Role of Press in Independence:

Indian press began to spread its roots in the 1870s. During 1870 to 1918 powerful emerged during these years under distinguished and fearless journalists. These were and Swadesamitran under the editorship of G. Subramaniya Iyer, Kesari and Mahratta under B.G. Tilak, Bengalee under Surendranath Banerjea, Amrita Bazar Patrika under Sisir Kumar Ghosh and Motilal Ghosh, Sudharak under G.K. Gokhale, Indian Mirror under N.N. Sen, Voice of under Dadabhai Naoroji, Hindustani and Advocate under G.P. Varma and Tribune and Akhbar-i-Am in Punjab, Indu Prakash, Dnyan Prakash, Kal and Gujarati in Bombay, and Som Prakash, Banganivasi, and Sadharani in Bengal.

- The Press was the chief instrument for carrying out the main political tasks i.e. political propaganda, education, and formation and propagation of nationalist ideology to arouse, train, mobilize and consolidate nationalist public opinion. Even the work of the National Congress was accomplished during these years largely through the Press. The resolutions it took and the proceedings of its meetings were propagated through newspapers. Nearly all the major political controversies of the day were conducted through the Press.

- Interestingly and naturally, nearly one-third of the founding members of the INC in 1885 were journalists. In fact, almost all the major political leaders in India either owned a or were contributing their writings to one or the other.

- The circulation was not confined only to cities or large towns. Newspapers used to reach remote villages. A reader would then read them to the others who, most probably, were not able to read.

- Gradually the trend of libraries started all over the country. A single newspaper would be made the center of a local ‘library’. The main assets used to be a table, a bench or two or a charpoy. Every piece of news or editorial comment would be read or heard and discussed thoroughly.

- The newspapers were started to be considered as political educator and reading or discussing them became a form of political participation.

- Newspapers were not published with business intentions but as a national or public service. They were patronized and financed by rich, aware philanthropists.

- It played the role of an institution of opposition for the Government. As a grudge, almost every act and every policy that the Government went forward with, was criticized ruthlessly. In this regar Lord Dufferin, the Viceroy, wrote in March 1886, ‘Day after day, hundreds of Sharp-witted babus pour forth their indignation against their English Oppressors in very pungent and effective diatribe.’ Again in May he writes, ‘In this way there can be no doubt there is generated in the minds of those who read these papers. . . a sincere conviction that we are all enemies of mankind in and of India in particular.‘

- Since 1870 Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code stated that ‘whoever attempts to excite feelings of disaffection of the Government established by law in British India’ was to be punished with transportation for life or with imprisonment up to three years or for any term.

- Indian journalists used tricks to stay outside the Section 124A. They would publish anti- imperialist extracts from London-based socialist and Irish newspapers or letters from radical British citizens. Indian (British) Government could not discriminate against the Indians in taking action against them without punishing the offending Britishers too.

- The Vernacular Press Act of 1878, against Indian language newspapers, was passed at a single sitting of the Imperial Legislative Council. The Act ordered the confiscation of the printing press, paper and other materials of a newspaper if the Government believed that it was publishing instigative materials and had flouted any warning from the government. Nationalist public bodies and the Press campaigned against this Act. Eventually, it had to be repealed in 1881 by Lord Ripon.

One of the most prominent journalists, activists and Congressman was Bal Gangadhar Tilak. He owned two newspapers, one in Marathi called Kesari and another in English called Mahratta. His growing agitation accumulated many leaders and led many movements. That is why he started to be called Lokamanya Tilak. These activities led to his arrest and trial. But Indian Press did not let its role get diminished.

Growth of Radio in India

Broadcasting began in India in 1924 with the setting up of a private radio service in Madras (now, Chennai). The British government approved a licence to the Indian Broadcasting Company to inaugurate radio stations in Bombay (now Mumbai) and Calcutta (now, Kolkata).

Industries started operating them as the Indian State Broadcasting Corporation. The Corporation came to be called the All India Radio in 1936, and it was controlled by the Department of Communications. When India became independent in 1947, All India Radio (AIR) was made a separate department under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

AIR, renamed as Akashvani, is a government-owned, semi-commercial operation of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. The AIR network had expanded by the mid- 1990s to around 146 AM stations along with a National Channel, the Integrated North-East Service that aimed at reaching out to the tribal groups in northeast India and the External Services.

There are five regional headquarters for the All India Radio. The government-owned network of Indian radio provides both national and local programmes in , English, and the regional languages. Commercial radio services in India started in 1967 with the Vividh Bharati service which has its headquarters at Mumbai.

There are special broadcasts for special audiences, such as farrrters needing agro-climatic, plant protection, and other agriculture-related information. News, features, and entertainment programmes are mainly broadcast, and the target audiences include the listeners in neighbouring countries and the large overseas Indian community. The FM broadcasting in India began in 1977 in Madras (now, Chennai). Till the 1990s, the All India Radio was all that the Indian audiences had. But private broadcasters emerged, especially in , Mumbai, Kolkata, Goa and Chennai, and this resulted in the emergence of private FM slots.

These were soon followed by stations in Hyderabad, Jaipur and . Over time, the number of private players dwindled and Radio City, Radio Mirchi and Red FM were among the few that managed to sustain themselves. These channels are almost exclusively devoted to pop and film music.

Newspapers

The Times of India, English-language morning daily newspaper published in Mumbai, Ahmadabad, and Delhi. It is one of India’s most influential papers, and its voice has frequently coincided with that of the national government. Originally called The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce, the paper was founded in 1838 to serve the British residents of western India. At first published twice weekly, the paper became a daily in 1851 and changed its name to in 1861. After Indian independence The Times’s insistence on accuracy, its avoidance of sensationalism, its serious tone, and its coverage of international news enhanced its prestige in India, where over the years it became known as an intellectual newspaper. Its coverage of international news, like that of the other great Indian dailies, is thorough, accounting for a quarter of its editorial space. It circulates nationally and covers a broad range of subject matter with attractive makeup and a readable style.

The Indian Express Ltd. is one of the most credible Indian news media publishing company. It publishes several widely circulated dailies, including and The Financial Express in English, the in Marathi and the Jansatta in Hindi. The company's newspapers are published from over a dozen cities daily, including New Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Pune, , Hyderabad, , Lucknow, Jaipur, Nagpur, Vadodara and Chennai. Its weekly entertainment magazine Screen, covering Indian film industry, also has a popular following.

Brands:

 Jansatta - Hindi daily for North India  The Indian Express - a national daily (English)  The Sunday Express - a news weekly  The Financial Express - a business daily  Loksatta - Marathi daily  Lokprabha - Marathi weekly  Screen, - Periodical dealing with the film and entertainment industry  Express Online - the portal for hosting IndianExpress.com, FinancialExpress.com, ScreenIndia.com, Jansatta.com, Loksatta.com and Lokprabha.com, ExpressCricket.in, and KashmirLive.com

The Hindu, started in 1878 as a weekly, became a daily in 1889 and from then on has been steadily growing to the circulation of 15,58,379 copies (ABC: July-December 2012) and a readership of about 22.58 lakhs.

The Hindu's independent editorial stand and its reliable and balanced presentation of the news have over the years, won for it the serious attention and regard of the people who matter in India and abroad.

The Hindu uses modern facilities for news gathering, page composition and printing. It is printed in seventeen centres including the Main Edition at Chennai (Madras) where the Corporate Office is based. The printing centres at Coimbatore, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Madurai, Noida, Visakhapatnam, Thiruvanathapuram, Kochi, Vijayawada, Mangalore, Tiruchirapalli, Kolkata, Hubli, Mohali, and Kozhikode are connected with high speed data lines for news transmission across the country.

The Hindu with the Chennai Edition brings out supplements and features on all days of the week.

On Mondays

Metro Plus

Business Review

Education Plus

On Tuesdays

Metro Plus

Young World

Book Review

On Wednesdays

Metro Plus

Empower

On Thursdays

Metro Plus Nxg

Science, Engineering, Technology & Agriculture

On Fridays

Friday Review

Metro Plus Weekend

On Saturdays

Metro Plus

Habitat

On Sundays

Weekly Magazine

Downtown

Cinema Plus

Literary Review , every first Sunday

Apart from The Hindu, the group publishes:

» The Hindu - Business Daily

» Sportstar - Fortnightly Sports magazine

» Frontline - Fortnightly magazine

ABP News is no. 1 Hindi news channel owned by ABP Group. Recently ABP News got the ‘Best News Channel’ award in ENBA 2019 Award Ceremony. It is a free to air TV channel. It was formerly known as STAR News before being acquired by ABP Group. ABP Live is an news website owned by ABP Group. It is also available on YouTube, It's YouTube channel name is ABP News. STAR News was launched on 18 February 1998. From 2003 STAR News became a complete channel. It was the first bilingual (English – Hindi) news service and was initially run by STAR India on its own with NDTV doing the production until 2003. When the agreement with the NDTV expired in 2003, STAR News was transformed into a complete Hindi language news channel, part of the STAR and ABP tie up. In 2003, the contract with NDTV ended and STAR decided to run the channel on its own. However, the government introduced a guideline capping foreign equity in the News business to 26%. STAR then entered into a joint venture with the Ananda Bazar Patrika group to form a company called Media Content and Communications Services Pvt. Ltd. (MCCS) which ran the channel STAR News. STAR owned 26% in this joint venture while the Ananda Bazar Patrika group owned 74%. On 16 April 2012, (ABP) Group announced that they would part ways, allowing the Rupert Murdoch-controlled company to retreat from the news business in India to focus on entertainment. With the split, the eight-year affiliation with the 'Star' brand came to an end. Media Content and Communications (MCCS), the company that owned and operated the news channels, said that after the split, Hindi news channel Star News would be named ABP News, Bengali news channel Star Ananda would become ABP Ananda and the Marathi news channel Star Majha would be called ABP Majha. A version of the channel called ABP Sanjha is popular with northern Punjabi audiences. A Gujarati language version called ABP Asmita was launched on 1 January 2016.

BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIAN MEDIA

Indian Media consist of several different types of communications: television, radio, cinema, newspapers, magazines, and Internet-based Web sites/portals. Indian media was active since the late 18th century with print media started in 1780, radio broadcasting initiated in 1927, and the screening of Auguste and Louis Lumière moving pictures in Bombay initiated during the July of 1895. It is among the oldest and largest media of the world. Media in India has been free and independent throughout most of its history, even before establishment of Indian empire by Ashoka the Great on the foundation of righteousness, openness, morality and spirituality. The period of emergency (1975–1977), declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, was the brief period when India's media was faced with potential government retribution.

The country consumed 99 million newspaper copies as of 2007 - making it the second largest market in the world for newspapers. By 2009, India had a total of 81,000,000 Internet users - comprising 7.0% of the country's population, and 7,570,000 people in India also had access to broadband Internet as of 2010 - making it the 11th largest country in the world in terms of broadband Internet users. As of 2009, India is among the 4th largest television broadcast stations in the world with nearly 1,400 stations. Snapshot of evolution of media in India is as below:

Mass media in India - Bengal:

The Bengal Gazette was started by James Augustus Hickey in 1780. The Gazette, a two- sheet newspaper, specialized in writing on the private lives of the Sahibs of the Company. He dared even to mount scurrilous attacks on the Governor-General, Warren Hastings', wife, which soon landed "the late printer to the Honorable Company" in trouble.

Hickey was sentenced to a 4 months jail term and Rs.500 fine, which did not deter him. After a bitter attack on the Governor-General and the Chief Justice, Hickey was sentenced to one year in prison and fined Rs.5, 000, which finally drove him to penury. These were the first tentative steps of journalism in India.

Mass media in India - Calcutta:

B. Messink and Peter Reed were pliant publishers of the India Gazette, unlike their infamous predecessor. The colonial establishment started the Calcutta Gazette. It was followed by another private initiative the Bengal Journal. The Oriental Magazine of Calcutta Amusement, a monthly magazine made it four weekly newspapers and one monthly magazine published from Calcutta, now Kolkata.

Mass media in India - Madras Chennai:

The Madras Courier was started in 1785 in the southern stronghold of Madras, which is now called Chennai. Richard Johnson, its founder, was a government printer. Madras got its second newspaper when, in 1791, Hugh Boyd, who was the editor of the Courier quit and founded the Hurkaru. Tragically for the paper, it ceased publication when Boyd passed away within a year of its founding.

It was only in 1795 that competitors to the Courier emerged with the founding of the Madras Gazette followed by the India Herald. The latter was an "unauthorised" publication, which led to the deportation of its founder Humphreys. The Madras Courier was designated the purveyor of official information in the Presidency.

In 1878, The Hindu was founded, and played a vital role in promoting the cause of Indian independence from the colonial yoke. It's founder, Kasturi Ranga Iyengar, was a lawyer, and his son, K Srinivasan assumed editorship of this pioneering newspaper during for the first half of the 20th century. Today this paper enjoys the highest circulation in South India, and is among the top five nationally.

Mass media in India - Bombay:

Bombay, now Mumbai, surprisingly was a late starter - The Bombay Herald came into existence in 1789. Significantly, a year later a paper called the Courier started carrying advertisements in Gujarati.

The first media merger of sorts: The Bombay Gazette, which was started in 1791, merged with the Bombay Herald the following year. Like the Madras Courier, this new entity was recognised as the publication to carry "official notifications and advertisements".

'A Chronicle of Media and the State', by Jeebesh Bagchi in the Sarai Reader 2001 is a handy timeline on the role of the state in the development of media in India for more than a century.

Bagchi divides the timeline into three 'ages'. The Age of Formulation, which starts with the Indian Telegraph Act in 1885 and ends with the Report of the Sub-Committee on Communication, National Planning Committee in 1948.

State of Modern Mass Media

After Independence, the Indian media had evolved, realigned and reinvented itself to a large extent, and now-a-days you can see a clear division between commercial and aesthetic expressions of our Media Giants, sometimes arbitrary. Modern mass communication media is poles apart relative to any aesthetic feeling: vulgarity and arrogance nullify any hypothesis of meaning. Aesthetics is the more powerful answer to violence of modern mass communication. Today’s mass communication media seems to elude every determination, exposing its message to all possible variants, it finishes to abolish it. Goal of mass communication is always the unbiased dissipation of any content, and the world wide web is no exception, and surely is the most efficient media tool.

It’s also very interesting to observe how the old media are becoming more and more permeable to blogs and D.I.Y. information. This phenomenon is not due to a fascination in more democratic information sources. On the contrary - the pressure is rising due to the growth of the eyes’ (cameras and new digital devices) that are watching the same events that mainstream media are reporting to us: the possibility of being uncovered are too many and broadcast journalists are forced to tell the truth (or at least a plausible version of it). As a consequence, blogs have become the major source of news and information about many global affairs. We also have to consider that bloggers are often the only real journalists, as they (at their own risk) provide independent news in countries where the mainstream media is censored, biased or under control.

Indian Press Under British Rule

Bengal Gazette (English weekly) published by James Augustus Hickey in 1780 Jan 29th from Calcutta. It was the first newspaper in South Asian sub- continent

- Bengal Gazette alias ‘Hicky Gazette’, ‘Calcutta General Advertiser’

- Declaration ‘a weekly political and commercial paper open to all but, influenced by none’

- Hickey had his own column, many persons wrote by pen names.

- Bengal Gazette could not survive more than two years due to sharp confrontation with Governor General Warren Hastings and Chief Justice Elijah Impey.

Indian Gazette as a rival to Bengal Gazette, published in the same year (1780) by Peter Read, a salt agent (backing by Hastings).

After Bengal Gazette, other publications from India were-

Madras Courier weekly (1785),

Bombay Herald weekly (1789) merged into Bombay Gazette in 1791,

Hurukaru weekly (1793),

Calcutta Chronicle (1818),

Bengal Journal,

Indian world,

Bengal Harkarer etc.

In the early period newspapers in India were run by Britishers.

Indian’s involvement in publication

- Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the pioneer Indian journalist and social reformer

- By his inspiration Gangadhar Bhattacharjee published Bengal Gazette (1816), the first Indian owned English daily newspaper, but could not survive long

- Raja’s own publications- Kaumudi (Bengali 1821), Mirat ul Akhbar (Persian 1822) and Brahminical Magazine (English 1822)

- Press Regulation –1823 imposed by British govt. in India to control newspapers.

- The regulation was used as a tool to deport James Silk Buckingham, Editor of Calcutta Chronicle.

- Raja presented a petition to Supreme Court to protest the regulation in favour of J.S. Buckingham.

- It was his bold step for the preservation of press freedom, however he defeated the case.

- Anti reformists Hindu fundamentalists published Samachar weekly to challenge Raja’s social reforms.

- Raja passed away in 1833

1857 Mutiny (the first war of Indian independence) was a turning point to Indian journalism.

- In the issue of mutiny, British owned press and Indian owned press blamed each other in the lowest level.

- British owned press acted like blood mongers of Indians.

- This event worked as a fuel to Indian owned press against the British rule in India. - Pioneers Indian journalists on those days- Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Gangadhar Bhattacharjee, Bhawani Charan Bannerjee, Dwarkanath Tagore, Girish Chandra Ghose, Harischandra Mukharjee, Ishworchandra Vidyasagar, Kristo Pal, Manmohan Ghose, Keshub Chander Sen etc.

- Other major publications by Indians- The Reformer, Enquirer, Gyan Auneshun, Bengal Herald, Bang Doot, Hindu Patriot, Indian Mirror, Sulab Samachar, etc.

After Mutiny

Standard, The Bombay Times and Telegraph merged into Times of India in 1861, Robert Knight was the owner , he was also owner of Statesman daily (1875) from Calcutta, Indian Economist monthly and Agriculture Gazette of India, his editorials and writings were balanced and impressive.

Other major publications-

Indu Prakash weekly, Gyan Prakash, Lokhitavadi (all 1861),

Amrit Bazar Patrika (1868 Cacutta),

Pioneer (1872 Allahbad),

The Hindu (1878 Chennai) ,

Kesari (marathi) and The Maratha (English) (both in1878 from Pune by veteran freedom fighter Balgangadhar Tilak)

Pioneer Indian Journalists-

Bal Gangadhar Tilak,

Mahadev Govinda Ranade,

Dadabhoi Naoroji, Gopal Rao Hari Deshmukh,

Vishu Shastri Pandit,

Karsondas Mulji,

Bal Sashtri Jambhekar etc.