Making News in Global India


Book Description

In the decades following India's opening to foreign capital, the city of Bangalore emerged, quite unexpectedly, as the outsourcing hub for the global technology industry and the aspirational global city of liberalizing India. Through an ethnography of English and Kannada print news media in Bangalore, this ambitious and innovative new study reveals how the expanding private news culture played a critical role in shaping urban transformation in India, when the allegedly public profession of journalism became both an object and agent of global urbanization. Building on extensive fieldwork carried out with the Times of India group, the largest media house in India, between 2008 and 2012, Sahana Udupa argues that the class project of the 'global city' news discourse came into striking conflict with the cultural logics of regional language and caste practices. Advancing new theoretical concepts, Making News in Global India takes arguments in media scholarship beyond the dichotomy of public good and private accumulation.




The Anthropology of News and Journalism


Book Description

This title explores the role of news and journalism in contemporary culture from an anthropological perspective. Essays by leading scholars look at communities of professional and nonprofessional journalists.




Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India


Book Description

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748856 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This book investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonized some women’s reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe. To tell this story, Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions—about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development. Locating India at the center of transnational historical change, this book suggests that Indian developments produced the very grounds over which reproduction was called into question in the modern world. The open-access edition of Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India is freely available thanks to the TOME initiative and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries.




Our Time Has Come


Book Description

Long plagued by poverty, India's recent economic growth has vaulted it into the ranks of the world's emerging powers, but what kind of power it wants to be remains a mystery. Our Time Has Come explains why India behaves the way it does, and the role it is likely to play globally as its prominence grows.




Global Muckraking


Book Description

Crusading journalists from Sinclair Lewis to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have played a central role in American politics: checking abuses of power, revealing corporate misdeeds, and exposing government corruption. Muckraking journalism is part and parcel of American democracy. But how many people know about the role that muckraking has played around the world? This groundbreaking new book presents the most important examples of world-changing journalism, spanning one hundred years and every continent. Carefully curated by prominent international journalists working in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East, Global Muckraking includes Ken Saro-Wiwa’s defense of the Ogoni people in the Niger Δ Horacio Verbitsky's uncovering of the gruesome disappearance of political detainees in Argentina; Gareth Jones’s coverage of the Ukraine famine of 1932–33; missionary newspapers’ coverage of Chinese foot binding in the nineteenth century; Dwarkanath Ganguli’s exposé of the British "coolie" trade in nineteenth-century Assam, India; and many others. Edited by the noted author and journalist Anya Schiffrin, Global Muckraking is a sweeping introduction to international journalism that has galvanized the world’s attention. In an era when human rights are in the spotlight and the fate of newspapers hangs in the balance, here is both a riveting read and a sweeping argument for why the world needs long-form investigative reporting.




Media Capture


Book Description

Who controls the media today? There are many media systems across the globe that claim to be free yet whose independence has been eroded. As demagogues rise, independent voices have been squeezed out. Corporate-owned media companies that act in the service of power increasingly exercise soft censorship. Tech giants such as Facebook and Google have dramatically changed how people access information, with consequences that are only beginning to be felt. This book features pathbreaking analysis from journalists and academics of the changing nature and peril of media capture—how formerly independent institutions fall under the sway of governments, plutocrats, and corporations. Contributors including Emily Bell, Felix Salmon, Joshua Marshall, Joel Simon, and Nikki Usher analyze diverse cases of media capture worldwide—from the United Kingdom to Turkey to India and beyond—many drawn from firsthand experience. They examine the role played by new media companies and funders, showing how the confluence of the growth of big tech and falling revenues for legacy media has led to new forms of control. Contributions also shed light on how the rise of right-wing populists has catalyzed the crisis of global media. They also chart a way forward, exploring the growing need for a policy response and sustainable models for public-interest investigative journalism. Providing valuable insight into today’s urgent threats to media independence, Media Capture is essential reading for anyone concerned with defending press freedom in the digital age.




Making News in India


Book Description

Post-liberalisation India has witnessed a dramatic growth of the television industry as well as on-screen images of the glitz and glamour of a vibrant, ‘shining’ India. Through a detailed ethnographic study of Star News and Star Ananda involving interviews, observations and content analysis, this book explores the milieu of 24-hour private news channels in India today. It offers insightful glimpses into the workings of one of the mightiest news corporations in the world and its ability to manufacture everyday reality for its audiences. Based on fieldwork in Mumbai and Kolkata, this study not only provides a detailed description of the television newsroom, its rituals and rhythms, but ventures beyond it to investigate how editorial and corporate strategies converge increasingly in an industry driven by profit. Through analysing how TRPs work to produce a non-inclusive idea of the ‘audience’ and examining hundreds of hours of news content, the book explores how news channels construct a vision of nationhood and of a successful and vibrant economy that caters primarily to the needs of the resurgent Indian middle class. While it will be of particular interest to media and cultural studies scholars and students, and to journalists and media professionals in general, this lively, engaging book also aims to give the general reader the wherewithal to analyse and critique the continuous barrage of 24-hour news television today.




Churning the Earth


Book Description

The world stands so dazzled by India’s meteoric economic rise that we hesitate to acknowledge its consequences to the people and the environment. In Churning the Earth, Aseem Shrivastava and Ashish Kothari engage in a timely enquiry of this impressive growth story. They present incontrovertible evidence on how the nature of this recent growth has been predatory and question its sustainability. Unfettered development has damaged the ecological basis that makes life possible for hundreds of millions resulting in conflicts over water, land and natural resources, and increasing the chasm between the rich and the poor, threatening the future of India as a civilization. Rich with data and stories, this eye-opening critique of India’s development strategy argues for a radical ecological democracy based on the principles of environmental sustainability, social equity and livelihood security. Shrivastava and Kothari urge a fundamental shift towards such alternatives—already emerging from a range of grassroots movements—if we are to forestall the descent into socio-ecological chaos. Churning the Earth is unique in presenting not only what is going wrong in India, but also the ways out of the crises that globalised growth has precipitated.




News for the Rich, White, and Blue


Book Description

As cash-strapped metropolitan newspapers struggle to maintain their traditional influence and quality reporting, large national and international outlets have pivoted to serving readers who can and will choose to pay for news, skewing coverage toward a wealthy, white, and liberal audience. Amid rampant inequality and distrust, media outlets have become more out of touch with the democracy they purport to serve. How did journalism end up in such a predicament, and what are the prospects for achieving a more equitable future? In News for the Rich, White, and Blue, Nikki Usher recasts the challenges facing journalism in terms of place, power, and inequality. Drawing on more than a decade of field research, she illuminates how journalists decide what becomes news and how news organizations strategize about the future. Usher shows how newsrooms remain places of power, largely white institutions growing more elite as journalists confront a shrinking job market. She details how Google, Facebook, and the digital-advertising ecosystem have wreaked havoc on the economic model for quality journalism, leaving local news to suffer. Usher also highlights how the handful of likely survivors—well-funded media outlets such as the New York Times—increasingly appeal to a global, “placeless” reader. News for the Rich, White, and Blue concludes with a series of provocative recommendations to reimagine journalism to ensure its resiliency and its ability to speak to a diverse set of issues and readers.




Making India Great


Book Description

India will be the world's most populous country by 2024 and its third largest economy by 2028. But the size of our population and a sense of historical greatness alone are insufficient to guarantee we will fulfil our ambition to become a global power. Our approach to realize this vision needs more than just planning for economic growth. It requires a shift in attitudes. In Making India Great, Aparna Pande examines the challenges we face in the areas of social, economic, military and foreign policy and strategy. She points to the dichotomy that lies at the heart of the nation: our belief in becoming a global power and the reluctance to implement policies and take actions that would help us achieve that goal. The New India holds all the promise of greatness many of its citizens dream of. Can it become a reality? The book delves into this question.




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