Rein and Laissez Faire: The Dual Personality of Media Regulation in India

Abstract

India’s hybrid media milieu provides a plentiful turf to engage with the regulatory framework marking the worlds of digital journalism. On the one hand, are the provisions and silences in inherited regulatory frameworks spilling over to scar digital journalism. On the other hand, are challenges triggered by new actors and dynamics characterising digital journalism. Across these, this article brings out two tendencies marking the regulatory framework of digital journalism, one ridden with control and the other with laissez faire. We begin by introducing the key actors and dynamics in digital journalism in India, and outline the contours of the regulatory architecture. We then detail the regulatory mechanisms implicating digital journalism as a form of speech and a form of business. Reflecting on the personality of the regulatory framework, we highlight the relationship between inherited and emergent regulatory responses. Here we point out two phenomena: the simultaneous endurance of restrictive and market liberal responses; and, the persistent non-intervention on key regulatory challenges. While the latter is captured through the idea of “considered silence,” the seemingly contradictory tendencies of the former are argued be part of the inheritance of analog thinking in media regulation in India.

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