India: When the Press Learns to Look Away!

Every year, India’s press freedom ranking drops a few more places, and every year, two things happen with remarkable predictability. The government dismisses the index as biased. And a section of commentators questions whether such rankings mean anything at all.

Both the responses have just enough validity to sound reasonable, and just enough convenient to be worth examining more carefully. This article examines what India is experiencing -- something quieter and harder to reverse: a structural erosion of the conditions that make independent journalism possible.

India sits at 157th out of 180 countries in this year’s Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index, down from 151st last year. A country that conducts the world’s largest democratic elections finds itself, on this measure, in the same band as states where the mechanisms of democratic accountability are either absent or significantly constrained. But the number, by itself, is not the point. The direction is.

A single bad year proves nothing. A decade of consistent decline, however, is harder to explain away as methodological quibbling. At some point, a pattern stops being a coincidence and starts being a condition. The question worth asking is not whether the index is perfectly calibrated. It is what has changed in the structural conditions for journalism in India that produces this outcome, year after year.

Media Ownership

Two things stand out. The first is ownership. Media has always been a commercial enterprise, and owners have always had interests. That is not new. What is different is the degree to which ownership has concentrated, and the nature of the interests involved. There is a meaningful distinction between a proprietor who holds political opinions and one whose core business depends significantly on the regulatory disposition of the state. The former influences editorial tone. The latter shapes what questions get asked in the first place. Most readers will not notice the difference, because the missing questions leave no visible trace.

India’s media landscape has seen significant consolidation over the last decade, with large conglomerates holding interests across sectors from infrastructure to energy acquiring prominent national outlets. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report consistently finds Indian news consumption concentrated around a small number of dominant players, many with legible proximity to political and economic power. This is not coincidence. It is the structural outcome of a media economy in which ownership and regulatory favour have, over time, found ways to align.

Advertising Dependency

Ownership shapes the frame; advertising determines what it costs to push against it. The structural roots of this dependency run deeper than most readers appreciate. Decades of predatory pricing have left Indian newspapers selling at cover prices that do not cover even ink and newsprint costs, creating what media economist Raju Narisetti has described as a near-total dependence on advertising across the industry.

Into that dependency stepped the State. Data tabled in the Lok Sabha shows that between 2014-15 and 2024-25, the Narendra Modi government spent a total of Rs 5,987 crore on advertising, averaging roughly Rs 1.5 crore every single day. State governments add a further layer, with advertising budgets routinely withheld as signals of editorial displeasure.

As Bobby Ghosh, former editor of the Hindustan Times, observed of this creeping dependency, it opened a door through which, over time, all kinds of pressures have rushed in. An outlet that cannot afford to lose a government account does not need to be instructed to be careful. It learns to be careful on its own, which is precisely what makes the dynamic so difficult to name and so easy to deny.

The electoral bond story is instructive here. While independent digital outlets spent months pursuing the details of political donations routed through the bond scheme, mainstream television news largely ignored it. The story was not suppressed by instruction; it was simply too costly for too many newsrooms to pursue. What was perhaps the most significant political finance story in a generation circulated, for much of its life, only at the margins of the media landscape.

The Legal Environment

A third structural pressure, less discussed than ownership or advertising, is legal attrition. Between 2014 and 2023, the Committee to Protect Journalists documented a steady rise in the use of sedition charges, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, and criminal defamation proceedings against working journalists in India. These cases rarely result in conviction. They do not need to. The cost is in the process: the bail applications, the travel restrictions, the months of legal exposure that make a journalist's continued employment difficult and their sources' trust impossible to sustain. 

The Indian government’s Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 and their subsequent amendments added a further layer, creating ministerial discretion over what constitutes “fake news” in digital content.

In 2024, the government formally notified the PIB Fact Check Unit under these rules, empowering it to identify online content relating to the Union government as “fake,” “false,” or “misleading.” Critics, including civil liberties groups and journalists, argued that the vagueness of these standards was not a flaw in the design. It was the design. 

The chilling effect of this legal environment does not show up in any ranking as a single data point. It shows up in what reporters choose not to investigate, and in the conversations that do not happen because someone decided the risk was not worth it.

As RSF’s Editorial Director Anne Bocandé has noted, the attacks on the right to information are now “more diverse and sophisticated,” with perpetrators increasingly operating without concealment. The result is not a press that has been silenced. It is a press that has learned, in certain areas, to stay quiet of its own accord.

The stories that run are often well-reported. The stories that do not run leave no record of their absence. Narisetti notes that Indian media houses are also notably reluctant to follow up on stories broken by rivals, a practice that allows a single advertiser to pressure one newsroom into dropping a story without worrying that others will pursue it.

Accountability journalism a democracy most needs, the kind that asks whether what the government says it is doing matches what it is actually doing, is precisely the kind that these structural conditions make most costly to produce, and most invisible when it disappears.

It is worth noting that India is not alone in this. The 2024 index classifies more than half the world’s countries in its two most concerning categories, a first since records began in 2002. The pressures on independent journalism are partly global: the economics of digital media have gutted the revenue models that once supported investigative reporting, and social platforms have handed control of news distribution to a small number of private actors with their own interests. India participates in all of these shifts while adding its own regulatory and political dimensions on top.

None of this means Indian journalism is dead. It is not. There is serious, rigorous reporting being done, often by smaller and newer independent outlets working with limited resources and considerable risk. The resilience of that work is genuinely worth acknowledging. But resilience is not the same as systemic health. A few outlets doing excellent work under difficult conditions tells us something about the journalists. It does not tell us that the conditions are acceptable.

The conversation India needs to have is not about any particular ranking. It is about the specific combination of ownership structures, advertising dependencies, and regulatory frameworks that have made accountability journalism progressively harder to sustain. Those are tractable problems. They have been addressed, with varying degrees of success, in other democracies: Norway’s direct press subsidies, Ireland’s statutory Media Fund, the BBC’s charter-insulated public funding model. None is a template, but all demonstrate that ownership concentration and advertising dependency are policy problems with policy responses, not permanent features of the media landscape. They require political will, institutional reform, and an honest acknowledgement that a press which cannot ask inconvenient questions is not serving the democracy that depends on it.

157th is a number. What built it, and what maintains it, is the more important story. It is also, rather tellingly, the one that gets the least coverage. The recent passage of India’s broadcasting regulation amendments and tightened digital content rules are not abstract developments. They extend to online news the same discretionary regulatory environment that has already reshaped broadcast journalism. The stories that will not be told as a result will not announce their own absence.

The farmer protest coverage that was throttled, the electoral bond reporting that mainstream television largely ignored while independent outlets pursued it, the Kashmir ground reports that circulated only through smaller digital platforms: these are not anomalies. They are previews. The ranking is a lagging indicator of a direction that is already well established. The more urgent question is whether enough people are paying attention before the conditions become permanent.

Dr. Aniruddha Jena teaches at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi, and is a Charles Wallace India Trust Visiting Fellow at King’s College London. Dr. Neeraj Bunkar is a researcher specialising in caste and cinema. The views are personal.