A fact that will not startle any professional journalist in India is that the nation’s mainstream news media are firmly in the grip of corporations, which exercise control chiefly through direct or indirect ownership of news outlets and advertising budgets. It is rare for a major scam involving a corporation to be unearthed exclusively through a journalistic investigation. Most scandals, including the one over how the government allocated coal deposits, have surfaced as reports on investigations by government agencies or public interest lawsuits filed by concerned citizens.
Except for the occasional reports on court rulings and briefings by government agencies, there is nothing much in India’s mainstream media that has hurt the nation’s big corporations. Indian journalism, it appears, has been tamed.
