Here’s a story I wrote for N3Magazine, an interview with James Crabtree, author of “The Billionaire Raj,” for the annual magazine of the Asian American Journalists Association’s Asia conference, held in May 2019 at Hong Kong University.
By Tom Benner
India’s media market remains strong, at least when compared to many other countries in Asia.
Yet James Crabtree, a former Financial Times journalist previously based in Mumbai, sees three large shifts affecting India’s vast media landscape — worrisome trends that will continue to have a coarsening effect on the state of the media in the world’s largest democracy.
The rising popularity of raucous television news, which comes at the expense of more civil discourse and public interest programming, combined with a lack of gatekeeping policies to prevent the spread of misinformation on social media, has contributed to a rise in nationalistic and anti-minority rhetoric in India. Similarly, the country’s shift from print to digital advertising signals a decline in print media’s influence on the general population. Continue reading …
Tom Benner Reports 