News Channels and Democracy: A View from India

Post 1991, India has witnessed a proliferation of television news channels. Shifting gears from ‘news’ to ‘news and views’, these news channels have traversed a long path. Located within the framework of news channels as the new opinion makers, this paper attempts to understand, how talk shows contribute to the understanding of deliberative and participatory democracy.Talk shows in news channels are a post satellite television creation. Talk shows have become an important constituent of news programming. Scholarships abound on the impact of talk shows on audiences. While some scholars have lauded talk shows by equating them with deepening democracy, others dismiss them as mere carriers of neoliberal ideas that further widens the existing social divides. In order to further our understanding of the nuances of the ‘talk’ genre in television news, an attempt will be made in this paper to do a content analysis of a few episodes of the popular talk show We The People aired on the English news channel NDTV 24x7 every Saturday from 8 to 9 pm. The data generated, will be analysed along broad themes, like the type of issues debated, the presentation of the episodes, the nature of the debate/discussion, the representation of diverse voices in panel, the promotion of viewpoints and henceforth. This analysis will be used in building up an argument of how news channels are creating space for public discourse.