Time’s up. Or is it? Journalists’ perceptions of sexual violence and newsroom changes after #MeTooIndia Chindu Sreedharan, Einar Thorsen and Ananya Gouthi Abstract The #MeToo movement, which engulfed much of India’s news and entertainment industry in October 2018, was projected by many as a watershed moment for Indian journalism. Driven largely through social media activism, it created significant media discourse and public outcry, leading to the ‘outing’ and resignation of scores of journalists. This paper explores the perception of #MeTooIndia in regional and national newsrooms. Drawing on Manuel Castells’s ideas of networked social movement, we consider the origins of #MeTooIndia, including its mediation on private and social networks. We then draw on 190 semi-structured interviews with journalists working in 14 languages across the six administrative zones of India to explore the ‘cause’ of the campaign—the prevalence of sexual harassment and sexual violence in workspaces— before turning our attention to the impact, or potential for impact, that journalists saw in it. We find most journalists felt the movement was “good”, but did not think it influenced their newsroom environment or newswork in any meaningful manner. Regional journalists expressed more pessimism about the #MeTooIndia, men more so than women. Keywords: Journalism, India, Sexual Violence, Sexual Harassment, MeToo, Social Movement Corresponding author: Chindu Sreedharan, W336, Faculty of Media and Communication, Bournemouth University, United Kingdom BH12 5BB. Email:
[email protected] Introduction #MeToo arrived late in India, towards the end of 2018, some 11 months after actor Alyssa Milano’s appeal on Twitter for women to come forward under that hashtag turned into a global campaign, and more than 11 years after Tarana Burke originally began it in a hashtagless world from “the deepest, darkest place in my soul” (Burke, undated).