Parthasarathi on Media Diversity

CMDS fellow Vibodh Parthasarathi examines how the governance of the newspaper business in mid-20th century India enrich our understanding of contests over media diversity.

In his essay published in Media, Culture & Society, on regulatory debates in India in 1954-1982, Parthasarathi argues that the contests spawned during these debates being driven as much by normative standpoints on the press as a modern institution as by enumerations of the actual dynamics in the newspaper business.
The paper highlights the anxieties about media diversity expressed by the two press commissions of the era and related policy debates in the interim; and reveals the desires to mitigate the risks to media diversity being undermined by mobilizing unqualified notions of media freedom.
The essay provides three insights into contests over media diversity and its relationship with media freedom in press policy between the 1950s and late 1970s. First, anxieties about the newspaper business got articulated in reports of both press commissions by invoking motley ideas about diversity, and risks to it. Second, although veering between normative and empirical standpoints on diversity, their underlying concerns correspond to contemporary scholarly conceptions of risks to media diversity in the press: viz. source diversity, content diversity, market share diversity, linguistic diversity, geographical diversity and ownership diversity. Third, for most of the 1950s and 1960s, policy debates focused on risks arising from market share and ownership diversity in the metropolitan press. The altered market structure catalyzed by the expansion of the subdominant press by the late 1970s, while imparting a degree of linguistic and geographical diversity, complicated conceptions of risks to diversity proposed in earlier decades.