Journalism and Mass Communication I: Concepts, the History of Print and Electronic Media in India, Indian-Language Landmarks, Media and the Making of States, Media Criticism and Literacy, the Press Council and Press Commissions, Media Education and Media Policy

India's first newspaper was James Augustus Hicky's Bengal Gazette, also called the Calcutta General Advertiser, first published on 29 January 1780. Hicky attacked the Governor-General Warren Hastings and his circle, and the paper was closed in 1782 when its types were seized. The early English papers were run by Europeans for Europeans, and the East India Company answered criticism with deportation: James Silk Buckingham of the Calcutta Journal was deported in 1823. The same year John Adam's licensing regulations required every press to hold a licence, and Raja Rammohan Roy's memorial against them to the Supreme Court is remembered as a founding text of Indian press freedom; he closed his Persian weekly Mirat-ul-Akhbar in protest.

Press law under the Company and the Crown swung between restriction and relief. Charles Metcalfe's Press Act of 1835 repealed the licensing regulations and earned him the title "liberator of the Indian press"; Lord Canning's Licensing Act of 1857, passed during the revolt, reimposed control for a year. The Press and Registration of Books Act 1867 regulated printing presses and newspapers by requiring declarations and imprint lines. Lord Lytton's Vernacular Press Act of 1878 targeted only Indian-language papers, which is why Amrita Bazar Patrika turned itself into an English paper overnight; Lord Ripon repealed it in 1882. The Newspapers (Incitement to Offences) Act 1908, the Indian Press Act 1910 and the Indian Press (Emergency Powers) Act 1931 answered the rise of the nationalist press.

The nationalist press was a political instrument as much as a business. Bal Gangadhar Tilak's Kesari and Mahratta (1881), Surendranath Banerjea's Bengalee, G. Subramania Iyer's Swadesamitran (1882), Aurobindo's Bande Mataram (1906), Maulana Abul Kalam Azad's Al-Hilal (1912), Mohammad Ali's Comrade (1911), Gandhi's Young India, Navajivan and Harijan, and Jawaharlal Nehru's National Herald (1938) were each tied to a movement. Business-owned dailies such as The Hindustan Times (1924), Anandabazar Patrika (1922), Mathrubhumi (1923) and The Indian Express (1932) laid the base of the post-Independence industry.

Broadcasting began with amateur clubs: the Radio Club of Bombay broadcast in June 1923. The private Indian Broadcasting Company opened its Bombay station on 23 July 1927 and Calcutta soon after, but failed, and the government took over as the Indian State Broadcasting Service in 1930. It was renamed All India Radio on 8 June 1936, with Lionel Fielden as the first Controller of Broadcasting. At Independence AIR had six stations. The name Akashvani, first used by M. V. Gopalaswamy for his Mysore station in 1936, was adopted for AIR in 1957, the year Vividh Bharati began (3 October) to win back listeners lost to Radio Ceylon's film songs. Advertising came to Vividh Bharati in 1967, FM broadcasting began in Madras in 1977, private FM stations came on air from 2001, and community radio was opened to educational institutions in 2002 and to non-profit organisations in 2006.

Benedict Anderson argued in Imagined Communities (1983) that print capitalism let people who would never meet imagine themselves as one community, and that argument fits India's linguistic states closely. Indian-language newspapers standardised the written language, built a reading public in it, and then gave that public a political voice. After Potti Sriramulu's death on fast in 1952, Andhra State was formed in 1953, and the States Reorganisation Commission led to the States Reorganisation Act 1956. The Telugu press, with Andhra Patrika of Kasinathuni Nageswara Rao as its pioneer, the Samyukta Maharashtra movement, which had Acharya P. K. Atre's daily Maratha as its voice before Bombay State was divided into Maharashtra and Gujarat in 1960, and the Malayalam press in the Aikya Kerala movement show how language journalism and statehood advanced together.

The pattern recurred with later states. Regional newspapers and, later, regional television channels carried the demands that produced Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand and Jharkhand in 2000 and Telangana in 2014. The media did not create these movements, which had social and economic roots, but they turned local grievances into a shared public agenda, which is exactly the agenda-setting role Chapter 2 examines.

Media criticism is the reasoned evaluation of media performance: accuracy, fairness, ownership, bias and effects. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent (1988) is its best-known academic form, proposing a propaganda model of five filters, ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak and anti-communism (later generalised as a dominant ideology), through which news passes. In India, dedicated media-criticism outlets such as The Hoot (founded 2001) and Newslaundry (2012) made the press itself a beat. Media literacy is the audience-side counterpart: the Aspen Institute's 1992 conference defined it as the ability to access, analyse, evaluate and communicate messages in a variety of forms. UNESCO's Grünwald Declaration on Media Education (1982) was an early international statement, and UNESCO now speaks of media and information literacy.

The First Press Commission (1952–54), chaired by Justice G. S. Rajadhyaksha, surveyed the whole industry. Among its recommendations were a Press Council, a Registrar of Newspapers (the office of the Registrar of Newspapers for India was set up in 1956), a wage board and statutory conditions of service for journalists, which led to the Working Journalists Act 1955, and measures against monopoly and against the price-cutting that let big papers crush small ones. The Press Council of India was first set up under the Press Council Act 1965 and began work in 1966. It was abolished during the Emergency in 1976 and re-established under the Press Council Act 1978. The Second Press Commission was appointed in 1978 under Justice P. K. Goswami, reconstituted in 1980 under Justice K. K. Mathew, and reported in 1982, with attention to the press's role in development and to its relationship with big business.

Under the 1978 Act the Council has a Chairman and 28 other members. The Chairman, by convention a retired judge of the Supreme Court, is chosen by a committee of the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, the Speaker of the Lok Sabha and a person elected by the members. Of the 28, thirteen are working journalists (six editors and seven others), six represent newspaper owners and managers, one represents news agencies, three are nominated by the University Grants Commission, the Bar Council of India and the Sahitya Akademi, and five are Members of Parliament (three from the Lok Sabha and two from the Rajya Sabha). The Council's remit is the print press; its strongest sanction is to warn, admonish or censure, and it cannot fine or imprison.

Journalism education in India began at Punjab University in Lahore in 1941, under P. P. Singh. The Indian Institute of Mass Communication was set up in New Delhi in 1965, and the Makhanlal Chaturvedi National University of Journalism and Communication in Bhopal in 1990. Media education has since spread to hundreds of university departments and private institutes. Its recurring problems are the gap between classroom and newsroom, uneven quality in private institutes, too little research in Indian languages, and the question whether a degree should train practitioners or critics; most programmes attempt both.

Policy for the press and for broadcasting followed two different logics. For the press the questions were ownership, newsprint and wages: a 1955 Cabinet resolution kept foreign-owned newspapers out, newsprint was imported and rationed by the state for decades, which the Supreme Court scrutinised in Bennett Coleman (1972), and a 2002 decision allowed foreign direct investment of up to 26 per cent in news and current affairs print. For broadcasting the question was autonomy. The Chanda Committee (1966) recommended separate autonomous corporations for radio and television; the B. G. Verghese Working Group (1978) proposed an autonomous "Akash Bharati"; the P. C. Joshi Working Group (1985) reported on Doordarshan's software. The Prasar Bharati (Broadcasting Corporation of India) Act was passed in 1990 but brought into force only in 1997.

The Emergency (June 1975 to March 1977) was the sharpest break: pre-censorship, the Prevention of Publication of Objectionable Matter Act 1976, the abolition of the Press Council and the merger of the four news agencies into a single agency called Samachar. After 1991 policy turned to managing a market. The Supreme Court held in 1995 that the airwaves are public property; the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act 1995 governed cable; TRAI (1997) took broadcasting and cable into its remit in 2004; private FM (2001), community radio, DTH (2003) and digitisation of cable under a 2011 amendment followed. The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021 extended oversight to digital news and streaming platforms, the Uplinking and Downlinking Guidelines 2022 govern satellite channels, and the Press and Registration of Periodicals Act 2023 replaced the 1867 law. A draft Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill was released for consultation in 2023; it remains a draft, not law.