Jimmy Kimmel to Kunal Kamra: Trump’s US follows a familiar playbook from Modi’s India

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on September 25, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/09/25/jimmy-kimmel-to-kunal-kamra-trumps-us-follows-a-familiar-playbook-from-modis-india

What do the current government of the United States, headed by Donald Trump, and the government in India, led by Narendra Modi, have in common?

I would suggest at least three aspects, although there are many more. One, an inability to tolerate criticism from the media, even as they declare that they head democracies, and second, a very thin skin that cannot tolerate humour.

The third, and in many ways far more insidious, is the attempt to control, regulate and even capture the media without making any changes in the Constitutional provisions that underwrite media freedom.

How do we define what has happened to India’s mainstream media, especially in the last decade? There have been various discussions whether we are living through an “undeclared emergency”, referring to the emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in 1975. Such a comparison serves no purpose in trying to understand the process that has resulted in a flattened mediascape, where even the normal questioning that is integral to journalism in a democracy, is virtually absent in mainstream media. 

I think the term “media capture” explains best the situation of the media in India. This is a term that is being used by media scholars to explain recent events in the US under the Trump regime where we have witnessed a combination of defamation suits and pressure on media owners to fall in line.  

The most recent incident was the decision of the ABC television channel to suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s popular late-night show. Although within a week, Kimmel has been reinstated, the very fact that the channel felt compelled to take this step led to much discussion about what this represents in terms of the future of the freedom of the press in the US. 

In an article in the Columbia Journalism Review, under the headline “Is the US media captured?” Joel Simon quotes several media scholars who have used the term to explain the state of the media in authoritarian regimes such as in Hungary, Turkey, or Mexico. It entails “government strategies ranging from manipulation of advertising to economic and regulatory pressure to the exploitation of informal relationships with media owners”, he writes. 

The article discusses whether such an eventuality of “media capture” is a possibility under the Trump regime, if it hasn’t already happened to some extent. Simon paraphrases a media scholar thus: “What’s unprecedented in the US … is the willingness of media companies to so transparently put their business interests ahead of their public interest obligations. When one corporation does it, another might pull back on critical coverage to avoid regulatory pressure—a kind of anticipatory obedience or capture in advance.”

Senator Bernie Sanders provides us with a useful illustration of what is meant by the term “media capture” in the context of the US.

In a post on X, he writes: “This is what American media looks like today: The wealthiest person in the world, Elon Musk, owns X. The second-wealthiest person in the world, Larry Ellison, owns Paramount, including CBS, and will possibly now be taking over TikTok and CNN. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post and Twitch. Mark Zuckerberg owns both Facebook and Instagram. In fact, the five richest men in the world are ALL media owners or executives. When we talk about oligarchy in America, it’s not only income and wealth inequality. It’s control over the media and what the American people are able to see, hear and read.”

In India, the richest man owns NDTV, the second richest owns Network 18 Group, and the dominant media houses are all owned by businesses that must remain on the right side of the government, a “kind of anticipatory obedience” as mentioned by Simon in the article quoted above. The dividing line between editorial and management was erased well before this last decade but the results of that erasure are more evident today in India’s mediascape than earlier.

Just look at the print media on September 17, when the prime minister turned 75. Newspapers were replete with page after page of advertisements and signed articles praising Modi. As if this was not enough, a few days later, the government’s decision to lower GST rates, after the country had lived through eight years of much higher rates brought in by the same government, was also greeted with page after page of ads by businesses and corporate houses thanking Modi for taking this step. Such a display of obsequiousness to “the leader” would be considered an embarrassment in any country that claims it is a democracy and has a free press.  

In India, we’ve also had our Jimmy Kimmel equivalents. They do not appear on mainstream television but have a notable following. For instance, the stand-up comic Kunal Kamra has had multiple cases filed against him because someone, somewhere, was offended by his jokes. Or Munawar Faruqui, who was hauled off to jail during a performance in Madhya Pradesh in 2021 and finally acquitted after spending 37 days in jail.

In addition to all this, in my view, the central government’s September 16 order asking 12 independent journalists and news platforms to take down allegedly defamatory content, which included 138 YouTube links and 83 Instagram posts, on Adani Enterprises Limited (AEL) removes even the chimera of pretence that it has any respect for the concept of freedom of the press. This order followed the September 6 ruling by a Delhi court, in response to a defamation suit by AEL against several journalists, asking them to take down content on AEL. The line between the government, and India’s richest man and a close ally of the prime minister, was erased by that one action.  

Although the matter continues to be heard in another court, the very fact that the government intervened on behalf of a private business, without allowing the matter to be assessed by a court of law, illustrates vividly the extent to which even the pretence of media freedom has been abandoned by this government. 

This has happened gradually over the last decade in a way that people have become used to a media that generally echoes the government’s line, questions only mildly, and stays away from any issue that could result in censure or loss of revenue.

The trajectory is now familiar. Get friendly industrial houses to buy media conglomerates. Then apply formal and informal pressure on those media houses that are still being critical. In time, mainstream media will be tamed.  

As for the pinpricks that constitute independent media, those not dependent on government advertising, or big business, you first ignore them because you think they don’t matter. Then you wake up to the fact that they do. You realise that technology has enhanced their reach. And the dwindling credibility of mainstream has further given the combined strength of many small platforms a reach that should not be ignored.

That is when you move against them. First, by protecting your main supporters, big business openly aligned with you. Then, by encouraging your loyal supporters spread across India to file cases against individual journalists or independent platforms under existing laws. These cases are filed in states where the party in power is the BJP. Hence, the police do not wait to even consider whether the complaint has any validity before they move. 

And all the while you keep assuring the rest of the world, and your followers in India, that this country is indeed the “mother of democracy” and that you are deeply committed to the Constitution and all the freedoms guaranteed in it.

The Modi government has provided a blueprint to other countries claiming to be democracies on how they can manage and capture the media.

The editorial we didn’t see on Emergency@50: Authoritarianism with anaesthesia in 2025

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on June 26, 2025

 

Anniversaries are a ritual in India. This week, it has been interesting to watch how the 50th anniversary of the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi at midnight on June 25, 1975, is being observed. 

 

There are several people in the governing party, the Bharatiya Janata Party who opposed the emergency. And in the opposition is the Congress Party, held responsible for the Emergency. As a result, the occasion has been reduced to one of the BJP finding more ways to slam the Congress by pitching the ‘Samvidhan Hatya Diwas’ to counter the opposition’s campaign to uphold the Constitution. This is politics as usual. 

 

But how does all this rhetoric help us to understand what the Emergency was all about, what we should learn from it, and whether what’s happening in India today reflects a difference or a similarity to the events that unfolded 50 years ago? 

I ask this as someone who was a journalist at that time, working with Himmat Weekly, a news magazine founded by Rajmohan Gandhi. Hence, I found this statement of Union Home Minister Amit Shah, while speaking about that period in our history, particularly ironic: “Just imagine the moment you became subjects of a tyrant within a day. You were a journalist or a student but suddenly became a danger to the country.”

Perhaps the selective amnesia that afflicts most politicians made him forget people like Umar Khalid, a student leader who questioned the Modi government’s intent in bringing in the Citizenship Amendment Act. Khalid was arrested in 2020 and continues to languish in jail without trial, without bail, for more than six years. He must have wondered how he suddenly became a danger to the country. A country where the government had not declared an internal Emergency.

Or Siddique Kappan, the Delhi correspondent of a Malayalam news portal who was arrested while on his way to report the rape of a Dalit woman in Hathras in October 2020. He was incarcerated for over two years, is out of bail, but still has the cases hanging over his head.

Or the Kashmiri journalists who have been in and out of jail. Why does this government consider them a danger to the country? Read this report in Kashmir Times on these journalists, their battle for bail and the multiple cases they have had to fight. How can this happen if the people who fought the emergency opposed precisely this kind of arbitrary action at that time?

These are the questions we should be asking on the anniversary of the Emergency. Though there is little evidence of them being asked except editorially in Indian Express which has run an extensive series on the Emergency.

Even there, it is political scientist Suhas Palshikar who raises several pertinent questions in his edit page article on June 25. He emphasises that the anniversary should be a time of introspection and asks whether the “Emergency template” has really been discarded. For instance, like the “foreign hand” that Indira Gandhi saw lurking everywhere, today there is the American billionaire George Soros, and if you protest you are labelled anti-national or an urban Naxal. Palshikar concludes: “The essence of the Emergency is being normalised in India’s current moment.”

To understand this better, just look at the state of the Indian media. During the Emergency, censorship was imposed. Everyone was required to check if what was published adhered to “guidelines” issued by the government that kept changing as the Emergency progressed. If the authorities thought you had violated them, your publisher could be fined or jailed, your printing press could be sealed, and you would find it difficult to continue.

As has been recorded in several books and articles over the years, mainstream print media, and there was only print in those days, conformed and fell in line. Indian Express did resist, as recounted in this piece by Coomi Kapoor who was working with it as a reporter at that time. In her first-person account, Kapoor writes about the way the government used all avenues of pressure, including the income tax department, trying to seize the printing press, and denying advertisements from the government and public sector companies to bring the paper in line.

If all this sounds familiar, it is the template this government has followed in the last decade to get the media to conform and relay the official narrative without asking too many questions.

During the Emergency, the Indian Express could withstand such pressure for some time because of its feisty owner Ramnath Goenka and because it had the financial ability to withstand it. 

What is not acknowledged adequately is the role played by many smaller publications, in English and in the regional languages, that also tried to resist censorship. They did not have the deep pockets of mainstream media houses like the Express group. And as a result, many of them had to fold up. 

 

Himmat Weekly, for instance, where I worked, also ran blank editorials after the Emergency was declared. It also tried to bypass censorship by deciding that we did not have to submit a copy to the censor as the government had declared “guidelines”. We thought we were too small and inconsequential to attract the wrath of the government. But in doing so, we were clearly delusional as in an authoritarian regime, even small pinpricks of opposition or questioning will not be tolerated.

Himmat survived the Emergency, just about. It was deprived of advertising; it had fines and notices slapped on it for “violations” of censorship guidelines that seem ridiculous today (such as using a quotation from Mahatma Gandhi about freedom), and had to hunt for a printer who would risk printing the magazine.

I have recounted the Himmat story over the years several times as illustrative of what happened to many other small publications (read here, here and here). And to point out that the story of resistance to authoritarianism is not just about prominent politicians and big media, but also of small independent publications and ordinary people. This is a history that sometimes goes unrecorded and unacknowledged.

For instance, few know about A D Gorwala, a retired civil servant who brought out a small journal named Opinion. When Emergency was declared, he refused to submit to censorship and continued till he was ordered to shut down. In his last issue, he wrote:

“The current Indira regime, founded on June 26, 1975, was born through lies, nurtured through lies, and flourished by lies. The essential ingredient of its being is the lie. Consequently, to have a truth-loving, straight thinking journal to examine it week after week and point out its falsehoods becomes intolerable to it.” 

Others like Minoo Masani’s Freedom First, or Janata Weekly, whose editor G G Parikh is now 100 years old and still as feisty as ever, also resisted. And there were many others across India.

The reason we need to heed such struggles is to understand what we are witnessing today. 

Take the media. Mainstream media has mostly fallen in line. The resisters are the small independent YouTube channels run by journalists who once worked in mainstream, or digital news platforms that perform the kind of “journalism of courage” that we so sorely need today. 

As Palshikar points out, aspects of the Emergency have been normalised. It has happened gradually in a way that most Indians seem to have been anesthetised. We have accepted that governments have a right to suppress dissent, to jail opponents, to put pressure on the media to conform, and to use all the power it has in its hands to ensure that its actions are not challenged.  

And yet, 50 years after the Emergency, we are lamenting that Indira Gandhi did precisely this.  

Ownership, money, Modi 3.0 uncertainty: A sobering reality check for election cheer

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on June 13, 2024

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/06/13/ownership-money-modi-30-uncertainty-a-sobering-reality-check-for-election-cheer

The Lok Sabha elections will continue to be analysed threadbare for some time to come. They were unexpected, revelatory about the Indian electorate and uplifting, even if momentarily, because they suggested that democracy is still alive in India.

The celebrations, however, by those who believe that the election results, and a governing party with a diminished mandate, will lead to substantial change need to be tempered with a reality check.

Let’s just look at the media, especially television news – call it “mainstream”, “Big Media” or “godi media”. There is little to debate now that in the last decade under Narendra Modi’s government, it has been a supplicant, rather than acting as the Fourth Estate in a democracy.

The clips of the dozens of interviews Modi gave to these friendly channels during the elections are proof enough, if that was needed. News anchors, who on any given day, are in scream mode, were listening and smiling attentively even as Modi proceeded to lecture and even insult the media.

After a decade of bending over backwards to please the ruling party, to amplify its poisonous and hate-filled narrative, especially against Muslims, and to save its aggression for the opposition, can one really expect a change just because the governing party’s numbers in this Lok Sabha are fewer than the last time?

I think not, and this is why.

First, even if the BJP is now more dependent on its coalition partners in the NDA today than it was yesterday, is there any proof that these partners are committed to freedom of expression and freedom of the press? Would they really object if this government – which the media has rightly called “Modi 3.0” rather than the “NDA government” because Modi will continue to dominate – continues to find ways to curb dissent and critical voices in the media? 

As a former chair of Prasar Bharati, Jawhar Sircar points out in this article in The Wire, “The godi media is likely to be a little less virulent against the opposition, as one never knows who may come in next. But the screaming television prosecutors, including a few rotund well-dressed creatures who revel in tormenting anyone who dares to question Modi, would hardly change — as they earn unimaginable amounts of crores.”

Which brings us to the second point, that the owners of these television channels dictate the line they take. And that ownership pattern is not changing.  As long as it is evident that Modi and the BJP are in full control of the government even if technically, they are part of a coalition, the topics discussed might change a little, but the approach will remain the same. There is no cost attached to attacking the opposition, but criticism of this government will still have repercussions.

Media analyst Vanita Kohli-Khandekar, who writes a column in Business Standard, makes some additional and interesting observations about Big Media. She points out that while the Election Commission figures reveal that 642 million people voted in these elections, and of these, roughly 235 million or 36.6 percent voted for the BJP, if you watch any of the roughly 400 news channels, you will think that the news on it is directed only at these 235 million who support the BJP. What about the remaining 407 million news consumers, she asks. 

This gap has been filled to some extent by independent news channels on YouTube and for those who read news, the digital news platforms that are not dependent on big business. Their numbers might not exceed those who watch or read news provided by these mainstream channels and newspapers, but there is little doubt that they have played an important role in the last five years, in filling the void left by mainstream media. They have been the source of nuanced and in-depth reporting, of critical comment, of interviews that inform and educate. 

Their ability to continue and remain independent in the future, however, is uncertain. This Modi 3.0 government might wait a while before it proceeds with the agenda it outlined in its previous avatar but there is little doubt that at some stage it will find ways to curb independent media. 

For instance, even before the first sitting of the new Lok Sabha, Mohammed Zubair of AltNews has been informed that the Delhi Police has asked that his account on X be taken down because it violates the Information Technology Act.  The social media platform has not complied with the request but the very fact this has happened within days of the formation of the new government provides a necessary reality check on its approach towards a free and independent media.  

We must remember that there are two interventions that will adversely impact independent media that are still on the anvil. One is the setting up of a “fact-checking unit” that will determine what is false or misleading and insist it be taken down by social media platforms. And the other is to bring all news-related YouTube channels under the Broadcasting Services Act which will give the government the power to curtail their content.

Journalist Charmy Harikrishnan sums up the last decade under Modi well when she writes:

“This was a lost decade of journalism. A generation of journalists has come of age with the bitter knowledge that the only news that is fit to print is positive news or spin. It is time we looked at ourselves in the mirror and flinched. It is time we wrote an editorial to ourselves. It is time we rediscovered the 5 Ws and put them to every announcement the government makes instead of responding with 1 Yes. It is time we redeemed ourselves.”  

Until this Modi 3.0 government settles back into its bad old ways with respect to independent media, there has been a welcome breathing space. This has permitted some interesting comment and analysis as well as much-needed humour and parody of India’s most powerful man.

The best is the cover of the latest issue of Frontline magazine, with a cartoon by Satish Acharya. It says all that needs to be said.

Also, much of the debate on TV, especially after the exit polls of June 1 that were way off the mark, took away from a more nuanced understanding of what had happened on the ground in these elections.

For those who wanted to know, The Hindu ran the post-poll survey by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) over several days. Equally useful and interesting is the interview by Manisha Pande of Newslaundry with Sanjay Kumar, the director of CSDS. The interview is worth watching because it answers so many questions that people must have to understand what has changed in India to throw up these results.

And finally, let me end by mentioning what I consider one of the most heart-warming articles to appear post-results even though I am not as optimistic about the future. Written by well-known cultural activist and literary critic G N Devy in The Telegraph, it is addressed to the Indian voter:

“Political analysts may lose sight of the fact that Indians are heaving sighs of relief not because their respective parties have won or lost but because they know that democracy has recovered from a spell of authoritarianism and the cult of personality… Leaders drunk on power, reeking of arrogance, need to know that as they were giving their lectures, thumping their chests, abusing their adversaries, pandering lies and posturing as superhuman, Indians were watching them without giving even the slightest clue as to which way their thoughts were going.”

The clues were there, given by independent media, but these leaders were not watching.

Media takeaways from 2021: What the government wants you to remember, and what it doesn’t

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on December 23, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/12/23/media-takeaways-from-2021-what-the-government-wants-you-to-remember-and-what-it-doesnt

 

As 2021 winds down, there are images that remain seared in our collective memories of this year.

Most vivid, and eviscerating, are those of funeral pyres and half-buried bodies on the banks of the Ganga as the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic raged through the country, killing in its wake lakhs of people. Many died unattended as hospitals ran out of oxygen. Others were not even counted as Covid deaths because they never made it to a hospital in time. Of those who succumbed to the virus, some got decent burials and cremations; others were left on the banks of rivers.

The photographers who captured these visuals need to be recognised and thanked. For these images cannot be wished away however hard the government might try and make us forget. Let us remember especially Danish Siddiqui, the brave Reuters photojournalist who was killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan in July. His photographs of the pandemic remain an unforgettable record of those terrible months.

Of course, if the Modi government had its way, the defining image of 2021 would be that of the prime minister inaugurating the Kashi Vishwanath Dham corridor on December 13. For two days, television channels gave wall-to-wall coverage of Modi carrying out Hindu religious rituals in a highly choreographed event. Not a word of scepticism appeared in the media as every move of the PM was recorded, often with breathless reverence.

While we have come to expect nothing less from Indian television channels, one had hoped that at least the print media would show a little more balance. Yet, in newspaper after newspaper, we were greeted first with the gaudy full-page advertisements issued by the UP government, predictably with the mug shots of both the PM and the UP chief minister, followed by the real page one (relegated to page five) with the same photographs of the Kashi Vishwanath Dham corridor.

There had already been a build up to the event by way of articles such as this in Fortune India calling the corridor “The Highway to Heaven”. We know how much was spent on the project, an estimated Rs 399 crore of taxpayers' money. But the question that must also be asked is how much was spent on the publicity leading up to its inauguration given that many newspapers carried full-page advertisements on the day of the inauguration.

Only a couple of newspapers gave us another side of the story, the unhappiness of the people whose land was forcibly acquired, such as this story. But such reports were drowned out by the adulatory tone of most of the reports in print and on TV.

As if this was not enough, barely a week later, the foundation stone for a road was laid in UP, once again by the prime minister. This time too the UP government took either the front page, or a couple of pages inside, in several leading newspapers. The ads boasted of the state government's achievements even though the announcement was about a road yet to be constructed.

The UP government advertisement story is best illustrated by its full-page ads announcing the foundation stone laying of a new airport at Jewar, Noida, by the prime minister. There were claims that it would be the biggest airport in the region with a capacity to handle seven crore passengers annually. That apparently is untrue as there are already seven airports in Asia with that capacity.

What is more, the image used to announce the new airport was that of Beijing's Daxing airport, called out once again on social media and by fact-check sites. If the UP government is spending so much money on ads, how is it that it doesn't have the competence to create advertisements that cannot be called out so easily? In fact, these ads are a good case for the Advertising Standards Council of India, which looks into complaints about advertising making wrong claims, to take up.

Apart from the look and content of such ads, there is another dimension that needs to be addressed about this sudden upsurge in government advertising in print media.

In the last year in particular, regular readers of print would have noticed the absence of consumer goods advertisements. In cities like Mumbai, for years the front pages of several newspapers displayed ads by builders advertising luxury apartments affordable to only a minuscule minority in this richest Indian city. Such ads are rarely seen today. Instead, the majority of the big ads in major newspapers are from governments, both central and state.

Those of us who have spent our entire journalistic careers in print media know of the influence that private sector advertisers had on content. From the 1990s, when the economic boom also led to more consumer goods advertising in print, it was not unknown for a representative of a multinational or a private corporation speaking directly to the owners of a newspaper if the company came across critical reports, or stories sympathetic to workers and their unions. The owners/editors would more often than not oblige by either removing such news or toning it down. Advertising was essential. It paid everyone's salaries, and brought in profits.

Much of that has changed now with the downturn in the economy. These companies wield less influence because they do not have the funds to release ads in newspapers. Also, their advertising budgets are focused on television, which has a much larger reach than print.

As a result, newspapers are in trouble. You can see it in the diminished number of pages each day when you get your favourite newspaper in the morning. And it is evident in the growing dependence on government ads.

If any of these governments were to decide that the particular newspaper was writing too much critical stuff, they could easily pull back their ads. The message would be clear. No newspaper, even the best resourced, can turn down government advertising today.

If this trend continues, we might just see the withering away of print media in India. Already many multi-edition newspapers have cut down on editions. Several magazines have stopped print editions and are only online.

Would the diminishing of print media be a blow to the media in India? Perhaps not, given that the majority of people access news through television and increasingly on digital platforms.

Yet we forget, as Aakar Patel points out in his book Price of the Modi Years, the biggest resource newspapers have is the beat reporter, a person who has feet on the ground and is able to get information that would otherwise remain unrecorded. During these Covid times, such reporters have been invaluable in documenting the full story of what was happening. Digital platforms like Scroll and Newslaundry have had to raise funds to assign people to do this kind of coverage that would be routinely done by newspapers. No independent digital platform can afford to hire the number of reporters needed to do extensive news coverage.

The importance of such reporting is self-evident. Without it, we would be left with government propaganda on the one hand, and the barrage of opinion and noise that has come to represent primetime news on television, on the other.

As we look ahead to 2022, is it inevitable that the only source of revenue that even the bigger newspapers can count on is government advertising? If that is the case, can we then say goodbye to the few spaces remaining for critical writing and investigative reporting?

It is a grim thought but one that must be noted. Today, it is some print and digital platforms that are still able to do what the media ought to be doing in a democracy. If these spaces were to be flattened or curtailed, it would be impossible to describe the media in India as independent and free.