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The thumping victory in 2014 of the BJP led by Narendra Modi brought a radical change in the ways politics and the media worked in the country. The Indian media was already undergoing many changes: digitization and expansion of online portals and services, sudden jump in the number of both big and small popular news sites and distribution of ad revenues between print and visual media. Modi coming to power accelerated the pace of these changes as well as introduced some drastic changes. These changes covered not only the major media entities but also the state institutions that oversaw and monitored media activities from newsgathering to dissemination. Laws governing media workers and organisations, in particular those connected with the digital media, have since been defined and redefined multiple times.
Before 2014, most major political rivals of the BJP had chosen to believe in the traditional concept of India’s English media as being ‘national.’ The vernacular media was considered ‘regional’ and limited to the areas the languages were spoken in. One of the major reasons for the BJP’s astounding electoral success in 2014 was its powerful media machines and the near- flawless oratorical skills in Hindi of Modi. Together the party and leadership had spotted the importance of India’s language media, in particular the Hindi media early on, and capitalized on it. Hindi, the language spoken in the demographically huge eleven states north of the Vindhyas, became a priceless tool in their hands, for winning friends and influencing people all over the vast Hindi belt, stretching to Maharashtra and Gujarat.
Actually, by the beginning of the millennia, the BJP, then led by Atal Behari Vajpayee, had become aware how several media houses in the Hindi belt were being corporatized. The Hindi belt was the largest homogenized market for the media in India. Although the media corporations remained family-owned, they had begun networking with other successful business houses. With this they had acquired considerable political clout in both print and TV.
Read more - https://article-14.com/post/the-taming-of-india-s-regional-media-why-hindi-dailies-tv-channels-present-handouts-from-ministries-as-news-662721d177038