ABSTRACT

The limits to press freedom in India are usually surveyed from the top-down, with a focus on government efforts to censor journalists, particularly English-language journalists. In this essay, we instead examine India's restrictive press culture by focusing on the sociological workings of Hindi language news production, studying ways in which everyday journalism practices intersect with freedom of expression. The paper first traces the history of Hindi journalism alongside the development of press freedom. It then analyzes mainstream Hindi media coverage of the recent murder and rape of a “lower caste” woman in rural India. Our analysis reveals how the sociological realities of casteism and patriarchy merged with self-censorship to enable media cover up of the rape case. We then draw on interviews with Hindi journalists to illuminate the reasons behind censorship in such cases and in news media more broadly. We argue that a combination of structural, ideological, and historical conditions has limited the growth of press freedom in India. We further suggest that top-down approaches that focus exclusively on English-language media cannot adequately capture the dynamics of news reporting on the ground, and that contemporary news media can only be holistically understood by studying the “non-global,” Indian language press.

摘要

印度新闻自由的限制通常是自上而下调查的，重点是政府审查记者，特别是英语记者的努力。在这篇文章中，我们通过关注印地语新闻生产的社会学运作，研究日常新闻实践与言论自由相交的方式来研究印度的限制性新闻文化。该论文首先追溯了印地语新闻业的历史以及新闻自由的发展。然后，它分析了主流印地语媒体对最近在印度农村谋杀和强奸一名“低种姓”妇女的报道。我们的分析揭示了种姓主义和父权制的社会现实如何与自我审查相结合，从而使媒体能够掩盖强奸案。然后，我们利用对印地语记者的采访来阐明在这种情况下以及更广泛的新闻媒体中审查制度背后的原因。我们认为，结构、意识形态和历史条件的结合限制了印度新闻自由的增长。我们进一步建议，仅关注英语媒体的自上而下的方法无法充分捕捉实地新闻报道的动态，而当代新闻媒体只能通过研究“非全球性”的印度语媒体来全面理解.