From Printing to Painting Facts, Indian Newspapers have Seen it All

Sonali

The press in the present day has turned into an incredible social foundation to an extent that it

has been given the status of the “Fourth Pillar”(G.N. RAY, 2009). Print media has been a major

contributor to this very idea of the press and has acted as one of the major sources of news in the

past one hundred years and more.

Print media frequently provides opportunities for in-depth reporting, and the information they

give out serves as an important base for the people in a democracy to question their legislators to

further change legislation for the good (Simon, 2019).

A couple of decades ago print was a major medium that was the most accessible to individuals

who require development messages, such as farmers and workers. A considerable amount of

emphasis was placed on newspapers as a medium of dissemination of information on developing

topics following Independence. Topics that were given an extreme amount of emphasis were

related to development. Journalists wrote about a variety of government development projects

and how citizens may benefit from them. They include topics such as farming and associated

topics, as well as weather, market pricing, and the availability of better seeds and tools (Patil,

2011).

The last two decades have acted as the foundation of what we call political news dominance in

the newspapers and magazines we read today. Direct ownership of newspapers by a lot of

political leaders has drawn a visible straight line between facts turned views that are being

reported. Some of the examples of such ownerships can be the Hindi newspaper Dainik Jagran

being owned by Mahendra Mohan Gupta, a Rajya Sabha MP, or Supriya Sule who is a Lok
Sabha MP and a politician from the Nationalist Congress Party and is also the director of the

Marathi newspaper Sakal (Media Ownership Monitor). The idea behind this ownership is to push

forward the basic ideologies of the owner which turns out to be advantageous for the institution

they’re a part of. Sanjay Srivastava, a sociologist, in one of his interviews mentioned that

Corporate and political giants own and hold large media companies’ publications to attack their

opponents.

Such ownership patterns have further introduced the idea of “Soft Pressure” on these print

media organizations. By using such "soft pressure," a transparent and impartial coverage of

material is greatly harmed. There is often an unseen pressure on a newspaper or even television

for that to express the government's point of view on a difficult topic.

Apart from political coverage, other topics have seen a major shift in their content coverage too.

Climate change, for example, has been one such topic that has seen a lot of changes in news

coverage in the Indian print media.

In recent years, climate change has gotten a lot of political and media attention. While western

media coverage of the subject is well-documented, such coverage in India per se lacks the aspect

of analysis. The elite Indian press frequently uses terms like scientific certainty, energy

challenge, social development, public responsibility, and impending calamity to raise important

social, economic, and political concerns. Cross-cultural comparisons of media conceptions,

particularly when we compare to nations in Europe and America aid in identifying the field's

future growth of information sharing (Mittal, 2012).

Article 19A of the Indian constitution states that every citizen has the right to freedom of speech

and expression. A similar set of rules comes for the media organizations as well. There are no

laws or rules as such governing the content that is being published by these print media
organizations, but it comes as a responsibility to them to give away the facts to their readers so

that they don’t end up reading a viewspaper instead of a newspaper.

REFERENCES

M. Patil, D. (2011). RECENT TRENDS OF PRINT MEDIA IN DEVELOPMENT

COMMUNICATION. Global Media Journal.

(www.dw.com), D. W. (2018). What's wrong with Indian media?: DW: 07.08.2018.

DW.COM. https://www.dw.com/cda/en/whats-wrong-with-indian-media/a-44982747.

Bergstrom, G. (2019). Understanding the news cycle at a newspaper. The Balance Small

Business. https://www.thebalancesmb.com/understanding-the-news-cycle-2295933.

Lime Flavour, Berlin. (n.d.). Media and political affiliation in India: Media Monitor India.

Media Ownership Monitor. https://india.mom-rsf.org/en/findings/politicalaffiliations/.

Mittal, R. (2012). Climate change coverage in Indian print media: A discourse analysis.

The International Journal of Climate Change: Impacts and Responses, 3(2), 219–232.

https://doi.org/10.18848/1835-7156/cgp/v03i02/37105

Reporter, S. (2011). NEWSPAPERS have BECOME VIEWSPAPERS. Guyana Chronicle.

https://guyanachronicle.com/2011/07/16/newspapers-have-become-viewspapers/.

Simon, M. (2019). An Analysis of Trends of Print Media Coverage on Climate Change in

the Trump Era. The University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons.