Desire and democratic visibility: news media’s twin avatar in urban India

News explosion in India: assessments and approaches

Boasting more daily newspapers than any other nation and a staggering 745 television channels on a recent count, the Indian media landscape has expanded at a blistering pace during the last two decades. A growing body of scholarship has recognized this expansion as a definite departure from the earlier phase of developmentalist media characterized by state monopoly over television and the ideologies of media participation in the developmental agenda of the postcolonial Indian state (Chakravartty, 2004; Jeffrey, 2000; Rajagopal, 2001; Thussu, 2007). The emerging public domain, on the other hand, is shaped by rapid commercialization of the private media and greater financialization of the news market fuelled by a combination of corporate and ‘gray’ capital, and multifarious forms of ownership with close links to formal and informal politics and family business networks (Parthasarathi, 2011). The implications of these shifts for the democratic structures and political cultures of post-liberalized India are far from clear. While existing analyses of the expanding news media rarely propose a simplistic model of the mediated public domain in India, there is a divide in the descriptive and evaluatory perspectives between what one seam of researchers consider a media-enabled democratic resurgence and those who give a more pessimistic account of the hyper-commercialization of the media, sharply termed as the ‘Murdochization’ of the press (Ninan, 2007; Sonwalkar, 2002; Thussu, 2007). Set within the context of India’s integration into the global economy, the critical seam of studies raises the alarm over the growing commodification of news resulting in the dumbing down and personalization of news. This echoes popular denigration of infotainment media as well as criticisms within the western academy of the rising market dominance of the news agenda in the last three decades (Curran, 2002). Scholars add that the historical association between the colonial administration, English language and upper castes, followed by the growing influence of the English press over policy makers and corporate power in postcolonial India ensure that the smaller, yet influential, elite English press normalizes the symbolic violence of the state and corporate power towards the large majority of poor and marginalized people (Parameshwaran, 2004; Shah, 1994).

Optimistic and positive evaluations, on the other hand, draw attention to the possibilities of democratic participation opened up by the expanding media, especially the growing field of the regional language press, which shape more inclusive domains of public debate by drawing diverse sections of people within the fold of legitimate news. Moving beyond the divide between these two streams of media assessment, Ursula Rao (2010) takes a closer look at the complex web of journalistic practices and reflective manoeuvring among journalists in the English and Hindi media, and rightly points out that the rise of critical journalism vis-a-vis the political class has come at the cost of greater institutional pressure to articulate the interests of the capitalist class who own the media and the huge crop of corporate advertisers driving the current phase of media expansion.

The theoretical framework guiding many of these approaches is the influential model of the public sphere elaborated by Habermas, specifically, the ideals of a critical citizenry holding the ruling governments and markets accountable to the autonomous public. The negative assessments of the Indian media also follow from this model, since commercialization of the media is argued – and rightly so – to be directly opposed to the growth of an autonomous public sphere free from market and state pressure. The vast body of the global literature on journalism – beginning with the long history of normative assumptions around journalism’s critical institutional role in democracy and the deeply entrenched self-definitions of journalistic profession across the world (Zelizer, 2004) – attests to this approach and, in some sense, renders the invocation of the Habermasian public sphere model a ‘normal practice’ within media studies. The liberal-democratic conception of journalism in terms of its presumed centrality in the acts of representing people’s voices, and its ethical project of advocating rights, justice and liberty, ² conjoined with Habermas’s ideas of rational-critical deliberation to form the core of the theoretical framework used in understanding and assessing the journalism–public interface. In this conception, the press is a key institution in the public sphere guaranteeing ‘a transactional continuum of information relatively unimpeded or deformed by governmental or commercial interests’ (Boyer, 2010: 244). It is an inter-subjective, non- coercive and reflective realm distinct from those of the state, market and family, in which free-thinking individuals gather as a ‘public’ to engage in a dialogue marked by the principles of communicative rationality rather than status or wealth (Habermas, 1989).

While the public sphere model based on the assumptions of ‘critical publicity’ (Habermas, 1989: 248) is certainly useful both as an evaluatory framework and a descriptive category to understand the narratives among news actors (news organizations and individual journalists), it may not be sufficient – and may even be erroneous – when postcolonial specificities of ‘publicness’ are taken into account. Several critics of the public sphere have argued extensively that the ahistorical conception of the journalism–public interface not only fails to take into account the distinct trajectories of the evolution of the press in various regions (Downing, 1996) but also precludes the possibilities of diverse modes of publicness and actually existing democratic practices (Fraser, 1990). Chantal Mouffe strikingly captures the lapses of current democratic theory: ‘citizens’ are ‘abstracted from social and power relations, language, culture and the whole set of practices that make agency possible. What is precluded in these rationalistic approaches is the very question of what are the conditions of existence of a democratic subject’ (cited in Laclau, 2005: 168). This critique is particularly relevant for discussions around journalism in societies like India, since the abstraction of print publics solely as rational-critical publics effaces the distinct histories of colonial encounter, postcolonial developmentalism and linguistically shaped, caste-inflected debates around modernity, and around journalism in particular (Udupa, 2010). Equally, to conceive of the news media as embracing the already-existing rational choices of the public in a pure act of representation will obscure the multifarious social and cultural conditions within which print mediated subjects emerge and are constituted. The limitations become even more acute in the context of rapid transformation of urban landscapes in India and postcolonial societies more generally, and their deeply fractured integration into the global economy. The case of the Times of India (TOI) group and its expansion in both the English- and regional-language news markets in Bangalore during the last two decades vividly illustrates the complexity of journalism’s current mediations and their implications for democratic politics.

The twin avatar of journalism in Bangalore

Re-launching itself in Bangalore in the wake of dramatic changes unleashed by new global networks for high-tech outsourcing since the early 1990s, ³ TOI brought new cultures of journalism into the city. ⁴ These were fuelled through top-down organizational practices of aligning the editorial team more closely with the marketing division. The paper soon overtook the older news groups in the region such as the Deccan Herald, the Indian Express and The Hindu through aggressive price wars, polychromatic appeal in the page layouts as well as freshly minted lists of news themes. ⁵ It marched ahead on all parameters of market success and became the highest circulation, newspaper with the largest volume of advertisement revenue in the city within five years of its re-launch. Particularly attentive to the changes under way in Bangalore, TOI drew on and co- constituted the image of ‘the new urban middle class’, which was central to the TOI-led discourse around the city. While these changes were not limited to Bangalore, since similar ‘editorial innovations’ were introduced in other markets such as Delhi, Bangalore was significant because the city appeared to have demonstrated the ‘merits’ of global capital flows, ‘evidenced’ especially by the symbolically significant global high-tech workers, and what the private sector could achieve if the ‘obstructing state’ retreated from its regulatory impositions. Within a decade following the tech boom in the late 1980s, there was an influx of migrants from various parts of the country drawn to the high-paying technology jobs of the global industry, as well as a new transnational class of returning diasporic tech workers within the city (Upadhya, 2009). TOI identified the new class of migrants and home-grown high-tech professionals as a new and lucrative readership market, constituting a subculture distinct from the non-IT ‘native Bangaloreans’. Implicit in this assumption was a belief that the non-IT Bangaloreans did not live up to the expectations of cosmopolitan, meritocratic, consumption-friendly and aspirational ‘new’ Bangaloreans. Although the paper continued to carry what is conventionally considered as ‘serious content’, such as the editorial page, the focus was firmly on the young professional class who they believed ‘drove the mall and IT revolution’, aspired to high-quality education and abhorred formal politics. The paper fuelled the discourse of a ‘new middle-class reader’ by offering what I call the ‘new regimes of mediated desire’ as legitimate aspirations of the urban middle class.

Against the backdrop of broader demographic and economic shifts in the city, there were at least four aspects of ‘desire’ articulated and narrativized by TOI to frame the cherished ‘new reader’ and cater to their perceived needs. The first concerned the very definition of what the city should mean to its readers, and how the city should assume particular forms of a desired ‘ideal local’. Drawing on the wider discourse of globalization and de-territorialized production available among the elite corporate actors and strategic bureaucratic actors in liberalized India, the management and news executives in the TOI together filled ‘the local’ with specific cultural content. Following the efforts shaped by their dialectical relation with the wider field of urban class groups, the newly defined ‘local’ was imagined to be embodying a ‘cosmopolitanism’ that shunned ‘traditionalism’ and dubbed all linkages with place as reactionary. The ideal inhabitant of this local was mobile, flexible, economically ascendant, culturally accommodating and overwhelmingly young.

The narrative of an ideal local was not merely ‘symbolic’ but had a definite materiality, reflected in the swelling number of news articles on real estate. These were designed to spark desires to acquire plush residential and office properties which were rapidly multiplying across the city. The TOI framed and fuelled the real estate desire – a crucial second dimension of mediated desire – as both economically wise and socially mandated. Enhanced focus on private residential properties and designer office spaces not only coincided with, but co-constituted, the real estate boom in the city at a time when urban land emerged as the most lucrative investment proposition for the private business and political classes, as well as for the state (Goldman, 2011). In the context of these wider shifts and its growing dependence on advertisements offered by private builders, ⁶ TOI gave vast coverage to the real estate sector and was itself actively involved in promoting plush residential properties offered by private developers, organizing ‘Property Shows’ at prime locations within the city as well as publishing a sponsored weekly supplement to promote the real estate sector. Contiguous with the real estate desire was a spurt in the number of stories on urban infrastructure, such as roads, flyovers and airports, which reflected another critical aspect of urban desire: efficient public physical infrastructure for the middle-class and corporate residents of the city. ⁷

While the desire for real estate and efficient public infrastructure was advanced through a combination of sponsored and ‘unpaid’ news columns, the more overtly cultural dimension of global-urban desire dovetailed with the phenomenal expansion of ‘page 3 journalism’. For the Bangalore Times, the daily city supplement of the TOI distributed along with the ‘main sheet’, page 3 connoted a combination of celebrity journalism and entertainment, aimed at generating a ‘positive feel’ among the readers by celebrating personal wealth, bodily décor and consumption, and recasting them as legitimate youth aspirations. Page 3 supplements are decidedly metropolitan in their tone, feel and location, anchored as part of the larger drive to capture urban youth markets and fuelled by the Times group’s new revenue models of inserting paid content within its supplements through the in-house public relations agency (Medianet). Following the guidelines on the aspirational new reader spelled out by the management, reporters working on page 3 city supplements generated news features on Hollywood, Bollywood, South Indian cinema, fashion, lifestyle (food, clothing and fitness), sex and sports, with a clear directive to avoid encroaching upon the main editorial turf, and instead look for ‘newsy’ articles that combined gossip and verifiable facts in entertaining ways. Page 3 journalism not only tried to normalize and celebrate the consumer-subject through this top-down template, but also offered it in a deeply gendered ‘pro-capitalist femininity-focused repertoire’ (McRobbie, 2009: 158), focusing on make-up, fashion and enticing bodies – all symbols of conventional femininity but now ‘with a ramped up price tag’ (Butler, 2009: 950). At the same time it pointed to the TOI’s efforts to imagine the urban-local as homogeneous and culturally predictable, available for replicating uniformly across all the metro centres of the paper. Indeed, there was much more than mere imagining at work here; it included an implicit pedagogy about the right way to live and desire. Corporate celebrities emerged as the new visible face of this pedagogy and a central figure of mediated desire.

The leaders of the new economy – encouraged by the global success of Bangalore-based software outsourcing companies – embodied the promise of ‘New India’, in contradistinction to the ‘corrupt political class’ and ‘inefficient (state) bureaucracy’. Owing to robust public relations efforts by the corporate sector in the city and the historical experience of the flaws of the rentier postcolonial state, not only the management but the journalists too deeply shared the ideology of corporate leadership for city governance as well as national politics. Enhanced trust in the efficiency of the corporate sector translated into city stories and editorials strongly advocating the need for private sector participation in policy making and urban development. The specific discourses around desire-as-aspiration set the stage for middle-class and corporate civic activism, actively promoted and organized by the paper through numerous campaigns named variously as ‘Refresh Bangalore’, ‘Unlock Bangalore’ and so on. These city-based campaigns imbued TOI-led forms of mediated desire with definite political effects insofar as they robustly advanced the voices of the middle class and corporate groups on urban development issues.

However, as several urban conflicts illustrated at regular intervals, the avowedly middle-class and corporate-friendly discourses around ‘desire’ were thoroughly penetrated by and at times deflected and distorted through multifarious logics underpinning rapid media expansion in urban India. These mediations were shaped by a range of logics including caste-based allegiances, market logic of differentiation and the cultural politics centring on newly revived and reframed ideologies of Kannada, the regional language. To consider the last factor more closely, I build on the rich body of literature within anthropology which has explored the bilingual dynamics of the news field in India (Peterson, 1996; Rajagopal, 2001; Rao, 2010; Stahlberg, 2002). Departing from the dichotomy posed within a significant strand of literature between hegemonizing English modernity versus vernacular resistance, which often makes a normative transition to romanticized accounts of the vernacular (Pandian, 1996), I contend that ‘Kannada’ works as an incomplete and partially embodied ‘empty signifier’ (Laclau, 2005) for the Kannada-language journalists and a section of English-language journalists, in such a way that different demands are brought to bear on the news discourse while, at the same time, entailing the possibilities of a conservative and violent politics made available precisely through the fleeting, protean and unstable nature of the symbolic functions of Kannada within the news field. These logics at times overlap with the market logic of marking distinct readership segments for English and Kannada news dailies, owned in many cases, by the same commercial news group (as with the Times group owning both the English-language Times of India and the Kannada-language Vijaya Karnataka). The effect, if not always the original intent, is to give visibility to a range of publics and demands through the signification of Kannada. The constantly mutating constellation of meanings and demands effected by Kannada in the news field is largely forged in relation to the ‘expelled other’ – English bourgeois, global consumption and corporate sector interests which had together acquired reasonable clarity under the strict editorial directions of newspapers such as the TOI. The partial embodiment of this signifier relies on associated meanings of nāḍu-nuḍi-saṅskriti-samudāya (region-language-culture- community) shaped and authenticated by the Kannada vāgmaya (linguistic ecumene). ⁸

Filtered through the long history of language-based movements in the region and the sedimented cluster of meanings cohering around ‘Kannada’, the most common invocation of Kannada lōka (the world of Kannada) among journalists in Bangalore rested on the conflictual zone of insiders (‘legacy Bangaloreans’) and outsiders (non-Kannada migrants), based on the logic of territorial localization, proprietorial nativism and the metaphors of soil and ‘the aroma of the soil’ (maṇṇinavāsane). Such sentiments had always existed in the Kannada news field, but they became more ‘experientially salient’ (Boyer, 2010: 248) in the wake of rapid urban transformation and migration in Bangalore. They significantly influenced journalists’ decisions to choose between diverse news sources and consequently, the news content they produced. To have Kannada organizations as reliable news sources, for instance, was more common among Kannada journalists than English journalists, who dismissed them as ‘rowdy organizations’ with visible antipathy. The politics of the insider–outsider binary was so deep-seated among a large section of Kannada journalists (and a section of English journalists) that they pinned the success of TOI on Bangalore’s ‘bastardized culture’ lacking a sense of cultural rootedness. The onward march of TOI thus posed a larger threat to these journalists than mere commercial success of a rival paper − it embodied the dangers of a deteriorating language and its culture and community.

Apart from several such instances of framing urban politics along the insider–outsider binary, invocation of Kannada also implied a sense of cultural richness and purity, which, owing to its contradictory movement, resulted in bringing the non-English, ‘non-high-tech’ sections of the city within the fold of news visibility as well as spilling out conservative, and at times, violent politics, in collusion with the Hindu right. The tensions of these violent cultural politics were directly implicated in the attacks on women in a bar in a coastal town in Karnataka by a right-wing Hindutva group in 2008 and the pink chaddi (underpants) campaign launched by a group of e-enabled urban women as a protest in Bangalore (Udupa, forthcoming). The same common ‘high-tech’ adversary and the notion of ‘Kannada lōka’ confronting it, however, struck an equivalence between the rural (as marginal) and sections of the urban population slated to lose out rather than benefit from the ongoing expansion of high-tech global industries. This was enacted through various meanings around Kannada, but the most common invocation in the field of meanings was ‘land’ in its most material form. With the high-tech sector as the expelled other, invocations of land and Kannada invariably implied writing stories in favour of farmers’ right to own their land or bargain for better compensation when there was no choice but to relinquish it for industrial expansion. Editors of major Kannada dailies were clear about the social constituencies they served, and had little doubt about their readers’ expectations of the Kannada papers on the question of land in these controversies. Thus, when land rows broke out at regular intervals within the city, since high-tech companies tussled to acquire land in order to expand their offices, Kannada papers took the side of the farmers and wrote extensively on their demands for fair compensation. The editor of a prominent Kannada newspaper justified this position by citing one of the most publicized controversies involving a prominent home-grown software services company:

It is true this company has done a lot of good for our country. It has generated a lot of jobs. But the methodology [sic] that they are using is moving them away from the true people of this country. It is a land-hungry company. What they could do within 100 acres, they do it on 500 acres of land. This land has come from an ordinary farmer who loses his land for peanuts. Where will he move now? The city cannot give him the same dignified space. Before him are the growing Kubēras [rich person, in Hindu mythology the demi-god of wealth] – the very people who grabbed land from him. This unsettles him. This is already happening across the country – Singur, Nandigram, Devanahalli and the outskirts of Bangalore where this company has its offices. Kannada journalism represents those people who are irritated with the systemic changes.

Kannada’s subaltern moments thus rested on the invocations of land and territoriality, precisely through ‘emptying’ Kannada-as-signifier to embrace a range of demands distinct from the TOI-enabled discourses around urban desire. With an acute feeling among the older journalists of deteriorating journalistic standards and sharp cynicism among the younger scribes about a hyper-commercial cannibalistic media under which their own ‘praxeological agency’ was seen to be under threat (Boyer, 2010: 242), the ideological task of keeping close ties between land, marginalized urban publics, rural problems and a ‘Kannada community’ became even more pronounced for a section of journalists within Kannada media and also a section of the English media. In many ways, Kannada gave a symbolic forum to articulate these concerns as interrelated, relevant and deserving of media visibility.

These mediations – inflected by ‘Kannada’ and caste practices, among others – arise from the domain of commercial news media in ways that complicate our critiques and normative positions around the expansion of commercial media, and the broader conceptual structure of public–private distinction underlying them. They emphasize the need to build new models that can chart the multifarious mediations of news and critically analyse their ramifications in non-western contexts.

‘Structured visibilities’: postcolonial specificity and democratic visibility

Building on the growing body of anthropological literature on journalism which considers news as a cultural construction embedded within specific social, historical and cultural practices (Bird, 2010), and the insights drawn from Bangalore, I propose the framework of ‘structured democratic visibility’ and argue that this framework could be more effective in capturing the variegated nature of the journalism–public interface, as opposed to the integuments inherent in the public sphere model. It allows us to take into account the fundamental mediation of journalism in terms of rendering visibility to publics, while at the same time acknowledging that these publics are diverse and emerge as a result of multiple intersections between the field of journalism and the broader field of power defined by heterogeneous cultural logics and social practices. In developing this framework, I draw on Thompson’s (2011) compelling discussions on ‘mediated visibility’ and its contradictory effects on structures of power. Following Hannah Arendt’s influential treatise on public–private distinctions in ancient Greek thought, Thompson proposes that the mediation of current communication technologies could be considered in terms of constituting a field of vision which is ‘stretched out in time and space’ (2011: 35) with definite political effects. Visibility signals the expansion of what Arendt theorized as the ‘space of appearances in which things that were said and done could be seen and heard by others’ (2011: 52). As Thompson elaborates: ‘The fact that they are seen and heard by others gives them a kind of reality that they wouldn’t have otherwise, a reality that consists in the fact that these actions and utterances are witnessed by a plurality of others’ (2011: 52). Mediated visibility proceeds in ways such that the relations between visibility and power are no longer limited to the Foucauldian notions of panopticism, in which visibility of the many to a few is exercised primarily as a means of social control. Instead, mediated visibility becomes a ‘double-edged’ sword since it can simultaneously provide the means of control for the elite as well as erode their power. The arenas of visibility are relatively more dispersed, open and accessible, especially in contrast to the earlier era of privileged visibility of the ruling elite. Implicit in this formulation is the Bourdieusian notion of ‘symbolic capital’ and the more recent theorization of ‘media meta-capital’, which proposes that media assume a ‘definitional power across the whole of social space’ (Couldry, 2003: 669). Thompson’s formulation of ‘mediated visibility’ prompts us to recognize that this capital might itself be available for appropriation and contestation among a range of publics.

While acknowledging the ‘double-edged’ nature of mediated publicity, I argue, however, that mediated visibility is structured and not undifferentiated in its ‘openness’. While the nature of this structuring depends on the varying contexts within which the media find themselves, in urban India this structuring increasingly takes place through the revived ideologies of regional languages and caste practices. The rich body of postcolonial literature is important in this context, since it gestures us towards the specificities of the public domain and political cultures in India, and emphasizes that the heterogeneous political practices do not always conform to the liberal model of civil society or rational-critical publics, and even the notions of ‘public–private’ separation underlying liberal theories (Chatterjee, 2004; Chakrabarty, 1991; Jain, 2007).While a ‘pure’ liberal model is hard to find anywhere in the world, and the specificities of the Indian case may not necessarily imply that they are exclusive to India or constitute its ‘essence’, the historical and social structures of public domains and the colonial regime which both drew on and reframed them within various regions in India need to be accounted for in any discussion on the journalism–public interface. Equally, the ways through which they articulate with current urban transformation are significant for journalism’s self-presentations and interactions with urban audiences. As the discussion on the effects of Kannada in the news field suggested, there are practices centring on kinship morality, which is evident most strikingly in the case of language communities through what Talwalker (2009) calls ‘kin fetishism’. Kin fetishism refers to ‘a simulation of familiar and taken-for-granted kin interacting’ (2009: 85) even within ‘contexts whose modernity precisely demands a different kind of sociality, one that is open to strangers’ (2009: 77). The differentiated public domain in India relates to modernity and the liberal vocabulary of citizenship as much as it draws on ‘local domains of power’ defined by multifarious forms of allegiances, partly owing to the colonial state’s policies of ‘avert[ing] its gaze’ from existing social forms of power ‘in which dominance was asserted, contested and sometimes perpetuated with some degree of freedom from the systematic operation of the rule of law’ (Chandavarkar, 2007: 447). The journalists in Bangalore readily referred to ‘Kannada lōka [world]’ to imagine their reading publics as well as to negotiate their own position within the field of news. These meanings of Kannada news publics and the affective ties linking them to the journalists were striking in their excess, since they were rarely confined by the market knowledge of readership and liberal rationalities. The news media in India thus intersect with solidarities and political practices which are often distinct from the liberal premises of rights-bearing citizens, and marked most strikingly along the lines of caste, language and region, which are also increasingly politicized and interconnected.

I argue that the intersection of these norms of sociality, cultural values and political cultures with the field of news practices structures the mode of visibility made available by the news media to diverse voices, rather than the sheer profusion of media avenues or their presumed representational capacities. These could then be termed as ‘structured visibilities’ and not merely ‘mediated visibility’. Through their mechanisms of visibility, the news media enhance, if not always guarantee, the chances for democratic participation, ⁹ bringing to the fore a range of claims and imaginations that differ significantly from state-sanctioned or corporate-driven agendas. ‘Structured democratic visibility’ thus relates to acts of visibilization, emerging as intended and unintended outcomes of the news practices through their intersections with the wider social and cultural field, and imprisoned neither within the liberal conception of representation and rational-critical discourse nor within the paradigm of absolute elite control.

News media’s mediation: ‘desire’

While democratic visibility, inflected through the structures of sociality and cultural values, is a key mediation of the expanding news media, it is itself occurring in the larger context of growing commercialization of the news media and the induction of diverse sites and spaces into global circuits of production and consumption. Indian cities in particular are undergoing rapid transformation in their economic and demographic makeup, owing to new flows of transnational capital, labour and mediated images. In the wake of broader shifts toward liberalization initiated by the reforming Indian state, cities have borne the brunt of new globalization, experiencing intense struggles over material and symbolic resources (Sundaram, 2004). At least within a section of Indian cities and the global south more generally, the changes follow the larger trends shaped by informationalization, the information revolution, the spatial disaggregation of business, capital mobility, capital fluidity and conspicuous consumption (Castells, 2000; Harvey, 2010). As several scholars have pointed out, urbanization itself came to occupy centre-stage in the globalized economy (Harvey, 2010) when new occupational ideologies and consumer lifestyles remade city landscapes (Nair, 2005; Upadhya, 2009) and land became, as with the original drive for urban expansion, an important commodity for capital’s investments in fixed assets such as infrastructure, housing and construction of offices. New theoretical approaches are thus needed to understand the nature and implications of journalism’s role in these changing urban landscapes, since, as the previous section demonstrated, the news media and the cultural politics of urban expansion are deeply interlaced in the ongoing process of urban transformation.

In the larger context of urban transformation under way in India and a broader swathe of globalizing economies, I suggest ‘desire’ as an alternative concept of thematization to understand the journalism–public dynamic. ‘Desire’ designates an intricate intermingling of the private and public domains of the news media’s address to audiences, and gestures towards the overlaps between contemporary news practices and the broader neoliberal framing of urban ambitions. In this analysis, I borrow Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983) theoretical revision of the concept of ‘desire’, which steers it clear of the psychoanalytical and modernist (universalist) underpinnings, to locate it firmly within the social field. They recuperate ‘desire’ from the psychoanalytical assumption of a ‘fundamental lack’, which according to Freud and Lacan, constitutes the subjectivity of an individual striving to overcome the absence of the object. Turning this logic on its head, Deleuze and Guattari argue that desire is not the effect of lack, but the inverse. The primary gesture of Deleuze and Guattari’s thesis is to emphasize the productivity and materiality of desire to argue that it is constitutive of the social field, and that ‘social production is … desiring-production … under determinate conditions’ (1983: 38). They firmly locate this within the cadences of the capitalist economy to argue that the interlinked phenomena of lack and desire involve ‘deliberately organizing wants and needs amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim to the great fear of not having one’s needs satisfied’ (1983: 28).

Specifically, on the mediated nature of desiring-production, a large body of literature has explored the effects of advertising media and new consumption sites such as department stores to understand their strategies of appeal and enticement (Leach, 1993). However, these studies approach desire primarily in terms of the manipulative, spectacular and seductive aspects of advertisements’ mediation of commodity consumption (Hennion et al., 1989), often within functionalist frameworks. While commodity consumption is a very important element of the operation of urban desire mediated by news practices, it is not limited to manipulative aspects alone or to consumer durables alone. In the hands of the contemporary commercial news media, I suggest, ‘desiring-production’ recasts publics as networks of desire, who may not be self-conscious vis-a-vis the state as the liberal conception of publics would hold, but nevertheless have specific effects on the nature of politics and political culture within urban contexts. These publics are charged with desire-as-aspiration, extending beyond the realm of consumer commodities into new imaginations of ideal citizenship, lifestyle and social mobility. The spectrum of desire thus extends to new imaginations of urban civic activism, cultural ascent, body and self, and results from a range of mediations that go beyond mere manipulation. The growing commercialization of the news media is significant in mediating desire-as-aspiration, as the media seek simultaneously to expand commodity markets (advertisers) and their own readerships through innovative strategies of connecting with the readers and the ideologies of urban revival and urban boosterism. TOI relied not only on price wars and polychromatic page layouts for its market success, but also on the cultivated vision of a ‘global city’ for Bangalore which yoked together luxury real estate, corporate stars, page 3 and civic activism into a narrative of global-modern urbanism. The intended and unintended outcomes of commercial news practices in terms of desire to participate in urban revival extends Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘anti-production’ (as organized production of lack) into realms of urban development and notions of citizenship, as well as land, lifestyle and leisure.

Broadly, I suggest that contemporary journalism’s mediation within rapidly transforming cities within India and postcolonial societies more generally could be considered in terms of ‘democratic visibility’, structured through specific norms of sociality, cultural values and a market logic of differentiation underpinning news practices, and ‘mediated desire’ constituted through commercial media’s intersections with the broader neoliberal turn of globalizing cities. I define these twin mediations as a tension, since the desire-enabled discourses of global-urban modernity come into direct conflict with socially structured and market-inflected mediated visibility. In other words, mediated publics in globalizing cities like Bangalore are shaped by a deep-seated tension between new enactments of ‘desire’ and limits imposed on these enactments by the very nature of visibility made available by the expanding news media and socially structured news practices. Indeed, the mediations remain more than just a tension, since together they co-create conflicts over what constitutes legitimate news and legitimate urban publics. The desiring-production of TOI in the years following its re-launch in the city, and the practices of the regional-language media and a section within the English media manifest this tension. While this tension might have always existed in the social field of news, I suggest that it has come to define the nature of contemporary journalism as a pivotal structure of conflict, after undergoing a specific global-urban turn in its character.

Conclusions: beyond the public–private distinction

In this context, the framework of desire–visibility disjunction, I suggest, can be generative in appraising the implications of the simultaneous expansion of media and market logic in the latest phase of globalization within postcolonial societies. It could, as a provisional way of framing the problem, overcome the limitations of the public–private division running through journalism scholarship (Ettema and Glasser, 2007). While the protean character of the public–private dichotomy alludes to different spheres of distinction within various disciplinary traditions (Weintraub and Kumar, 1997), studies of the news media have also deployed the distinction in diverse ways. In the liberal formulation and the modernist ideologies underpinning them, the news media’s primary address is in the public realm – defined in contradistinction to the private realms of family and presumed to be constituted by ‘audience-oriented subjectivity’ as the originary moment of the public sphere (Habermas, 1989). In Marxist accounts of media, the private interests of commercial media producers (capitalist class) overpower journalism’s purported public functions (Bandhu, 2001; Entman, 1989). Simultaneously, deeply mindful of the ‘intimate’ nature of newspaper reading, a long tradition within media studies has framed journalism in terms of the reading experiences unfolding within the ‘private’ realm of the reader-subject, taking a cue from Hegel who spoke of newspapers as replacing the ritual of morning prayers for the modern man (Anderson, 1991). In these approaches to understanding the nature and effects of the news media, there are links made between the private space of newspaper consumption and the effects of this private consumption on the nature of politics and the public domain. The conceptual distinction between the ‘private’ and ‘public’ is however presupposed in all these accounts: between ‘private’ psychological effects and the public domain of politics or nation; public discourse versus private interests of the capitalist class; public domain of rational-critical discourse in contradistinction to private spheres of family and affect, and so on. This is not surprising since the concepts of ‘publicness’ and ‘privateness’ and the distinction between them are ‘profoundly important … in western societies’ (Benn and Gaus, 1983: 25).

By conceptualizing the twin avatar of journalism as desire and democratic visibility, I seek to move beyond the dichotomy posed in these diverse strands of journalism literature, especially those that draw a distinction between commercial and public service models. ¹⁰ If critics of commercial news media often point to the emergence of a homogeneous consumer public, public service proponents rue the demise of serious journalism and its role in fostering a homogeneous rational public. Optimists, on the other hand, claim that the proliferating media have created multiple spaces for multiple publics. In both accounts not only are the particular logics operating within the news field elided, but the particular histories of different regions and their new encounters with global capital are also inadequately addressed. This article has reformulated the problem of public good and private accumulation as a problem of a tension between mediated desire and mediated democratic visibility. Such a formulation allows us to avoid reductionist accounts of commercial media as merely serving private interests and utopian accounts of an explosion in media-enabled deliberative democracy. Instead, it conceptually opens up the possibility of excess of practice inhering in the commercial model of news production, and in its interface with the larger social field within which it is embedded. While commercial media are firmly anchored to private interests, the consequences of media visibility opened up by the media are not exhausted by their commercial rationality. On the other hand, media expansion need not always embody expansion of public rights precisely because journalism’s mediation is not always ‘public’ – inclusive, anonymous and non-private − in nature. The growing influence of global and regional capital has resulted in a new fashioning of nexuses between public and private modes of journalism’s address to its audiences − the complexity of which can be comprehended by critically revising public–private distinctions.

As the preceding section on Bangalore has illustrated, the specific nature of the Indian news media’s reinvented approach to its audiences and its relation with state and market forces suggests a new fashioning of the nexuses between private realms of consumption and civic participation, even as the news media increasingly inscribe the audiences in the narratives of aspiration around body, lifestyle and leisure. To formulate journalism’s mediation in terms of ‘desire’ is to bring these nexuses to the fore, without falling into the reductionist accounts of commercial media, while at the same time acknowledging the complexity of commercial news media’s mediation in terms of non-material forms of property and its entanglement with the neoliberal salience of market rationality. The growing regimes of desire thus allude to the predominance of non-material forms of property which ‘require public dissemination to ensure their realization as privately appropriated value’ in the latest phase of globalization of capital (Rajagopal, 2002: 65). The nature and implications of this mediation resonate within a broader swathe of globalizing cities which are increasingly anchored to ideologies of entrepreneurial cities, urban innovation and urban branding (Smart and Smart, 2003) as well as intensified forms of consumption woven into what Guano terms as ‘shoppinización’ (2002: 186).

While I capture the coextensive realms of ‘private’ and ‘public’ in capital’s drive for accumulation in the latest phase of globalization with the concept of ‘desire’, ‘structured visibility’ indexes another aspect of the blurring of the public–private distinction within postcolonial contexts, especially in the delimited area of news production which is the focus of this study. The discussions on language ideologies suggest that the mediated public domain in India, although analytically distinct from the ‘private’ sphere of family, is nevertheless imbricated in kinship and land metaphors framed on the grounds of language and caste-based solidarities. They draw on the blurred boundaries of publicness and privateness entailed in these sentiments and allegiances, as they negotiate current urban transformation. Together they bring visibility to a range of publics in contingent and historically inflected ways of articulating connections between notions of language, caste and news audiences. As the case of the news field in Bangalore bears out, the dynamics of the journalism–public relationship thus gets defined by a conflict between what journalism coalesces as a democratic politics of visibility, and what it co-constructs as legitimate desire, which together challenge public–private distinctions and compel us to contextualize such influential paradigms within journalism studies and the broader field of media anthropology.