Indian Media

Indian Media

It is only natural to find yourself associating in your mind Indian culture with the indian media. Whether it's gender roles or values, the media constructs the image and ideology of our country, and we draw from its portrayals heavily. Subconsciously, we're molded to a large extent in our thinking and attitudes by the media. The indian media can and is doing alot to promote our culture, which is wat it is essentially supposed to do. The danger in all this is that the age of information and entertainment is still relatively new, and we overlook that most of the portrayals are heavily sensationalized and embellished. Experts call it passive vs. active processing of information.

Indian soap operas
Mainstream Indian soap operas today are mostly quite regressive. On the one hand they show polygamy, extra marital affairs and devilish, scheming characters in the guise of modernism and then the same over decked women follow all the malpractices of our culture. A smart woman with a definite agenda,Ekta Kapoor consistently strikes a chord with viewers across the subcontinent. She says "This is real India, not the India we see from Malabar Hills". Most households are undoubtedly big on the whole Hindi serial craze. While media representations of values and sex roles continue to change and evolve over the years, we tune ourselves to its variations conveniently.

News

Media's penchant for sensationalism is by no means a new phenomenon. Ever since tabloids were first published in the U.K. sensationalizing news events, publishing unverified reports, gossip columns and celebrity news, became a part of the media. However, they never posed a serious threat to mainstream newspaper because the readers were aware of the fact that tabloids had more to do with entertainment than serious journalism. Tabloid journalism never gained a similar foothold in India in the first fifty years of independence, conservative Indian society did not allow the same level of openness and irreverence that is so essential in tabloid journalism. Even in the post- liberalization era tabloid journalism was not successful except for national dailies publishing entertainment news and celebrity gossip in what is now popularly called page 3 news. However, with the advent of satellite television tabloid journalism in India has found a new face in Hindi and vernacular news media especially the visual media. It soon degenerated into something which is yet to be defined.

News channels again are a mixed lot. There are channels that have encouraged people to stand up for their own rights. Even casual stances are directed towards creating a bias and influencing opinions. They have helped solve many long standing court cases (Jessica Lal and Nitesh Kataria cases), but the thing to be considered is the transmogrification of news channels into a sensational, televised tabloid that seeks and breeds on lurid topics.
A growing and potentially harmful trend in the Indian media is glamorization of supernaturalism and occult. The line demarcating superstition from supernaturalism is too fine, if any group of professionals should stay away from this realm then it is undoubtedly the group of tabloid journalists. Predictions based on Sun Signs and Moon Signs are a regular feature in tabloids world over but Indian news channels have taken this trend to a new level.
India is being increasingly seen by the rest of the world as a rapidly developing powerhouse of science and technology but most of the popular news channels not only ignore the country’s scientific achievement but also reinforce superstition and regressive mindset. For instance, the recent successful launch of PSLV hardly got any coverage when compared to exclusive programmes on fortune-telling methods.

Movies

We've been subjected to regular pot boilers for decades. Moving away from these, movies like 'Life in a metro' and 'Taare zameen par' that are treading new grounds by blending modernity with traditionalism are now entering mainstream cinema.


Advertisements

Contemporary ads raise pertinent questions about perspectives on gender in media representations of men and women. Men in ads are being presented in a much more macho-dominant manner than they were before.
On the other hand, while sports and athletics sported more men than women in the past in India and in the West, today however, real achievers like Sania Mirza have changed all that. Yet, women do not appear in ads for 'solid' products such as steel and cement and even if they do, they are sidetracked within the script. So have male and female roles in Indian ads changed over the past decade? Are men more frequently visible in Indian ads than they were, say, ten years ago? Have the images of men and women in ads softened over time, blurring the stereotypes, or have they hardened?
There is an increased appearance of men in Indian ads. This may be attributable to a number of factors. First, India is one of the fastest growing markets for consumer durables and several "male-oriented" products such as insurance, medical, industrial, and technology-related products. Because men are more often considered to be the primary decision makers for such products, the increase is understandable. Second, the number of ads in business and general interest magazines in India has increased tremendously while the number in women's magazines has not. Both of these factors could have led to an increase in the number of men appearing in Indian ads.

Some of the common stereotypical portrayals seem less prevalent in Indian ads. For example, unlike in British magazine ads, women in Indian magazine ads were more likely to be portrayed in "neutral/other" ways and less likely to be portrayed as sex objects. Women modelling for mobile phones, cars and two-wheelers, painkillers, and as protagonists carry neutral portrayals. Women were also less likely to be portrayed in "dependency" roles in Indian ads than in British ads. It is noteworthy that these results are similar to those found in two other Asian countries--Korea and Japan--where, again, females were less likely to be portrayed in very negative stereotypical ways than in western nations.