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With the advertiser as the new boss, the reader/viewer mutated from a citizen into a consumer, causing a reassessment of priorities with subjects of appeal to an affording class taking precedence. @amritareach (1/n)
Rather than reporting on problems that affected the whole population, the media moved towards reflecting an aspirational, glamorous, leisurely lifestyle that one previously saw in advertisements. (2/n)
Some readers may recall that there was a time when the primary purpose of news media was to cover/investigate matters of significance. For a while now, Indian news television has abdicated this responsibility mostly, often under the claim that it is too expensive to do news (3/n)
This is like a university maintaining it is too expensive to teach. What this means is not that media houses with a turnover of billions cannot afford to send a reporter into the field but that the cost in terms of lost advertising is too high (4/n)
The replacement for hard news is the prime time chat show, an advertiser-friendly format in which news, even terrible happenings, are mediated through entertaining fights between familiar faces. (5/n)
"News television formats that pit opposing views against each other like boxers – with shouting and shrill sounds – are using age-old tactics employed by marketers to attract the attention of allegedly fickle buyers and to keep them addicted" - quite like WWF. (6/n)
Finding a way out of the malaise is a challenge for the media and democracy itself. @amritareach in https://scroll.in/article/984851/what-the-nidhi-razdan-phishing-case-and-arnab-goswami-chats-tell-us-about-indian-media-today (n/n)
