 Ravish Kumar, formerly of NDTV coined the term Godi media. This word has gone viral now, it is used by everyone and many of you who use the term probably do not even know that it was once coined by Ravish. What Ravish wanted to depict with the term Godi media was the image of a media that is sitting in the lap of those who are in power. Not just political power, but also financial and economic power. It is his description of the mainstream media of today. Now, you all know that Ravish Kumar decided to quit NDTV when the network was bought over recently. This is an award-winning journalist with an absolute cult following. In a normal market, he should have been lapped up by NDTV's competitors. But no one has offered him a job till now. Winner of the Max SSA Award for his outstanding journalism hasn't been able to get another job. And Ravish is not alone. There are many others who have either had to quit or have been shunted out of mainstream media. Abhisar Sharma, who you see on this channel, Puneer Prasad Bajpayee, Ajit Anjum, Srinivasan Jan, Nidhi Razdan. These are some of the bigger names that you might have heard of. There are many young people, young journalists who are less visible, who have also lost their jobs or have quit because they could no longer accept what was happening in the newsroom. For their bosses were telling them to do. This is one of the biggest changes that has taken place in India since 2014. The complete alignment of news media with the power. Now I'm not saying that there were no Ghodi journalists in the UPF period. Many of the top journalists that you see today were outright power brokers. Let's call a spade a spade. But they still were fair to the opposition and they gave opposition leaders enough of a voice. Even those journalists who spent their evenings hobnobbing with ministers, top bureaucrats and big corporates did criticize government policy. They did ask tough questions of the government. That has completely stopped now. But what caused this? There are various reasons for this. But the biggest of them is the complete financial collapse of news companies. News organizations were actually doing very well between the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s even when they weren't earning huge profits. They had enough funding to be able to attract the best talents with good pay packages. Remember, this was the period when India's economy was opening up to global capital. There was a massive consumer boom amongst the upper middle classes. Young people from India's elite over finishing their education wanted more comfortable lives than their parents had. They wanted cars, washing machines, microwaves, different kinds of gadgets, foreign holidays, meals in five-star-budget restaurants, for instance. Things that their parents were beginning to enjoy only in their middle age. Young people wanted all that right at the beginning of their careers. I repeat, I'm not talking about the low middle class here. I'm speaking of those who ruled India, the bureaucratic managerial class and what their children wanted. By the mid-90s, children from the English-speaking elite no longer wanted to be IS or IFS officers or even become university teachers, for instance. They wanted jobs which would give them both the prestige and social capital that their parents had and good money. Journalism, especially TV journalism, offered that avenue. And once TV began to attract talent away from other knowledge-based industries, print followed suit. By the end of the 1990s, newspapers, too, began to pay huge salaries. Journalists' pay actually came pretty close to corporate salaries. And by the mid-2000s, editors were earning, but bankers were being paid. Now, many of these English-speaking elite journalists came from secular liberals, often pretty westernized backgrounds. Many of them were sympathetic to Nehruvian socialism and sometimes even the left, although they then self-believed in free market and free enterprise. They came with a certain idealized notion of what journalism is all about in a democracy. They believed that it was their duty to ask questions, to grill politicians, to speak for the underdog. Of course, they were always trapped in their own liberal and sometimes neoliberal belief systems. So they never really questioned corporates or the market or the neoliberal economic policies followed by governments of that time. But in general, there was a progressive liberal atmosphere in newsrooms, which were dominated by these people. By the way, this was not restricted to only English-speaking English-language newsrooms. The same atmosphere, the same belief system was replicated in Hindi and regional-language news organizations as well. There's another reason, another way in which money helped create the news boom of the early 2000s and that is in news gathering and news production. You could see this change the most in television, but print was also affected by it. News organizations were able to spend much more to send their reporters to faraway places to cover stories. This included sending teams to Afghanistan or Iraq to cover the war, for instance, which was a very expensive thing to do. But here's the rub, much of the increased spending in the mid-2000s was being funded through equity sales and even loans. News companies raised money through IPOs. They then sold more of their shares to big funds. They used their market valuation to take big loans from banks. In a sense, they were actually running on empty and then came the great financial crisis of 2008. News videos stock just crashed. News companies could no longer raise funds. They had these huge loans to pay back, so they began cutting costs. First, it happened in news gathering and production and then by downsizing, that is by sacking employees. News channels also went populist. They focused on being entertaining and sensational instead of doing good old-fashioned journalism. But even then, organizations maintained editorial balance. They gave enough space to criticism of the government. This changed in 2014 and I would argue this has a lot to do with the return of a government with an absolute majority after a full 30 years. Before Narendra Modi's 2014 victory, the last time the party got absolute majority in the election was in 1984 with Rajiv Gandhi. And one should not forget, when Rajiv Gandhi was prime minister, he did try to curb the media by bringing in an anti-deformation law. He tried to do that, which would have made it very easy to muzzle journalists. What has got added now to the absolute power of the central government is corporate control of news media. Old promoters of news companies have gradually had to compromise with big corporates to keep their businesses going because their earnings have crashed and because they've got wiped out in the stock markets. Take just four examples here. In January 2008, the network 18 in their stock had hit a high of over 530 rupees. Today it is just around 53 rupees. In the same period, NDTV's share prices dropped from 470 rupees to 475 rupees. HT media has crashed from 260 rupees in January 2008 to just 15 rupees now. Jagran Prakashan from 170 rupees to just 70 rupees. That is why big corporates have been able to buy up news organizations. And those who retain control are still entirely dependent on corporate advertising. They come mess with corporate and have their revenue taps turned off. So, as India's political economy has become increasingly oriented towards promoting and sustaining big business or monopoly capital, big business has started to use news media. It's under their control to push the gender power. You could ask what stopped journalists from walking out. As I said right at the beginning, many have. But the way in which media jobs have dried up, most people cannot afford to just get up and leave. They don't have alternate jobs to go to. Just look at these two numbers. In March 2016, there were 6.97 lakh jobs in media. In February 2022, that had crashed to 2.38 lakh jobs down to one-third of what it was seven years ago. So, those who are in mid-career have families to take care of. They simply cannot get up and say, I'm going where the editors and anchors have sold out for big money. They have to put their heads down and bear it. That is why most journalists in Gaudi media organizations keep quiet. And that is how Gaudi media continues to spread its venom across the nation. 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