Sudeshna Devi

In recent years, the concept of 'social capital' has gained a prominent position in the discourse of development studies. Here, the prefix 'social' would refer to the social dimension of capital. Social capital is concerned with the social resources available to the actor which s/ ...

Located within the framework of media as an agency of opinion formation, this paper attempts to understand, how talk shows in news channels contribute to the understanding of deliberative and participatory democracy. 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. The data generated, is 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 in India.

The three selected texts are a timely addition to the scantly researched area of newsroom ethnography in the Indian context. They make a substantial case for the need of an ethnographic study into newsrooms in a non-Western context. The authors argue that the ethnographic studies of the 1970s and 1980s are proving ineffectual to grasp the complexities of the fast-changing news ecology of the current time. These earlier studies were conducted in Western countries and replicating the same model to understand non-Western media is futile.