Traditionally, the two channels for news information more popular in
India were BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) and CNN
(Cable News Network). However, nowadays the world of news is
becoming more and more complicated in this country because of the
proliferation of sources that are changing the global news-scape. At
the same time that journalism is going through a critical period in
most of the occidental democracies, in places like India it is
possible to find another situation: mass media, specially if we focus
on television, are a growing market. In fact, looking at this market
form a global context, we could say that it is equipped with a huge
pluralism, for instance, it has over eighteen official languages and
seventy-round-the-clock news channels, what means this is the world´s
most linguistically diverse media landscape. And future for TV
industry in India is promising, in a country where more than 60% of
the population live in the countryside, we could conclude that a huge
market is still waiting to be connected. In fact, while TV
penetration in urban spheres is around 64%, when talking about rural
areas this data changes to 19%. So far, number of TV households is
113 million, and broadcasters revenue comes from advertising in 73%
and from subscription in 27%.
Satellite
Television Asia Region (STAR) is an Asian TV service owned by Rupert
Murdoch´s News Corporation. According to the STAR website,
their service has more than 300 million viewers in 53 countries and
it is watched by approximately 120 million viewers every day. One of
India´s most popular Hindi general entertainment channels is STAR
plus ( http://www.startv.com.tr/), it was one of the
five original STAR TV channels when it launched in 1991, and was
dedicated to English language entertainment (which then became STAR
World). Murdoch was responsible for introducing the first music
television channel in India (Channel V), reality TV series
(Lakme Fashion Show) and the adaptation of an international
game show ( Who Wants to be a Millionaire?). In order to
launch this last mentioned programme he used one of the most popular
Bollywood´s film stars to actuate as a presenter, what made it a
very successful format among the Indian audience.
So, the
question is, are we attending to a Bollywoodization of the
news media in India? One important data to take into account is that
entertainment and the media sector in this country is projected to be
worth twenty nine billion dollars by 2012. In addition,
news-entertainment synergies between Hollywood and Bollywood have
been institutionalized during the last years. And, the conclusion of
this kind of market strategies is that they bet for the three “C”
of Indian infotainment: Crime – presentation of the country
as a dangerous place-, Cricket – Murdoch´s sport channel-,
and Cinema -Bollywood-.
Finally,
television can be also contemplated as a new source to democratize
the country; for example, in this huge offer of channels we can find
some of them, as it is the case for NDTV ( http://www.ndtv.com/), where the quality of
contents really cares. So, it is also possible to create a TV for
development, apart from that businessmen blinded by millions of
revenues.
· In
conclusion...
Privatization of Hindi TV has entailed the proliferation of new
channels broadcasting different kind of contents. On the one hand,
this fact could represent the Indian TV-market aperture to media
convergence and desregularization; but, on the other hand, this
increasing offer of contents brings to the citizens more information
about current affairs, what, at the same time, contributes to
democratize the public sphere. Of course, Mr. Murdoch and its News
Corporation presence in the Hindi market plays an important role in
the Foxilization of news in this country, or, what it´s the same,
the rise of infotainment. But, as I have explained before, freedom of
expression is being also used for developing serious discourses based
on accuracy and pluralism (e.g. NDTV).
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