On the surface, there is a simple story about accountability in Indian media. On this view, there is competition; and competition, we assume, produces accountability. But competition alone does not work on many dimensions. Running a newspaper is a financially complicated business. This is particularly true in a country like India where newspaper readers are not willing to pay anything close to the costs of producing quality news. The rest will have to be subsidised by activities like advertising revenue.

Although related, competition for advertising revenues is not the same thing as competition for the needs of readers. Both have different logics. There is a sense in which intellectual ambition is a genuinely public good, but is under-supplied by the market. The Indian media cannot be accused of a lack of diversity of opinion; equally it cannot be accused of having high intellectual, professional or aesthetic ambition for its outputs. In many countries the public broadcasting system did provide a genuine outlet for taste, intellect and a genuine sense of distinction that society needs. But our public broadcasting system was ruined by the logic of politics and patronage. There is a case to be made that despite competition an important class of public goods remains under-supplied.

But the really important place competition has failed is in accountability of the media itself. While mutual contention and differences between news media are fine, that contention has to have some minimal baseline credibility. It is a measure of the declining credibility of the media that almost no paper is widely regarded as a journal of record. As someone once put it, there are often more subtexts than texts. But to invoke competition to scuttle the debate over media accountability is a bit like saying that because politics is competitive, politicians don’t need to be held accountable to other constituencies. In some ways, politicians at least have a go at each other. But when was the last time the media had a competition over holding each other accountable? This could be for many reasons: an exalted sense of guild solidarity or an acute consciousness that they are all living in glass houses. Competition does not lead media to hold each other accountable.

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