 NDTV, which many consider to be one of the last bastions of old-school television journalism, is now under a hostile takeover attack, a takeover bid by a company that's owned by India's richest man, one of the richest people in the world, Gautam Adani. If this goes through, then a large chunk of India's television news will come under the direct control of two big corporate houses. Between Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani. Between the two, their combined revenue, annual revenue is about 4% of India's GDP, and their combined net wealth is about 1.5% of the total wealth of India, everything that everyone owns in this country, two people versus 1.38 billion people. Why is this consolidation of news media platforms, television news platforms in the hands of two big business houses worry? That's because ideally in a democracy, every citizen should have absolute and complete information about everything that's going on in the corridors of power and what is going on in the economy. Not only because they need to be informed when they go to vote every couple of years, but also to just live their daily life to have information about what is going on in the world around them. But obviously in real life democracies, this is not possible, this does not happen, this is a utopian expectation. But the media, the news media is supposed to provide a semblance of access of information to the ordinary citizen. That is why we say journalism is when you speak truth to power. So when a handful of people who have monopoly control over large sectors of the economy come to control news media, then there is no two opinions about this. There is a danger to the operation of democracy. And this is the danger that India faces today, but the question is how did this come to pass? How did we come to a situation where two or three big corporates began to control all of television news media? And the answer to this question ultimately boils down to just one thing. The fact that you and I do not want to pay for the news that we watch. We don't want to pay for news TV whether it is through direct subscriptions or through a license fee which can create a public trust which will then fund a public news broadcaster. There is a model for that, the BBC, which has a degree of independence, a significant degree of independence from the powers that be because it is directly funded by the people. That is why in India almost the entire revenues of news channels come from advertising. And when that happens, the real customer, the real user for news channels is not you and me, not the viewer but the advertising corporate. That is why advertisers have acquired so much clout in newsrooms and senior editors sometimes self-censor, sometimes top stories that might end up annoying corporates because they don't want to lose advertising. And advertisers have also directly started boycotting or staying away from channels which ask questions of the government. Some of them do it because they don't want to mess with the government, they don't want to get into any trouble but others do it for ideological reasons. And this puts additional pressure of editors who are tempted to kill any story that goes against the government or criticizes the government or at the very least water it down. This is a form of censorship through the back door. So you and I watch news that has already been pre-censored to a certain extent because of corporate intervention because we don't want to pay for the news, not even the amount that we pay for OTT platforms on which we watch entertainment. Ironically, a bigger reason why corporates today are getting control of news channels is because there was a time when news channels believed that you and I, the viewers, will one day pay for what we are watching. In fact, this belief made news channels an attractive investment proposition from the early 2000s and a lot of investors wanted to back news channels. News channels raised money from the stock markets. They sold equity to big foreign investors, to institutional investors and they used that money to expand. They used that money to build new studios. They used that money to buy new equipment, spend more on news gathering and travel and news channels mushroomed in the mid-2000s and what did that do? News channels fought amongst themselves to compete for the limited pool of talent of journalists or TV journalists who they wanted to hire. That pushed up journalist salaries and pushed up news channel costs. Everything seemed fine as long as news channels could sell more shares, raise more money and also use their high valuation, their both bloated valuation to go to banks and raise loans. But then the 2008 global stock market crash happened and news media companies, news media stocks which had high costs and very low revenues were the worst hit. Suddenly news channel management could no longer raise money from the markets. The valuations had crashed so they couldn't even use their shares as collateral to raise more loans. In this situation, it's actually big corporates who came to bail them out. They sold equity to big corporates and in some cases the entire company was sold to a big business house and in other cases loans were taken against equity from big business houses. News channels had no other avenue open for funds and this was the only way they could survive and that opened the door for what we are seeing today. The corporate takeover of television news. If viewers had decided that they should pay a certain amount for the news that they want to watch if they had paid for serious news, important news, news that would keep them informed in a democracy then news channels would have been able to fight off their situation. The one that they faced when there was an economic slowdown and perhaps survived today. Now if there's a corporate control of news media, we all are to blame for it. That's the show today. Keep watching NewsClick. Do like this video, share it and subscribe to our channel as well.