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Whoever pays, owns the news

हिंदी | English

If we set aside the government’s own Doordarshan, All India Radio and its other information efforts, today’s Indian media can be seen, broadly, as three main camps.

The first camp is seen as left-leaning, with outlets such as The Wire as a leading example. The Wire is a digital news portal that focuses mainly on criticism of government policy, minority rights, secularism and social justice. Scroll, The Caravan and, to some extent, The Quint are also counted in this group. They work mostly in English digital media, and their business is small in scale.

The second camp is seen as right-leaning, and includes publications such as Panchjanya. Panchjanya is a Hindi weekly published since 1948. It is linked to the RSS and centres on Hindu nationalism and cultural heritage; its English counterpart is Organiser. In popular perception, platforms such as OpIndia, Swarajya, Republic TV and Sudarshan News also lean this way.

The third and largest camp is neither clearly left nor clearly right: media that sits in the middle, or swings both ways. Most of these outlets are owned by big business: the Times Group (The Times of India, The Economic Times, Times Now), Reliance (Network18 and JioStar), the Adani Group (NDTV), and large houses such as Dainik Bhaskar, Dainik Jagran, Amar Ujala, Hindustan and India Today. This camp dominates the market, its reach and its earnings.

Besides these three, two other forces are at work: social media and the government. Social media is itself split into many streams, and the government carries on its own work of information and publicity.

The money game

The reality is that media cannot run without money. That money comes from the government, from political parties, or from big business houses. India’s media and entertainment industry was worth about ₹2.78 lakh crore in 2025, and more than 60 percent of advertising has now moved to digital. The share of purely left or purely right media in this is very small; they matter for ideas and influence, not for money.

In my view, this is why the term “godi media” (lapdog media) now fits almost every kind of media, except the outlets that are directly tied to one ideology and openly argue for it. The outlets in the middle usually cannot run their business well without sitting in someone’s lap. They survive only under someone’s shelter.

This is not an ideal state of affairs. Ideally, the media would ask questions freely and expose the failings of both government and opposition. But in practice it is easy to invoke the “ideal” or to question other people’s work; it is hard to actually live up to it. Most outlets end up tied to someone’s interests.

The separate world of social media

Social media stands apart from this whole structure. Here some people are earning well by spinning stories. They become influencers and sometimes even gain celebrity status. Several well-known journalists who have either left their jobs or been let go now do the same work on YouTube and other platforms and earn far more than before. They draw viewers by twisting the news their own way, stirring up controversy or playing on emotions, and they earn from that.

This division is only a rough one. In many large outlets the leaning shifts from one department to another or over time, and digital platforms have made the old divisions even more tangled.

The truth about the numbers

To understand the variety of India’s print media, an important source is the Press in India 2023-24 report issued by the Press Registrar General of India (PRGI). According to the report, as of 31 March 2024 the country had 1,51,474 registered newspapers and periodicals in all. These include dailies, weeklies, fortnightlies, monthlies and publications of other frequencies.

Of these registered publications, 36,358 filed an annual statement. Language-wise figures for self-declared circulation are available only from these statements. The chart below shows the self-declared circulation (per publishing day) of the main languages:

Self-declared circulation by language 2023-24, bar chart

These figures make it clear that Hindi publications lead by circulation. At the same time, other regional languages, including the South Indian languages, hold an important place of their own.

Note: the circulation figures above are declared by the publishers themselves. PRGI has not fully verified them. Only about 24 percent of all registered publications filed an annual statement.

The truth is that complete and authentic data on Indian media is neither available, nor is there any sound system for collecting it. Of 1.51 lakh registered newspapers and periodicals, only about 36 thousand reported their circulation, and even that was self-declared. In the social and cultural climate of India today, policies that rest on self-declaration defeat their own purpose. Where advertising and government benefits are tied to circulation figures, the temptation to inflate them is only natural.

In short

The three main camps of traditional media, the separate world of social media and the government’s own information machinery together make up the picture of Indian media today. And in this picture, it is often the source of money that decides who stands with whom. Whoever pays, owns the news.

References

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