalists decided that a half hour programme
could be put together for the afternoon. This allowed the channel to
advertise it through the morning, thus attempting to create an
afternoon appointment with the viewer. Given that it was a story about
child brides, the imagination was that it would appeal to the women or
housewives, who were the target audience in the afternoon.

2pm to 5 pm: June 16th, 2006 (Day 3)

Star Ananda

Star Ananda featured nine local stories this afternoon, including polio
awareness campaigns, protests, killings of local leaders, student strikes,
the state of local hospitals and robberies. Besides the scheduled
programme Hoi Ma Noi to Bouma which clones Star News’s SBS, another
half hour “news programme”, was aired at 3.30pm. It focused on a local

121
A popular weekly programme on world affairs that revolutionised the concept of
prime time television viewing in India.
245
film actress, Pulokita, who had accused her in-laws of harassing her.
Given its placing in the afternoon, when most men are out at work, the
programme was probably assuming women as its target audience. The
main headline story remained the Salim Group investment, covered
from various ‘angles’ including the former chief minister of the state,
Jyoti Basu, voicing his displeasure at the developments.

Star News

Star News’s main focus at this stage was on the suicide of the woman
army officer. Competing for place this afternoon were several other
stories. The Rakhi Sawant episode, with its mix of sex, scandal and
cinema was priority along with a story of top Bollywood singer Udit
Narayan who, it emerged, had two wives. The story was centred on a
court case filed by the singer’s first wife. Narayan had failed to turn up
in court and images of his first wife crying and interviews with lawyers
from both sides became part of the story. The UP chief minister’s
unemployment gathering at Lucknow was a developing story which
was still being followed. At 12.30, Vishwa Yudh (World War), the
football World Cup based programme, was telecast. The other
programme besides SBS was Registaan mein rounak (Celebrations in the
Desert), based on the IIFA award at Dubai. At around 1pm, the Indian
Defence Minister announced that political parties, depending on their
membership, would be given land on which to build offices. This story
was followed up through the evening as the major political news. A
strike at the All India Medical Institute; the slashing of car prices; and a
proposed bank for Muslims, all vied for headlines in an afternoon which
saw several new stories.

Analysis

Despite this afternoon having been what journalists refer to as a

246
“newsy day”, Star News did not break from its traditional structure.
Cinema, crime and scandal continued to dominate the headlines and an
unscheduled programme on Bollywood stars’ celebrations in Dubai was
added. In Kolkata, the women in the audience were targeted with the
news programme on the Bengali cinema star accusing her in-laws of
harassment. As the channels approached evening prime time bulletins,
it is important to note that international stories, especially on world
politics, were remarkable for their absence. Stories tended to focus on
particular audience groups, especially in the afternoons where
programmes targeting women were aired in both the channels.

5pm to 8pm: Production Practices at Star Ananda and Star News

The newsroom was at its busiest during the early evening. Most of the
reporters would be back from their day’s assignments; the senior
editors giving the final touches to what were to be primetime news. The
core target audience, the 25 plus male, would have been on their way
back from office and the 15 plus male, the audience that Star News and
Star Ananda target (see chapter 4), is back from his school or college.
Most of the stories would almost be ready, the programmes packaged,
and the agenda decided for the day. Within two hours, advertising rates
would be the highest the channels charge and the newsrooms would
want to highlight what they imagined to be the most “attractive”
content.

5 pm to 8 pm: June 14th – June 16th 2006 (Day 1)

Star Ananda

At 6pm was the scheduled programme Ekhon Kolkata (Now Kolkata), a

listing of the various cultural events for the evening. The diversity of
the afternoon bulletins was over. There were just three stories now on
the bulletin. The “issues”, as Yuvraj said, had been decided. The football
World Cup and stories around it, Rahul Mahajan getting bail, and the

247
firing at Mahesh Bhatt’s office were the only stories that the channel
focused on. At 7.30pm, there was another scheduled programme, Khela
Shuro (The Game has started) focusing on football matches and cricket.
At 8pm, Kolkata Ekhon (Kolkata Now) comes on again under a slightly
different name and a few additions to the one at 6pm.

Star News

The main stories this evening were focused on Rahul Mahajan, the
Mahesh Bhatt incident and cricket. Even the news programme Aaj ki
Baat (Today’s Topics) only covered these three stories. The programme
was preceded by Yeh Bhaarat Desh Hain Mera, (This is my India) which
on this particular evening was about the marketability of the new
cricket star, Mahendra Singh Dhoni. This was followed by the scheduled
cricket based programme Wah Cricket, a half hour show starting at
7.30pm.

Analysis

The “issues” in both the channels were the World Cup, the firing at a
film director’s office and the release of a high profile politician’s son
from jail on charges of drug abuse along with cricket. As I have argued
in the introduction to this chapter, the diversity in languages and target
audience that might have resulted in diverse articulations does not
necessarily take place in the two channels. While there are some
differences in stories filed through the day, by evening, when the core
audience is being targeted, both channels air almost identical news. The
imagined core audience is therefore the same: the affluent middle class.

5 pm to 8 pm: June 15th, 2006 (Day 2)

Star Ananda

248
In the bulletins between 6pm and 6.30pm, some of the local stories
filed in the afternoon were still carried: the policewoman receiving
unwelcome texts; a story on incessant rainfall in Bengal; the sexual
assault of a young girl; and the lack of funds in Universities in West
Bengal. At 6.30pm, the World Cup based programme, Beliner Lorai,
came on. The headline stories after the programme were the interview
with Amitabh Bachchan on his tax issues; the politician Amar Singh
receiving income tax notices; the IIFA awards; the Rakhi Sawant story;
and the story on Rahul Mahajan’s release. The stories on cricket
included detailed analysis with former cricketers coming to the studio
for expert comments.

Star News

The main stories of the second day were tax notices to Amar Singh; the
AIIMS doctors’ strike; movement in the Mumbai stock market; and the
story of the Mahajan family. Rahul Mahajan’s press conference received
ample coverage. Besides the headlines, film actor Rakhi Sawant’s case
against Mika forcibly kissing her was also included in the bulletin, with
the former approaching the National Commission for Women to
intervene in the case. There were three half hour programmes within
these two hours. At 6.30pm, there was Yeh Bharat Desh Hain Mera. This
evening’s episode concerned old men at Varanasi, a Hindu holy town in
North India gathering together to celebrate and demonstrate their
skills. The programme was promoted as Aabhi to Hum Jawaan hain (We
are Yet Young). At 7pm was Aaj ki baat, a news bulletin packaged as a
programme and, at 7.30pm, it was back to cricket with Wah Cricket. Aaj
ki baat focused on the Mahajan story and the Amar Singh case.

Analysis
Programmes were inserted in news bulletins to create the
appointment-based viewing relationship with the audience that I
discussed in the chapter on corporate practices. Thus, in the hours just

249
before hitting the main primetime schedule for the evening, there were
several news-based programmes, which even if not very different from
regular news cycles, had a certain sense of repetition: the same
anchors, similar styles of presentation - something which the audience
could identify with and come back to watch, knowing what to expect.
Star News’s scheduled programme Yeh Bharat Desh Hain Mera on the
older men at Varansi and how they cope, live and work together is
interesting as it breaks the stereotypical patterns of what news
structures are in the two channels. As I have stated earlier, however
much patterns in news structures can be discerned, aberrations and
contingencies must be allowed for as the individuality of a particular
reporter or programmer occasionally breaks the mould.

5 pm to 8 pm: June 16th, 2006 (Day 3)

Star Ananda

At 6.30pm, after Ekhon Kolkata, Berliner Lorai (The War in Berlin) was
screened. It was repeated at 8pm, followed by Khela Shuru (The Game
Starts) at 7.30. Besides the World Cup, one headline was about a speech
of the West Bengal chief minister in which he asks state trade unions to
change their ways and attitudes towards work. This was put next to a
story on India’s richest businessman, Mukesh Ambani meeting the
Chief Minister. It was followed by the story on the Salim Group state
investments. Bollywood was not to be left behind and there was more
on the IIFA awards from Dubai. The Kolkata actress, Pulokita being
harassed by her in-laws was the other story for the evening.

Star News

The suicide of the woman army officer, the two marriages of Bollywood
singer Udit Narayan, and the High Court asking for a case to be filed
against the organisers of a fashion show where a model’s clothing had
come off on stage were the main stories in the news programme and

250
the headlines. At 6pm, Desh Videsh (At home and abroad) showed the
story of two kidney patients receiving organs from each other’s spouses
which was treated like a family soap opera with interviews of relatives
from each side. At 6.30, in Yeh Bharat Desh Hain Mera, a half hour show
titled Crorepati ki kangal patni (The Millionaire’s Pauper Wife)
described how a rich lawyer had thrown his wife out of the house and
how she now lived on the streets. It was followed by Wah Cricket at
7.30pm.

Analysis

This evening’s bulletin of Star Ananda substantiates the point I have

made earlier in this chapter that journalists in Kolkata articulate their
own desires through the news cycle. Kolkata has been shunned for
several decades by the big industries because of the presence of strong
workers’ union. The message from the Chief Minister and his meeting
with the industrialist, Ambani, were stories directed at the growing
image of West Bengal as a place for new industries and investment
opportunities. This is followed by the story of a multi-million dollar
investment by the Salim Group from Indonesia. The desired articulation
is that West Bengal is changing economically and is becoming
prosperous. The focus is on the sensational in Star News and both the
scheduled programmes are treated like television soap operas.

8pm to 11pm: Production Practices at Star Ananda and Star News

By the primetime news hour, from around 8pm, most of the day’s work
for the input team was completed. The output desk which looks after
production quality would still be busy giving final touches to stories or
programmes. The senior editors and journalists not going on air would
be leaving or planning to leave. On the assignment desk, the handover
from the evening shift to the night shift would be taking place.

251
8pm to 11 pm: June 14th, 2006 (Day 1)

Star Ananda

The headline stories at these hours remained unchanged. The Salim

Group story dominated followed by the story on Rahul Mahajan and the
shooting at the film director Mahesh Bhatt’s office. The IIFA awards
continued in the headlines along with Sourav Ganguly’s batting exploits
at club level cricket. Reports from the World Cup Football and the
cricket series were also included.

Star News

Primetime in Star News started with a scheduled programme Khabar

Filmi Hain (The News is Cinema). Two stories made up this programme:
the Mahesh Bhatt shooting incident and the making of a new movie,
Gangster. At 9pm a new programme launched recently called
Satyameva Jayate (Truth Prevails) began. The programme focused on
three stories: a boy refused treatment at AIIMS as doctors went on
strike; privatisation of some elite colleges and the hike in petrol prices.
The headline stories include the Rahul Mahajan saga, the shootout at
Mahesh Bhatt’s office, the IIFA awards and stories on cricket. Another
scheduled programme, City 60 was at 10pm, focusing on the main
events that have happened in the metro cities through the day.

Analysis

Almost every headline, though continuing through the day, was

updated. For example, there was a live conversation with his sister in
the Rahul Mahajan story; new guests came in for analysis of sporting
events of the day: on the Mahesh Bhatt incident, the producers used
graphics to try and capture how the shooting had taken place. Star
News entered the primetime with a film-based programme each
evening. However, their new programme at 9pm, Satyameva Jayate,

252
was a result of feedback that the channel needed hard news stories. The
programme was advertised as a show that would air stories that
affected the audience. This programme had been conceived as a
counter to the criticism that Star News had not been airing enough hard
news stories.

June 15th 2006 (Day 2)

Star Ananda

The headlines this evening were clips of the Amitabh Bachchan

interview where the film star spoke about the problems he was facing
with income tax authorities. The next headline was the election of the
officials of a cricket board in Kolkata. Another story from the afternoon
followed: the CID policewoman receiving anonymous texts. The IIFA
awards in Dubai, the Salim Group investment and the World Cup were
the other headlines. At 8.30pm, a scheduled World Cup Football
programme, Berliner Lorai was aired

Star News

After the programme Khabar Filmi Hain, the new programme

Satyameva Jayate came on. The first two stories in the programme
looked at the Pramod Mahajan incident and the next one was on film
star Salman Khan who had been accused of shooting endangered
species of animals and was being taken to jail after a long court battle.
The next story focused on the doctor’s strike at AIIMS and the final
story was on diabetes and its spread in India. At 9.30pm, another
cricket based programme was aired called Operation Vijay122 (Operation
Winning). 10pm was the time for City 60.

Analysis

Operation Vijay was also the code name for the Indian army operation against the
122

Pakistani army offensive, known as the Kargill war.

253
Star Ananda on this evening had a story on the election of cricket board
officials of the Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB). Writing on the
coverage of the same issue a few days later, Mehta notes:

On 30th July, 2006, voting for the new governing body of Cricket
Association of Bengal (CAB) saturated news on all major networks.
All channels covered the polling live through the day and at least
three commissioned exit polls with professional agencies: Times
Now with A.C. Nielson, Star Ananda/ Anand Bazar Patrika with
Mode and Kolkata TV with IMG-Marg. All this for a regional sports
management association with a grand total of 120 voters
(2008:196)

Along with cricket, it was cinema and crime which fought for space in
both channels. They followed similar stories through the day into
primetime. News packaged as programmes were the staple diet of Star
News; it is an attempt to create the audience loyalty and appointment
viewing that I discussed in the chapter on editorial processes.

8 pm to 11 pm: 16th 2006 (Day 3)

Star Ananda

Headline stories focused on industrialist Anil Ambani coming to meet

the chief minister of West Bengal; the chief minister’s speech asking the
state’s government workers to change their ways and work harder; and
the Salim Group story. The other headlines were similar to Star News
and included the Rahul Mahajan case, the IIFA awards ceremony,
cricket and World Cup Football.

Star News

Bollywood singer Udit Narayan’s non-appearance in court in relation to

charges of polygamy; the suicide of a woman officer in the Indian army;
the cricket series; and the World Cup were the main headlines. IIFA
awards; forensic reports in the Rahul Mahajan case; and a crime story
254
where a group printing bogus court papers was cheating the courts of
revenue also made headlines. On Satyameva Jayate, the main story was
about political parties being given plots of land. The other story was
that medicine prices were scheduled to come down. At 9.30pm, cricket
based programme Wah Cricket was aired.

Analysis

Star Ananda’s primetime stories show a difference from those of Star

News. The stories were focussed this evening on the articulation that
the state was on a path of economic progress. The West Bengal Chief
Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya who belongs to the Communist Party
of India (Marxist) (CPIM) exhorted government workers to change
work practices and shun industrial action. One of India’s richest
industrialist came to visit Mr Bhattacharya and the Salim Group had
already made promises of large investments. The illusion was of
prosperity. I have argued above that this is a middle class articulation
made by middle class journalists. Since the audience targeted is
essentially middle class, a match making continuously takes place. Star
News’s focus on primetime remains on Bollywood stars and awards,
cricket and scandal.

Conclusion

In the first lines of his book, The Sociology of News Production,

Schudson defining journalism writes

Journalism is the business of practice of producing and

disseminating information about contemporary affairs of general
public interest and importance. It is the business of a set of
institutions that publicises periodically (usually daily) information
and commentary on contemporary affairs, normally presented as
true and sincere, to a dispersed and anonymous audience in a
discourse taken to be publicly important (2003).

255
In the Indian context, from the examination of the content of the two
news channels, Star News and Star Ananda, it is evident that the
“general public” Schudson is referring to is a certain elite section of the
society. In a country where more than 400 million live below the
poverty line, where unemployment, hunger and famine occur
frequently, where continuing insurgency movements threaten several
parts of the nation, coverage of cinema, crime and cricket to the extent
that it colonises almost every news bulletin of national news channels
must be seen as exclusionary. Unlike Doordarshan, which constructed
an all inclusive, though North India dominated notion of the nation, the
constructed nation of the private news channels is definitely exclusive.
The “general public interest”, therefore, is the perceived interest of the
affluent Indians.
The next chapter, the concluding one will address the merits of
an ethnographic approach to studying newsrooms. Pulling in the
various strands of arguments and empirical data from previous
chapters together, it will seek to ask whether journalism in India and in
a broader context, the global South inherently different and if so, do we
require new categories to analyse news practices? To do so, I will use
Cottle’s formulation of the “orthodoxies” of earlier newsroom
ethnographies and examine them against the research data and see
whether they are still useful tools for critiquing news practices in a
different century, in settings which are geographically non-western?

256
 Chapter 8
Conclusion

Hegel reminded the philosophers of his time to read the papers

daily. According to Derrida, the same responsibility today would oblige
the philosopher “to learn how the dailies, the weeklies, the television
news programmes are made, and by whom.” (2001: 1). Hartley has said
that news is “the sense-making practice of modernity” and, as such, “the
most important textual system in the world (1996: 32). Derrida,
therefore was suggesting to the philosopher, the importance of
understanding how and who makes news and thereby creates a sense of
who we are, how we understand ourselves, and how we make sense of
‘reality’. My research was conducted in this spirit of inquiry; the
attempt was to understand how news programmes are made and by
whom, and therefore who gets to articulate ‘India’ and how.
Indian media and also the international press have held up the
country as the new Asian economic tiger. The country’s economic
prowess is demonstrated with Indian companies taking over western
industries, be it Ratan Tata’s acquisition of the Jaguar in England or
another steel plant which comes under the billionaire businessman,
Lakshmi Mittal’s, anvil. The term Bollywood no longer requires
footnotes. However, it is also equally true that India is a poor country.
“We [India] are a nation of nearly a billion people. In development
terms we rank number 138 out of the 175 countries listed in the
UNDP’s Human Development Index. More than four hundred million
lack even basic sanitation, and over two hundred million have no safe
drinking water” (Roy, 2000: xxiv)
The media has been disparaged by scholars for not paying
attention to the less privileged sections of society and constructing a
world of glitz and glamour (Chakravorty and Gooptu, 2000, Deshpande,
2003, Mehta, 2008). Yet, most of these arguments do not tell us how the
media constructs an elite discourse. Why does it do so? What the media
practitioners feel about their work routines, ethos and ethics? In short,
an ethnographic approach, which this thesis has adopted, has helped to

257
reveal the complex situated particularities of news practices in Indian
television newsrooms; the whys and the hows of newsrooms’
construction of ‘reality’. The empirical data generated from this
research will provide political economy theorists with ammunition to
critique and analyse media practices, especially television news. In
short, ethnography, as this research claims to be, can provide data from
within, instead of pontificating from the outside.

The “orthodoxies” of media theory: making a case for grounded

research

One of the prime drivers of this work was to conduct newsroom

based ethnographic research in a part of the world where such work
has not been done before. Given India’s burgeoning media industry and
the country’s increasing global influence, such a study seemed quite
necessary. Newsroom ethnographies, as discussed in the literature
review, have played a significant role in formulating media theory;
providing meta-theoretical formulations with grounded, empirical data.
Their influence in media theory is remarkable, and yet it is their very
prominence which has resulted in an unquestioned acceptance of some
of the key tropes in media scholarship. Cottle has called for a “second
wave” in news ethnographies which can challenge and question the
“orthodoxies” of the first (2000). Chapter 2 of this thesis has detailed
how I have worked with four of these “orthodoxies” as theoretical entry
points to commence my research. In this concluding chapter, I revisit
these “orthodoxies” to see how a “second wave” of news ethnographies
can question and critique earlier ethnographic findings, allowing for a
reinvigorated media theory.

Routinisation: Professional social activity, quite often, is routinised.

Journalism requires a huge amount of daily output, more than most
professions, and is therefore highly structured to ensure continuous
production. Cottle points out that news ethnographies have shown that

258
routinisation within newsroom leads to create a prominence for
“events” based reportage which hides long term process from public
view. It also creates a newsroom division of labour and journalists are
assigned particular beats and bureaus are located strategically.
Journalists also turn to official news sources and this dependency
allows official elites to become the “primary definers” of news.
Routinisation also creates a “vocabulary of precedents” which creates a
journalist’s news sense. (2000: 22)
If we examine the empirical data of this research, especially chapter 5, it
is evident that both Star News and Star Ananda are highly routinised in
newsroom activities. Journalists perform specific functions within
specific formats at specific times and are strictly controlled. Star
Ananda, I have noted, operates like an assembly line production house.
Yet, while agreeing that news production is indeed routinised, the
“unintended consequences” (Cottle 2000: 22) of this needs
contextualisation in the Indian scenario in particular and also in the
changing news ecology everywhere in general.
Ethnographic work in the 1970s and 1980s have noted that the
process of routinisation, puts journalists into particular beats as
“newsnets” need to be monitored (Rock 1973; Tuchman 1973; Fishman
1980). This, today, can only be partially true. The television news genre
has made news beats a less sacrosanct space for individual reporters
than it used to be in newspapers. Limited manpower in most news
channels mean that reporters are asked to work on several beats at the
same time and also collaborate with each other. The demands of
immediacy in television journalism also means that if a particular
reporter is unavailable and a story breaks in his or her beat, other
reporters would have to immediately follow up the story. If we look at
the newsroom processes described in chapter 5, it is evident that at
night when a sole reporter is present in the newsroom, s/he is
responsible for any news breaks, that is, the reporter is in charge of
every news beat. The assignment desks in both channels, I have shown,
control reporters. They provide information on ground to the reporters
and keep them updated. This means that journalists in assignment

259
desks encroach into every beat. Reporters are asked to provide phone
numbers of sources and officials on their beats to the assignment desks.
News beats, therefore, no longer work in the manner it did when the
earlier ethnographic works, mentioned above, were undertaken.
Most news channels now have guest desks that organise which
official or expert should come in to talk on particular subjects. This
means that the position of “dependency” individual journalists would
enter into with particular news sources is broken to a certain extent.
Individual journalists might have favoured certain sources. With several
journalists in the play, many more news sources come in. The
establishment of news bureaus must also be looked at anew. As news is
targeted towards particular audience group, news bureaus in India are
created according to what the media managers feel is important for
their target audience. So, Star News, catering to the Hindi Speaking
Market (HSM) will have several more bureaus in the north Indian hindi
speaking heartland than it would in the north-east of India which has a
just one reporter to cover seven states.
News room routines, Ericson states, also feature in the
journalists deployment of a “vocabulary of precedents” that help them
to recognise, produce and justify their selection and treatment of “news
stories” (1987: p348). Given the importance of the audience in the
newsroom (see chapter 6), the recognition, production and justification
for stories have completely changed. It is news channels that follow
each other in their stories and programming, keeping an eye on the TRP
ratings which results in the production of a homogenous content across
news channels.

Objectivity: A second orthodoxy, Cottle claims, in part derived from

routinisation, is journalistic objectivity. (Cottle, 2000) Soloski has
argued that “objectivity is the most important professional norm and
from it flow more specific aspects of news professionalism (1989:33).”
Tuchman sees this ‘strategic ritual’ as a pragmatic response to the
elusiveness of objectivity (1972). Also, this claim of ‘objectivity’
obviates, we are told, the need for explicit organisational policies as a

260
form of control (Larson cited in Cottle, 2000:28). Given the empirical
evidence provided in the preceding chapters, a universal notion of
objectivity in newsroom is obviously contentious. In the Indian context,
where “[t]he tone of reporting is unabashedly promotional, the stories
about private lives and public engagements of film stars: how they
celebrate religious festivals, their holidays, their dress and eating
habits, their likes and dislikes, are repeatedly given air time – across the
board and on an almost daily basis (Thussu, 2007: 105)”, the notion of
objectivity seems redundant. Journalists have repeatedly told me
during interviews that stories are meant for an audience to like and
enjoy. Objectivity, as the bureau chief of Star Ananda pointed out is for
“journalists to be loyal to their employers” (see chapter 5). Given this
evidence from newsrooms, objectivity even as a “strategic ritual”, surely
needs rethinking. Being an empirical impossibility, at best it is a ritual,
at worst a pretence. However, the notion hardly influences practices in
Indian television newsrooms at most times. If a high TRP rating is
achieved, the objective has been served.

Hierarchy of Access: The ‘first wave’ of ethnographies made a strong

case that routinisation of news production coupled with the notion of
objectivity serve to access the voices of the socially powerful, and
marginalise or even silence those of the institutionally non-aligned and
powerless (Hall et al,1982; Goldenberg, 1975; Gitlin, 1980). Social
hierarchy is thus replicated in and through the patterns and processes
of news access. In the Indian context, this is definitely the case. But
again the understanding of the socially powerful needs
contextualisation. As the empirical evidence and the chapter on news
structures show, there is a new breed of elites, film stars and cricket
heroes who define national news in India. As Rajnish Ahuja, head of the
assignment team in Star News pointed out in chapter 5, political
reporting is no longer that important in Indian television. The elites to
whom Stuart Hall was referring to in the 1980s, the bureaucrats and the
politicians, have now changed to film stars and sporting heroes. In
middle class India, the less affluent indeed have no voice. Bollywood

261
icons now define nationhood in Indian television. This obsession with
film stars and sporting icons are bringing about fundamental changes in
way news is imagined and constructed and needs careful investigation
if media theory is to serve any relevant purpose in this emerging news
ecology.

The forgotten or the imagined audience

The fourth “orthodoxy” in media studies, Cottle claims, is that “mass

audience” by definition being “unknowable”, can only be “imagined”.
“While this literally may be the case, it ignores that the audience
approached “as a discursive conceptualisation or typification inscribed
by the news producers into their particular news forms rather than as
an empirical object ‘out there’, the ‘imagined audience’ of the news
producers is literally ‘at work’ within newsrooms” (Cottle, 2000: 34).
Chapter 6 of this thesis is dedicated to this understanding of the
audience within the newsroom and how it influences news practice. As
Cottle states, the audience is literally “at work” within Indian television
newsrooms. News programmes are tailor made for specific audiences;
news is constructed keeping a particular audience in mind at various
times of the day and evenings. Journalists are trained and encouraged
through various corporate strategies to understand the likes and
dislikes of the core audience and produce news keeping them in mind.
Instead of the “unknowable” audience, in Indian television newsroom,
the audience has been captured and reified. Journalists know their
audience; it is the self and the familiar of middle class India.

262
Claims of this news ethnography

As a news ethnography, this thesis makes three broad claims that it

wishes to inform media theory of. First, the assumed traditional divide
between corporate and editorial no longer exists in Indian television
newsrooms. Each performs the job of the other, encroach into each
other’s territories and no line is sacrosanct. Second, journalists imagine
themselves as the audience and produce content they think they and
their families would like. Most of these professionals come from middle
class and relatively prosperous backgrounds. Across television channels
in India, middle class journalists producing news for the self and the
familiar, result in homogeneity in content. Connected to this is my third
claim. Advertisements target the wealthier sections of society. In
pursuit of advertisements, television channels too, target the same
group as their primary or core audience. With journalists coming from
the same economic class as the target audience, a match-making takes
place. Privileged journalists articulate for a privileged audience and a
hegemonic and singular narrative of an affluent nation is thereby
achieved.

Towards a “second wave” in news ethnographies

The orthodoxies of news ethnographies, as the empirical evidence of

this research suggests, clearly need a rethink. The categories in
themselves, no doubt, are important. Routinisation of news produces
certain formats. The rich and the powerful of course dominate the
media. Without a notion of objectivity, news becomes increasingly a
tool for the social elite. The audience is even more important than ever.
In this scenario, as Cottle states, a “second wave” of news ethnographies
is urgently needed (2000). Most newsroom ethnographies were
conducted in the 1970s and the 1980s. Despite their influence, their
numbers were few. A lack of access to newsrooms for researchers
means that in recent times, even fewer ethnographic research works

263
are conducted. The news ecology has changed overwhelmingly in the
last 30 years. Convergence, digital media, new media and continuous
shifts in the political economy have all changed the way news is
produced. While the methodology of an ethnographic approach to
understand newsroom dynamics remains extremely relevant, more
such work is required to provide media theory with empirical data. It is
only by a steady accumulation of research data, both from the South
and the North, can we start theorising on news practices in today’s
television newsrooms. This ethnography of two Indian television
newsrooms, with its detailed empirical evidence of corporate and
editorial processes, of its changing understanding of audiences and
analysis of news structures, is a step towards that end.
That contemporary television newroom practices should produce such a
particular, middle-class, image of India and discount all the other possible
imaginings and realities raises profound questions about the adequacy of
India’s public sphere and opens up new trajectories for research.

264
 Bibliography
 

Altheide, D.L., & Snow, R.P. Media Worlds in the Postjournalism Era.
Hawthorne NY: Aldine De Gruyter, 1991

Anderson, B. Imagined communities: Reflection on the origins and spread of

nationalism, London, New York: Verso, 2006 (reprint).

Ang, I. Desperately Seeking the Audience. New York, London: Routledge,

1991

Appadurai, A. Modernity At Large, New York: Routledge, 1996

 
Arden, J. America’s Meltdown: The lowest common denominator society,
Westport: Praeger/Greenwood, 2003
 
Batabyal, S. For God’s Sake, Be Objective, Sarai Reader (472-481), Delhi:
Sarai, 2005

Batabyal, S, “Dilemmas of Ethnographic Research: The

Practitioner/Academic’s Quandary” Networking Knowledge: Journal of
the MeCCSA PGN, Vol 1, No 1, (2007),

journalhosting.org/meccsa-pgn/index.php/netknow/article/view/5  
 
Benjamin, I. The Black Press in Britain, Stoke-On-Trent: Trentham Books,
1995

Beville, H.M. Jr. Audience Ratings: Radio, Television and Cable. Hillsdale, New
Jersey, Hove and London: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates, 1988
 
Bhatt, S.C. Satellite Invasion of India (Mass Communication and Broadcasting,
Journalism, Advertising, Culture) New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 1994
 

265
Bidwai, P. “Whose Truths?: Indian Media in the Global Village.” Humanscape
Magazine, Dec, 1996, 6-8

Billig, M. Banal Nationalism, London: Sage, 1995

Boorstein, D.J. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America. New York:

Harper and Row, 1964

Bourdieu, P. “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction” in Knowledge,

education and cultural change, (ed) Brown, R. London: Tavistock, 1973

Bourdieu, P. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press:

Cambridge, 1977

Bourdieu, P, The Logic of Practice. Polity Press: Oxford, 1990

Bryman, A. Social Research Methods, Oxford, New York: Oxford University

Press, 2001
 
Butsch, R. The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Televison, 1750-
1990. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid: Cambridge University
Press, 2000

Castell, M. The rise of the network society, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000

 
Carter, C., Branston, G. and Allan, S. (eds) News, Gender and Power. London:
Routledge, 1998

Chakravorty, R and Gooptu, N, “Imagi-nation: The media, nation and politics

in contemporary India” in Hallam, E and Street, B [ed] Cultural Encounters,
Routledge: London, 2000

Chibnall, S. Law and Order News - An Analysis of Crime Reporting in the

British Press. London: Tavistock, 1977

266
Cohen, B. The Press and Foreign Policy, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1963

Coleridge, N. Paper Tigers: the Latest, Greatest Newspaper Tycoons, New

York: Birch Lane Press, 1998
 
Cottle, S. TV News, Urban Conflict and the Inner City. Leicester: Leicester
University Press, 1993a
 
Cottle, S. “From BBC Newsroom to BBC News Centre: On Changing
Technology and Journalist Practices”. Convergence: Journal of New
Information and Communication Technologies 5(3): (1999) 22-43
 
Cottle, S. “New(s) Times: Towards A 'Second Wave' of News Ethnography”
Communications: The European Journal of Communication Research, 25(1),
(2000): 19-41.
 
Cottle, S. “Rethinking News Access” Journalism Studies. 1(3), (2000b): 427-
448
 
Cottle, S. “Contingency, Blunders and Serendipity in News Research: Tales
from the Field”, Communications: The European Journal of Communication
Research, 26(2), (2001): 149-167
 
Cottle, S. “Ethnography and News Production: New(s) Developments in the
Field”, Sociology Compass 1/1, (2007): 1–16
 
Curran, J. and Park, M. De-Westernising Media Studies, London, New York:
Routledge, 2000

Danahay, D. (ed) Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the self and the social,

Oxford, New York: Berg, 1997
 

267
Dayan, D. and Katz, E. Media Events: the live broadcasting of history,
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1992

Deshpande, S. Contemporary India: A Sociological View, New Delhi, Penguin:

2003

DeLanda, M. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social

Complexity, London, New York: Continuum, 2006
 
Deleuze, G. Foucault. London: Continum, 1988a

Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and

Schizophrenia. London: Continuum, 1998b

Derrida, J. Echographies of Television, London: Polity, 2001

 
Dubey, S. ‘The middle class’, India Briefing, Oldenberg, P. (ed) 137-164.
Boulder and London: Westview Press, 1992
 
Dunwoody, S. “Science writers at work”, in D. Berkowitz (ed) Social
Meanings of News, Thousand Oaks and London: Sage Publications, 1978
(155-167)

Epstein, E. J. News from Nowhere: Television and the News. New York:
Random House, 1973
 
Ericson, R.V., Baranek, P.M and Chan, J. B. L., Visualizing Deviance: A Study of
News Organization. Milton Keynes: Open University, 1987
 
Fernandes, L. India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of
Economic Reform. University of Minnesota Press, London: Thousand Oaks,
2006

268
Fischer, J Michale and Abedi, Mehdi. Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues
between Tradition and Postmodernity, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1990

Fishman, M. Manufacturing the news. Austin: University of Texas Press.

1980

Foucault, M. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences,

Tavistock: London, 1972

Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison, New York:
Vintage, 1979

Foucault, M. The Use of Pleasure: History of Sexuality (Vol 2), Random House:
New York, 1990

Gaye, T. “Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsmen's

Notions of Objectivity”, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 77, No. 4
(Jan., 1972): 660-679   

Gandy, O. Beyond Agenda Setting: Information Subsidies and Public Policy,

Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing, 1982

Ganguly-Scrase, R. and Scrase, J. T. Globalisation and the Middle Classes in

India: The social and cultural impact of neo-liberal reforms, US, Canada:
Routledge, 2009

Gans, H. Deciding What’s News, New York: Pantheon, 1979

 
Galtung, J. and Ruge, M.H. “The Structure of Foreign News,” Journal of Peace
and Research, 2, (1965): 64-91.
 
Geertz, C. The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays, New York: Basic
Books, 1973

269
 
Gerbner & Gross, p.182, “Living with Television: The Violence Profile.”
Journal of Communication, (Spring 1976): 182
 
Ghose, B. Doordarshan Days, Penguin: New Delhi, 2005
 
Ghose, S. Modern History of Indian Press, Cosmo: New Delhi, 2002

Glasser, T.L. and Craft, S. ‘Public journalism and the search for democratic
ideals’ in T. Liebes and J.Curran (eds) Media, Ritual and Identity. London:
Routledge. 1989

Goldenberg, E. Making the Papers. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath. 1975

Golding, P & Elliott, P. Making the News. London: Longman. 1979

 
Ginneken, J V, Understanding Global News, London, Thousand Oaks, New
Delhi: Sage, 1998
 
Gitlin, T. The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and
Unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980
 
Gupta, D. Mistaken Modernity: India between Worlds. New Delhi: Harper
Collins, 2000.
 
Hall, S. (ed), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying
Practices, London: Sage, 1997

Hall, S. ‘The rediscovery of ideology: Return of the repressed in media

studies’. in M. Gurevitch, T. Bennett, J. Curran & J. Woollacott (Eds.) Culture,
Society, Media (pp56-90). London: Methuen, 1982

270
Halloran, J.D., Elliott, P., & Murdock, G, Demonstrations and Communication:
A Case Study. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970
 
Harding,S. The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political
Controversies, New York: Routledge, 2003
 
Hartley, J, Invisible fictions: television audiences, pedocracy and pleasure.
Textual Practice, 1/2: 12-38, 1987
 
Hartley, J. Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture, London,
Arnold, 1996

Herman, E. and Chomsky, N. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy

of the Mass Media. London: Vintage, 1988

Hobart, M. After culture: anthropology as radical metaphysical critique.

Yogyakarta: Duta Wacana University Press, 2000

http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/dec/12you-might-soon-have-500-tv-
channels.htm

Inden, R. Imagining India. London: Hurts & Company, 1990

 
Jaffrelot, C and Veer,P. [ed] Patterns of middle class consumption in India and
China , London: Sage, 2008

Joshi, Vijay and Little, I.M.D. India's Economic Reforms 1991-2001. Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1996

Kohli, V. The Indian Media Business, New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, London:
Sage Publications, 2006

Kumar, S. Gandhi Meets Primetime: Globalisation and Nationalism in Indian

Television, Urbana and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006
 
271
Laclau, E., Mouffe, C. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: towards a radical
politics. London: Verso, 1985

Lakha, S. “The State, Globalisation and Indian Middle-Class Identity” in M.

Piches (ed.) Culture and Privelege in Capitalist Asia, London: Routledge,
(1999):251-74

Lichtenberg, J. “In defence of objectivity revisted”, in J. Curran and M.

Gurevitch (ed), Mass Media and Society, Sage, 1996
 
MacGregor, B. Live, Direct and Biased? Making Television News in the
Satellite Age, London: Edward Arnold, 1997
 
Madianou, M. Mediating the Nation: News, audiences and the politics of
identity, London: UCL Press, 2005

Mankekar, P. Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An ethnography of

Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India, Durham: Duke
University Press, 1999

Marr, A. My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism, London: Macmillan,

2004

Mazzarella, W. Shovelling Smoke: Advertising and Globalisaton in

Contemporary India, , Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2003

Meehan, E. ‘Ratings and the institutional approach: a third answer to the

commodity question’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, (1984): 216-
25

Mehta, N. India on Television, New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2008 

Moreley, D and Brundson, C. The Nationwide Television Studies, London:

Routledge, 1999

272
Murphy, D. The Silent Watchdog: The Press in Local Politics. London:
Constable, 1976

Morrison, D. ‘Journalists and the social construction of war’. Contemporary

Record. 8(2), 305-20, 1994

Morrison, D., & Tumber, H. Journalists at War: The Dynamics of News

Reporting During the Falklands War. London: Sage, 1988

Morson, G. and Emerson, C. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a prosaic. Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1990

Nainan, S. Through the Magic Window: Television and Change in India, New
Delhi: Penguin, 1995

Neuman, W.R. The Future of the Mass Audience, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1991

Page, W and Crawley, D. Satellites over South Asia: Broadcasting Culture and
Public Interest, New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, London: Sage, 2001

Pedelty, M. War Stories. London: Routledge, 1995.

Rabinow, P. Reflection on Fieldwork in Morocco, University of California

Press: California, 1977
 
Rajagopal, A. “The Rise of National Programming: The Case of Indian
Television” Media Culture and Society, 15 (1993): 91-111
 
Rajagopal, A. Politics after Television: Religious Nationalism and the
reshaping of the Indian Public, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge,
2001

273
Ram, N. in Silvers, R and Epstein, B. [ed] India: a Mosaic, New York: New
York Review of Books, (2000): xi-xiii

Rosenblum, M. Mission to Civilize: The French Way, London, New York:

Anchor, 1988

Rosenblum, M. Back Home: A Foreign Correspondent Rediscovers America,

New York: William Morrow and co, 1989

Rock, P. ‘News as eternal recurrence’. In S.Cohen & J.Young (Eds.) The

Manufacture of News: Deviance, Social Problems and the Mass Media.
London: Constable. 1981:64-70

Ross and Nightingale. Media and Audiences, New Perspectives, London, New
York: Oxford University Press, 2003
 
Roy, A (In Silvers, R and Epstein, B. ed India: a Mosaic, New York: New York
Review of Books, (2000: xv-xxxiv)

Sahay, U [ed] Making News: Handbook of the Media in Contemporary India,

New Delhi: OUP, 2006

Sajal N.  “Roots of Ethnic Conflict: Nationality Question in North-East India.”

Social Scientist, Vol. 19, No. 10/11 (Oct. – Nov, 1991):84-96
 
Scannell, P. “Public Service Broadcasting and Modern Public Life”, Media,
Culture and Society, Vol 11 (1989): 135-166

Scannell, P and Cardiff, D, A Social History of Broadcasting, vol 1, 1992-1939:

serving the nation, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991

Schlesinger, P. Putting 'Reality' Together: BBC News, London: Constable,

1978
 

274
Schudson, M. Sociology of News, New York, London: W.W. Norton, 2003

Shoemaker, P.J. Gatekeeping, Newbury Park: Sage, 1991

 
Shanti, K. Gandhi Meets Primetime: Globalisation and Nationalism in Indian
Television, Urbana Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2006

Sigel, L.V. Reporters and Officials, Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1973

Simpson, J. News from No Man’s Land: Reporting the World. London:

Routledge, 2002
 
Sissors, J.Z. and Bumba, L. Advertising, Media Planning, (5th edn),
Lincolnwood: NTC Business Books, 1996
 
Smith, R.R. ‘Mythic elements in telvision news’. Journal of Communication,
29, (1979): 75-82.
 
Smyhte, W. Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism. Consciousness
and Canada, New Jersey: Norwood, 1981
 
Smulyan, S. Selling Radio: The Commercialisation of American Broadcasting
1920-1934. Washington, London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994

Soloski, J. “News reporting and professionalism: some constraints on the

reporting of news.” Media, Culture & Society, 11(1989): 207-28, London,
Sage Publications. 

Sonwalker, P., Violence as Non-Communication: The News Differential of

Kashmir and Northeast Conflicts in the Indian National Press (Unpublished
PhD thesis, University of Leicester), 2000

Sonwalkar, P. ‘Murdochization’ of the Indian press: from by-line to bottom-

line, Media Culture Society. (2002) 24: 821-834,

275
 
Sreberny, A. in Chan, J. and Bryce, T. [ed] In Search of Boundaries:
Communication, nation states and Cultural Identities, Westport, CT, London:
Ablex, 2002

Stahlberg, P. Lucknow Daily: How a Hindi Newspaper Constructs Society,

Stockhom: Almqvist and Wiksell, 2002

Taussig, M. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror

and Healing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987
 
Thomas, A. Imagi-nations and Borderless Television: Media, Culture and
Politics across Asia, New Delhi, London, Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2005
 
Thussu, D. News as Entertainment: The rise of global infotainment, London:
Sage, 2007
 
Thussu, D. “Murdhochisation of the media: An Asian perspective”, (from a
paper presented at the 14th Asian Media and Information Centre (AMIC)
annual conference Media and Society in Asia – Transformations and
Transitions, held in Beijing, China on July 18-21, 2005). Online
http://www.compos.org.br/seer/index.php/e-compos/article/viewFile/
105/104

Tuchman, G. ‘Making news by doing work: Routinizing the unexpected’.

American Journal of Sociology, 79(1), 110-31, 1973

Tuchman, G. ‘Objectivity as strategic ritual: An examination of newsmen’s

notions of objectivity’. American Journal of Sociology, 77, 660-679, 1972

Tuchman, G. Making News: A Study in the Social Construction of Reality. New

York: Free Press, 1978

276
Tunstall, J. The Westminster Lobby Correspondents: A Sociological Study of
National Political Journalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970
 
Verma, P. The Great Indian Middle Class, New Delhi: Penguin India, 2008

Warner, M. ‘Organisational context and control of policy in the television

newsroom: A particpant observation study’, British Journal of Sociology, 22:
283-94, 1971

Weaver, D.H. and Wilhoit, G.C. The American Journalist: A Portrait of US

Newspeople and their Work, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1986

Webster, Phalen, J.G and Lichty, L.W. Ratings Analysis: Theory and Practice.
Hillsdale, Hove and London: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates, 1991
 
Webster, Phalen, J.G. and Lichty, L.W. Ratings Analysis: The theory and
practice of Audience Research, (2nd edn). Mahwah, New Jersey and London:
Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates, 2000
 
White, D.M. ‘The gate keeper’: A case study in the selection of news’,
Journalism Quarterly, 27, 383-390. Reprinted 1964: In Dexter, L.A. and
White, D.M. (eds) People, society, and mass communications, New York: Free
Press, (1950: 160-72)

Wilson, C. ‘The paradox of African American journalists’ in S.Cottle (ed)

Ethnic Minorities and the Media: Changing Cultural Boundaries. Buckingham:
Open University Press, 2000

Woodward, B. The Plan of Attack, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004

Zelizer, B. (1993). ‘Has communication explained journalism?’ Journal of

Comunication, 43(4), 80-88.

277