News for Sale: ‘Paid News’, Media Ethics, and India’s Democratic Public Sphere

It is difficult to theorize the practice of ‘paid news’ in routine democratic discourse. As such, sociologists have been skeptical of media’s objectivity or selective perceptions, but even by those standards putting a price tag on news coverage is the new low for India’s thriving quality press. Ample literature has been written on how media is linked to the exercise of power and hegemony, how it helps in manufacturing consent and steering of public opinions, or how concerns of the marginalized citizens seldom make news (Gramsci 1971, Adorno and Horkheimer 1979, Herman and Chomsky 1988, Entman 1989, Nimmo and Combs 1990, Entman and Bannett 2001). More specifically, some research is now available on the awesome spread of the Indian media, particularly in the language market, and also on its pro-urban and pro-market predispositions (Jeffrey 2000, Ninan 2007, Thakurta 2009, Mudgal 2011, Krishnan 2012). But the issue of selling editorial space by the ‘free press’ still baffles the believers and the skeptics alike. What is now (in)famous as ‘paid news’ in India is the practice of charging a fee, in cash or equity, from politicians, film stars, businessmen, or from private companies, for presenting biased and one-sided news items to be passed off as routine news coverage. Its occurrence goes up during elections, when individual candidates or their parties could do with orchestrated hype, or when a private company enters the equity market or even when a new movie is about to be released.