INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES,
ENGINEERING & PHARMACEUTICAL SCIENCES

India’s media market has emerged in recent years as one of the most competitive and profitable in the world global scenario. However despite the nation’s status as the world’s largest democracy, India’s news media have been criticized for their emphasis on entertainment values at the expense of critical, pro-social, and investigative forms of journalism. A related development has been the increasing influence of political parties in the news content development, a practice which is named ‘paid news’, an Indian version of ‘manufacturing of consent’. This controversy came to the fore during the (April-May, 2009) Indian parliamentary elections when numerous overtly favorable articles and news reports emerged in the Indian media that contained no disclosure of the monetary transactions that facilitated their publication/broadcast. This development poses serious threats to the continued advancement of a vibrant Indian mediated public sphere, and instead represents a deliberate attempt to manufacture popular consensus. This article details these unethical news practices in Indian news media and argues that this form of contemporary Indian journalism is a violation of the core values of the profession and their relation to the democratic process. This research paper is a qualitative work relying mainly on textual and content analysis, which include analysis of interviews, newspaper articles and paid news contents.