Is Press Freedom Better Protected in Democracies? Internet Shutdown and Journalism in India

Abstract

It's commonly assumed that democracies are comparatively better than non-democratic regimes in safeguarding press freedom from political interference and ensuring constitutional and regulatory safeguards. Although this perception is largely true, numerous recent examples have shown journalism coming under attack in democratic regimes too. Drawing upon qualitative interviews conducted with journalists during and after the world's longest internet shutdown in the state of Jammu and Kashmir in India in 2019, this article underscores the measures used by the Indian government to control the flow of information. The article unpacks the dynamics of reporting by local, national and international media during the internet shutdown and shows how differing perceptions of their roles allowed journalists to perform their professional tasks even in difficult situations. Given the fact that repression of journalistic freedom occurred in a democracy, and at a time when the world is more connected than before, this not only challenges the normative understanding of how journalism functions in democracies but it may also hold lessons for journalists in circumventing the use of such tactics in other democracies.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.