A democracy without a questioning press is not a democracy. It is a performance of democracy, a staging of the institutional forms, elections, parliaments, constitutions, without the oxygen that makes those forms meaningful. The press is democracy's memory: it records what governments do, asks why they did it, and ensures that those who govern know they will be held to account. When the press stops doing this, governments stop believing they will be held to account. And when governments stop believing that, they stop governing with the restraint that accountability demands.
This is not a philosophical abstraction. It is a description of how democracies decay. And it is relevant to India.
India's press freedom rankings have declined significantly over the past decade. On the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index, India ranked 150th out of 180 countries in 2023. The Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights Watch and various other international organisations have documented the pressures facing Indian journalists, including legal harassment through sedition and defamation cases, physical attacks on reporters covering sensitive stories, economic pressure on news organisations through withdrawal of government advertising, and a general atmosphere in some domains where independent reporting on powerful interests has become professionally and personally risky.
These pressures are real. But they are not the only or even the primary problem with India's media. The more pervasive problem is not external pressure but internal accommodation: the choices that media organisations make, voluntarily, about what to cover, how to cover it, and whose interests to serve.
The Commercial Capture of News
India has one of the world's largest and most diverse media ecosystems. Hundreds of television news channels, thousands of newspapers and a vast digital news landscape make India's media look pluralistic from a distance. But diversity of outlets is not the same as diversity of perspective, and the commercial pressures that shape what most of these outlets actually produce have, in many cases, aligned their interests with power rather than against it.
The television news economy in India is driven by viewership, which is driven by conflict, outrage and spectacle. The news cycle rewards stories that generate emotional response, particularly anger and fear, and punishes the patient, complex, evidence-based journalism that holding power accountable actually requires. Investigative reporting is expensive. It requires time, legal resources and editorial commitment. It generates legal risk and political friction. It is harder to sell to advertisers than a panel of shouting commentators. The commercial logic of the Indian television news business, a business that has seen audience fragmentation and advertising pressure, does not naturally support the kind of journalism that democracy needs.
The dependence of many news organisations on government advertising creates a structural conflict of interest that is rarely discussed openly. Government at all levels, central, state and municipal, is one of the largest advertisers in the Indian media ecosystem. News organisations that are dependent on this revenue have a powerful financial incentive not to report critically on the governments that provide it. This incentive does not require explicit threats or deals. It operates as a background condition that shapes editorial cultures over time.
The Access Problem
Political journalism in India, as in most democracies, often suffers from what might be called the access problem. Journalists who are seen as hostile to powerful people lose access to those people. Journalists who are seen as friendly retain access. Since access, the ability to get quotes, advance information and interviews, is the currency of political journalism, the incentive is always toward accommodation and away from confrontation.
This dynamic is not unique to India and is not a conspiracy. It is a structural feature of how political journalism works when it is organised around proximity to power. But in India, where a small number of very powerful figures have very centralised control over what information is released and to whom, the access trap is particularly dangerous.
The result is a kind of journalism that is good at providing the perspective of those in power and poor at providing accountability of those in power. Press conferences are covered extensively. The questions asked at those press conferences are often anodyne. Major policy decisions are explained as the government explains them. The follow-up scrutiny, what actually happened, who actually benefited, what was actually promised versus delivered, is thinner than democratic accountability requires.
The Silence That Speaks
There is a form of media failure that is harder to document than false reporting but equally corrosive: the story not told.
The mining scandal in a state that relies heavily on central government contracts. The farmer protest that is covered until it becomes inconvenient. The public health failure that implicates a politically connected hospital chain. The environmental clearance granted to a company with political connections. The police encounter that doesn't fit the official narrative. These are the stories whose absence from the media record is itself a form of distortion.
The absence is sometimes the result of direct pressure. But it is more often the result of the accumulated habits of caution that develop in newsrooms that have learned, over time, what kinds of stories create problems and what kinds don't. This learning is not cynical. It is often survival. But the cumulative effect of many newsrooms learning to avoid many kinds of stories is a public record that is systematically incomplete in ways that benefit those with power and harm those without it.
What the Audience Does to Journalism
The relationship between media and democracy is complicated by the reality that audiences are not simply victims of media failure. They are participants in it.
India's news audiences have shown a consistent preference for the emotional and the tribal over the informational and the complex. Television news channels that prioritise nationalist outrage and communal tension consistently outperform channels that prioritise careful reporting. Political commentary that confirms existing beliefs performs better than journalism that challenges them. The incentives created by audience preference are real and powerful.
This does not excuse media organisations from their responsibilities. The argument that we're only giving audiences what they want is the same argument used by every institution that has chosen commercial success over social responsibility. Food companies that make people obese are giving consumers what they want. Cigarette companies gave consumers what they wanted. The fact that an audience preference exists does not mean that feeding it is morally or professionally defensible.
But it does mean that the responsibility for the state of Indian media is not located only in newsrooms and media owners. It is distributed across the audience that rewards and punishes particular kinds of journalism with its attention, its subscription and its money.
What Good Journalism Requires
The press freedom problem in India has two dimensions that are often conflated but need to be addressed separately. The first is the external pressure dimension: the use of legal and economic instruments to intimidate and punish independent journalists. The second is the internal decay dimension: the choices that media organisations make in the absence of external pressure that still produce journalism that fails democratic accountability.
Addressing the first requires legal reform. Sedition law, in its current form, is used selectively against journalists whose work powerful people find uncomfortable. Defamation law creates civil liability that can be weaponised against critical reporting. The processes through which these laws are applied can be punishing in themselves, regardless of outcome. Limiting the misuse of these instruments would not require eliminating them, only ensuring their application is consistent, proportionate and not selective.
Addressing the second requires something harder than legal reform. It requires the professional culture of journalism to develop and enforce its own standards, to treat accountability reporting not as an optional extra for the idealistic but as the central function of the profession. It requires news organisations to make the editorial and commercial choices that support investigative and accountability journalism even when those choices are expensive and risky. It requires audiences to support and reward journalism that holds power accountable, even when that journalism is uncomfortable or challenges their existing beliefs.
None of this is new wisdom. It is the accumulated understanding of what journalism needs to be to serve democracy. The challenge is not knowing it. The challenge is doing it, consistently, under conditions that make it difficult.
The Democracy It Affects
India's democracy has survived many stresses. It is a resilient system with deep roots. But the resilience of Indian democracy should not be confused with its immunity to the decay that insufficient accountability enables.
When governments know they will not be held accountable for failures, they invest less effort in avoiding those failures. When corruption is not investigated and reported, it grows. When policy failures are not documented and scrutinised, they are repeated. When the abuse of power is not covered, the abusers conclude that there is no cost to abusing. When citizens don't have accurate information about what their government is doing, they cannot make informed choices about whether to keep it.
The press is the institution that makes accountability possible. It is not the only institution, but it is the one that reaches citizens most directly and most regularly. When it fails, the effects ripple through the entire democratic system.
India's democracy is worth defending. Defending it requires, among other things, a press that is genuinely free, genuinely rigorous and genuinely committed to the accountability function that only it can perform.
When that press forgets its purpose, democracy starts forgetting what it was supposed to be. And that forgetting, unlike the forgetting of an individual, is a forgetting that affects everyone.