3. Kalpana Sharma - “The media’s not asking the critical questions”

In this episode, Kalpana Sharma, who has worked at Times of India, The Indian Express and The Hindu, and is a columnist writing on the print media for the online platform Newslaundry, tells Savyasaachi Jain and Nirupama Subramanian that with a few exceptions, mainstream print media has failed its task of critical examination of politics, restricting themselves to coverage of events and speeches without questioning, fact-checking or investigation.  Kalpana recalls the years after the Emergency as a time when, according to her, the media was adversarial and unafraid. She talks about how “corporatisation of the media” — not referring to the ownership, which has always been private, but the approach to news as a consumer product rather than public goods — set the stage for what she describes as an overall decline of the print media. She praises non-mainstream online news portals for stepping up to the role journalists ought to be playing despite their scarce resources, with investigations, for example on the electoral bonds issue.