The Indian Media Problem Is Bigger Than Trust

The immediate provocation for this essay was the unusually overt rejection of the mainstream media during the recent Jantar Mantar student protests. The protesters turned a few television crews away, some driven off the site entirely, while the protesters filmed the whole thing themselves and published it before any newsroom could get it to air. They were demonstrating that the old intermediary was now optional.

The Indian media’s problem is not the absence of an audience. Television still reaches approximately 745 million Indians every week. Print remains unusually resilient too, with nearly 30 million newspaper copies still circulating daily. Large traditional news groups receive hundreds of millions of monthly digital visitors. But reach is no longer the same as authority, and authority is no longer reliably convertible into reader revenue.

At the heart of the media's existential crisis is that credibility and business success have been decoupled for a while. The uncomfortable fact is that Indian media could afford to lose credibility without losing enough business to force a correction because of this disconnect. The question raised by the protests is whether that would change. Even the political establishment, historically among media’s most reliable users, has started to answer that question with its feet.

The Core Paradox: India Consumes News, but News Producers Capture Little Value
The 2026 FICCI--EY report, Stories, Scale and Impact: Unlocking India’s Media and Entertainment Economy, estimates that though digital advertising grew 26% in 2025 to ₹947 billion and represented 63% of all advertising revenues, traditional media ceded significant space to the digital giants like Google, Meta, Amazon and, more recently, to the quick commerce companies.

Moreover, publishers cannot monetise their audiences effectively because they no longer own consumer relationships. According to the FICCI--EY report, India had just four million paid news subscriptions, compared with 216 million paid video subscriptions. The DNPA--EY report, Monetizing Digital News: Charting a Sustainable Future in India, found that traditional publishers remain heavily dependent on aggregators and social platforms for reach. According to it, as high as 83% of monthly active users of traditional media digital platforms accessed content from these other routes; only 10% used organisations’ apps, reducing chances of repeat visits. News discovery is often through Google Search or Discover, social media apps, YouTube, news aggregators or increasingly through AI-generated responses, weakening consumer loyalty.

How India’s Advertising Mix Shifted

Net result: Print advertising revenue grew 2%; print subscriptions declined 1%; digital revenue represented only about 5% of print publishers’ revenues on average; linear television advertising fell 10%.

The global media journey away from ad-funding

For a substantial part of media history globally, advertisers were key to the media business but did not get in the way of strong editorial content. Diversified advertisers and strong newsroom norms protected editorial judgment, as well as the fact that advertisers needed the newspapers too; there weren’t too many other ways of reaching their audience.

This balance of power shifted from roughly 2000 onwards, with big global media facing an existential crisis. By 2019, Facebook and Google alone were taking 53% of the US digital advertising revenue. US newspaper advertising revenue fell nearly 63%, from $49 billion in 2006 to 18 billion in 2016.

Then a significant change occurred, when for the first time in media history, the revenue hierarchy reversed in 2020. By 2022, advertising revenue for US newspapers was an estimated $9.8 billion while circulation generated $11.6 billion. In 2025, NYT generated $1.95 billion from subscriptions versus just $566m from advertising, ending the year with about 12.2 million digital-only subscribers. NYT, WSJ, Financial Times, The Economist, Le Monde in France and a few more concluded that advertising was not enough to finance the kind of journalism they wanted to produce. They looked to create differentiated products for the customers rather than being audience aggregators for advertisers.

The India Story
India took the opposite route. Rather than follow the global shift away from advertising dependence, Indian media intensified it in the 1990s. The newspaper price wars did not help. In Delhi, TOI cut its cover price from ₹2 to ₹1.50; HT followed and eventually, in 1999, dropped to ₹1. India Today described this as a battle that changed the industry paradigm, as publishers across markets cut prices and reader revenue became increasingly insignificant relative to advertising. It became a vicious self-perpetuating loop as the so-called “invitation price” strategy became the constant pricing norm.

Indian media was teaching its consumers they did not need to pay for the journalism. India entered the digital transition era with a structurally weaker reader-paying habit and less differentiated too.

Editorial judgement was the brand

And the absence of the same removed a significant brand moat. A masthead was valuable because it represented an independent, reliable, true and relevant method of information. When the media is seen as mainly following social trends, leaning into political access, over-indexed on competitive imitation, the diminished editorial voice comes at a cost.

A media brand matters for offering reporting or analysis unavailable elsewhere with authoritative verification so that if it vanishes tomorrow, it is not easily replaceable by another. Consumers pay for a combination of scarcity or uniqueness, specialist expertise, original information, and rigorous and substantiated analysis; without these, news producers lose pricing power.

Huge product commoditisation has resulted in editorial convergence through imitation-driven news coverage, media often chasing each other’s tails for the same stories. Even when a user trusts a general-news brand, they refuse to subscribe because substantially similar information is freely available elsewhere. The DNPA-EY report identified the prevalence of “largely undifferentiated general news products” as key to slow subscription growth. It adds that implementing any tiered subscription models for general news is difficult due to this undifferentiated content, often easily accessible at no cost.

Political Fragmentation, Polarisation & Kinds of Media Ownership
The issue is not that the media has a point of view. Every media organisation, in India or elsewhere, makes subjective decisions about what deserves coverage, what facts are relevant, who are the voices they consider authoritative and how events should be contextualised. It is about journalism with a transparent editorial worldview with disciplined, factual methods versus where political alignment, owner interest or access to power determine the facts selected, suppressed or framed.

Political polarisation, not exactly uncommon world over, got compounded in India with the issue of media ownership. On one hand are the traditional media groups or media-primary businesses such as TOI, HT and The Hindu. TOI historically combined high advertising dependence with enormous bargaining clout due to its sheer reach. HT has a lesser financial cushion. The Hindu is attempting the same shift pursued successfully by publishers such as the NYT, FT and Economist: reducing dependence on advertising by making readers pay for distinctive, useful journalism. It has introduced paywalls, bundles, e-papers, newsletters, webinars and personalised products, with digital subscriptions growing strongly. It’s early days, and advertising still contributes roughly 70- 80% of revenues.

The second category is the economically insulated media, part of a larger business group, where the media contribution, in pure earnings terms, is relatively marginal. For example, NDTV under Adani, Network 18 under Reliance or TV9 under infrastructure-linked owners. Where the parent’s larger businesses are heavily dependent on regulation, government contracts or political access, preserving those relationships may become a bigger aim than maximising the media company’s commercial returns.

The third category is with direct political ownership or strategic connection, with variations within these. Sakshi is directly strategic; Sun is commercially successful but politically embedded; Republic is founder-led and ideologically positioned; Asianet combines political ownership with demonstrated newsroom independence.

The common factor across these categories is the over-dependence on particular advertisers or government spending and/or government approval so that credibility is then no longer the enforcer of economic discipline. The market cannot punish bad journalism nor reward trustworthy journalism. The market-dependent publisher may choose survival over trust by pandering to a major advertiser, while an economically insulated publisher may choose to absorb the loss in return for influence, access or benefits to its larger businesses. Both kinds of ownership find it in their interest to accommodate power, which produces similar editorial incentives and direction.

Rather than advertising corrupting the media, it’s thus the absence of an independent market discipline, where readers/ viewers stop being the primary customers and their trust is commercially underpriced.

Political partisanship has other commercial consequences. It may be distrusted by half the population but is intensely trusted by its political constituency, bringing loyal viewership, high engagement, strong media personalities and considerable political influence. This further disconnects the media business from its traditional objective credibility. Once news becomes a political position rather than an evidence-based product, audiences are drawn by political affiliations rather than facts, eventually weakening the media's role as a factual institution.

The rise of Scroll, The Wire, Newslaundry, The Ken and The Morning Context can be read partly as a market response to the weaknesses of mainstream media. They are trying to rebuild a more direct relationship with the audience, either by asking readers to fund independent public-interest reporting, or by making journalism distinctive and useful enough to command a subscription. It remains to be seen if they succeed in scaling up or building their business and influence despite a lack of scale.

So Were the Protests a Watershed Moment?
There have been other protests like the farmers’ agitation, the anti-CAA protests, etc. that called out media partisanship. This time, not only did the media become one of the institutions the protesters opposed, they deliberately chose not to allow the media to carry their story. The media rejection occurred physically and publicly; the camera and microphone no longer granted authority. The protesters possessed their own content distribution system that bypassed mainstream media, and their narrative became central for a significant audience.

Mainstream media hasn’t become irrelevant. Yet. But audiences did begin to question mainstream media’s right to own the narrative lens, bringing a harsher scrutiny to media legitimacy than ever before. Political power has noticed it -- the PM decided to use Instagram to reach out to protesters. Reuters reported on August 6 that the BJP has intensified Instagram outreach to woo young voters generally, ahead of 2029, as part of a broader shift toward “raw,” unedited content. Political power’s core skill has always been going wherever the audience already is; that instinct just relocated to Instagram.

For years, Indian media could lose credibility without losing enough business to force a correction. Declining credibility had not imposed a commensurate business penalty. The protests offered an unsettling possibility: that reach may no longer guarantee relevance or influence, at least with some key audiences. What happens if audiences now learn they can bypass it altogether? When even political power starts following those audiences directly to Instagram, media companies should worry about more than trust. They should worry about relevance.

This piece first appeared on Minari Shah’s Substack page, The Long View.