Why TV News in India fell from grace?

The descend of TV news has been one of the gravest concerns Indian democracy faces in today's times. An institution which was promoted as a pillar of democracy went rogue and is threatening to destroy the democracy itself. It is hell bent on burning every moral, ethical and professional obligation it has to the republic and its citizen, just to satisfy the powers that be. 

In the last decade of the previous century, India saw the emergence of cable TV. Private TV channels and a spectrum of big & small media players flooded the market. Doordarshan made way for new and exciting alternatives and one of the most radical paradigm shifts was the coming about of 24/7 news channels. Along with the news channels, came the celebrity anchors who became household names breaking news to us every evening at prime time.

Now let's discuss where things went wrong. Once you do a deep dive, you find the broken business model of TV news industry is to be blamed for this mess. TV news has been an incredibly important platform to raise pertinent questions in society and to keep the viewer at its core of all broadcasting and editorial decision. But the business model was heavily reliant on treating the society and on a micro level the viewer as a commodity. It ends up selling the same viewer as a commodity (which it meant to serve) to its customer i.e. The Advertiser. So, in this case the viewer ceases to remain the customer but the advertiser becomes the customer for the channel. Let's understand this in a little more detail by an example.

Take the instance of a small shop at the corner of your street, authorized by a big telecom company to sell mobile phone sim cards to people at dirt cheap prices or no price at all, by collecting their personal information like Aadhar or passport details etc, while cross selling other products as well from the same company. Now, in this situation the person getting the sim card feels he is being served by the shopkeeper and concludes himself to be the customer. On the other hand the shopkeeper is paid by the telecom company to promote its sim card by selling it to people free of cost and marketing it, so in this scenario the telecom company becomes the customer for the shopkeeper, not the guy down the road who bought the sim card. His revenue comes from the telecom company not the guy getting the sim card. The only goal for the shopkeeper here is to achieve maximum sales of sim cards, which the shopkeeper might want to achieve by any means possible or legal, even lying about the product itself. This is good enough to understand, that the guy getting the sim card is just a commodity and the telecom company is eventually the customer for the shopkeeper. Just replace shopkeeper with the TV news channel, the telecom company with the advertiser and the guys getting the sim card with the viewer, everything would become crystal clear.

In TV broadcasting, the costs are very high and the revenue sources are limited. Subscription, which consumers pay to D2H operators or cable operators are miniscule and nothing reaches the broadcaster or the channel. So, the only revenue stream that helps them offset their costs are the revenue coming through advertisements. Now, while advertisers are happy to shell big bucks, they understand it's a "winner takes all" market i.e. the channel or broadcaster with the highest viewership gets the lion's share of advertisements. This has started a mad race among broadcasters to grab eyeballs at any cost, leading to a massive growth in misinformation and fake news. The lose regulations around news broadcasting regarding misinformation also acts as a facilitator for this insanity.

In all this operational and financial cockfight, the news that was supposed to be the central product, finds no relevance. News rooms morph into content creation centres, always creating third grade broadcasting content. Since ground reporting has evaporated in the backdrop of rising cost and plunging revenues, the last mile reach of these broadcasters has been hampered. Now it's all about a yelling anchor with six random people (in separate boxes inside the idiot box) waiting to shout at each other and in turn being yelled at. This anarchy leads to sound pollution and depression and doesn't contribute anything positive to the society.

At this point, we have identified the problem of the broken business model driving TV news broadcasters to lay red carpets for advertisers and not bother about serving their viewers with truth (of-course they serve something which is far from news but a sort of hyper-nationalist drama to shore up viewership). The situation remained concerning but it went to the point of no return once the government and political parties came to their rescue (more to serve their own interests) by becoming the biggest advertisers on their platform, leaving major companies like Netflix and Unilever far behind.

Now, when the political parties and Government of India (GOI) becomes the biggest source of revenue for the TV broadcasters, we can all imagine what kind of priorities would the broadcasters have. News becomes propaganda and is used as a tool to keep the viewer in an imaginary Utopian world of make-belief (SAB CHANGA SI).

Unfortunately, this has become a norm in India. Viewers have not matured enough to pay for the content they consume. Anything which is free in India has a lot of takers. We, as a society have unfortunately become freeloaders. Also, poverty and less income have a lot to do with this, but even people who can pay for quality content wouldn't. So much so, we take turns in using same login credentials to access Netflix for entertainment content among many friends. This behaviour needs to change for viewers to create any kind of shift in the broadcaster's content broadcasting practices and saving factual TV news from dwindling away. Unless that happens, we need to rely on fact checkers and digital news portals, who are not under this kind of tremendous pressure from government and politicians to tweak their content policy for their own interests, under rising operational costs.

Conclusion:

TV news industry propped up during the boom that India witnessed during the last decade. It was mainly other business houses that either acquired stakes in existing news channels or started their own venture. It was for many a side kick but not the main business. It slowly started becoming a way to gain foothold into the political scene for many owners in lieu of favourable content. Also, the broken business model didn't leave much option but to stay closer to the powers in the government and political parties to keep getting advertisements for the channel to continue. This reliance on the political class to keep operations running led to the content quality degrading overtime and a fall from grace for the TV news.