India’s media-business nexus is now a constitutional crisis

There are moments when a retired judge, speaking at a commemorative lecture, says something so plainly and so urgently that it cuts through the noise of daily public life and lands with the force of a constitutional alarm. Justice K M Joseph, former judge of the Supreme Court of India, provided exactly such a moment on August 19. Delivering a lecture, organised by the Kerala High Court Bar Association, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence, he did not dwell on American history. He spoke about Indian reality.

“I am really concerned,” he said, “about the way the majority of the national media houses that I get to listen, how it reveals the close inexorable link between business houses and the media. How they completely destroy an otherwise healthy discourse which should happen.”

He went further, describing how anchors “manipulate the discourse in such a way that it not only reveals the bias of the anchor, but it also leaves the listener in a quandary as to what is the truth.” His conclusion was devastating in its simplicity: “The ultimate right of every citizen in any democracy is to pursue truth and find truth. This is the fundamental thing of any democracy, any society. This is sadly missing.”

These are not the words of a partisan commentator. They are the carefully considered words of a man who served on the highest court of the republic, who has read its Constitution closely, and who has now chosen — in retirement, without the constraints of judicial office — to say plainly what the institution he once served has been reluctant to articulate.

Consolidation of airwaves by corporate houses:

To understand the gravity of Justice Joseph’s concern, one must trace the arc of Indian media ownership over the past decade. It is a story of systematic consolidation — the quiet, methodical transfer of India’s most powerful information channels into the hands of its largest corporate conglomerates.

In May 2014 — the very month that a new government came to power at the Centre — Reliance Industries Limited approved funding of up to ₹4,000 crore through its Independent Media Trust to acquire control of Network18, with open offers completed by December 2014. Network18 is the parent company of CNN-News18, News18 India, CNBC-TV18, Firstpost, Moneycontrol, and more than ten regional news channels. Reliance Industries today holds a 56.89 per cent controlling stake in Network18. One corporate group, one ownership stake, and a news reach that spans virtually every major language market in India.

Eight years later, in late 2022, came an acquisition that sent shockwaves through Indian journalism. Gautam Adani’s AMG Media Networks, in what journalists and international observers widely described as a hostile takeover, raised its stake in NDTV — founded in 1988 by Prannoy Roy and Radhika Roy, and built over decades into India’s most credible independent broadcast news organisation — to 64.71 per cent. The founders were effectively displaced from control of the network they had created. Adani’s group has reportedly also acquired IANS, one of India’s major domestic news wire agencies — an acquisition that, if confirmed, would extend corporate media control to the very raw material that hundreds of smaller outlets use to construct their daily coverage.

The Adani and Ambani acquisitions are only the most visible elements of a broader landscape of concentrated ownership. The Zee Entertainment group, the India Today group, HT Media, and the Times Group are all controlled by powerful business and family interests, whose commercial relationships with the government and the regulatory state are deep and entangling. What was once a diverse, occasionally chaotic but genuinely pluralistic media ecosystem has been steadily narrowed into a small number of powerful corporate channels.

Numbers don’t lie: India’s press freedom in free fall:

Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the Paris-based press freedom organisation, publishes an annual World Press Freedom Index ranking 180 countries. India’s trajectory on this index tells its own story. In 2012, India ranked 122nd. By 2022, it had fallen to 150th. In 2023, it plunged further to 161st. In 2024, it stood at 159th. In 2025, there was a marginal improvement to 151st. These rankings — from a credible international organisation with documented methodology — reflect the lived reality of journalists working under conditions of acute commercial pressure, legal harassment, and ownership-driven editorial constraint.

The constitutional dimension and fundamental rights:

Justice Joseph’s remarks were not merely sociological observations. They were a constitutional argument, carefully constructed. He cited the Supreme Court’s Constitution Bench judgment in Kaushal Kishore v. State of Uttar Pradesh, which established that Articles 19 and 21 of the Constitution operate not only vertically — between citizen and state — but also horizontally, between private parties. This is a significant legal point with profound implications for media accountability.

“If I am invited to a debate,” Justice Joseph explained, “and if I am actually snuffed out, if what I want to say I am not permitted to say, I am tortured out of shape in what I have said — all of this, in my view, constitutes a gross violation of Article 19, the right of the person, who is participating, and the right of the audience, which is wanting to find out what they are saying actually.”

He also raised, with uncomfortable specificity, the issue of government advertising as a mechanism of media control — what he described as a potential “carrot and stick” relationship in which media organisations dependent on state advertising revenue develop powerful structural incentives to soften their coverage of government. The Union Government, through the Central Bureau of Communication (formerly the Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity), distributes thousands of crores in annual advertising expenditure across print, digital, and broadcast media. The Supreme Court has in several rulings observed that government advertisement allocation must follow transparent, non-discriminatory criteria — but implementation has remained inconsistent.

What must change:

The solutions are neither mysterious nor technically complex. They require only political will. A robust anti-monopoly framework for media ownership — limiting any single conglomerate’s control across broadcast, print, and digital platforms — is the most fundamental need. Several mature democracies, including the United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia, maintain such frameworks. India’s cross-media ownership regulations remain underdeveloped and largely unenforced.

Full transparency in government advertising — mandatory public disclosure of all advertising expenditure to media organisations by central and state governments — would immediately disrupt the editorial dependency that Justice Joseph described. A genuinely independent public broadcaster, insulated from government control, would provide citizens with a baseline of unmanipulated information. Legal protection for journalists — shielding sources and preventing the weaponisation of sedition, defamation, and UAPA provisions against legitimate reporting — would begin to restore the conditions for truthful journalism.

The fourth estate’s final exam:

Justice Joseph ended his remarks with an appeal to “authorities to take notice.” That a former Supreme Court judge must make such an appeal — publicly, at a commemorative lecture — is itself a measure of how far institutional failure has progressed.

Citizens of a democracy cannot make free and meaningful choices if the information they receive is curated by the same corporate interests that simultaneously seek government contracts, regulatory approvals, and favourable policy outcomes.

When media ownership is concentrated in the hands of conglomerates whose fortunes are intertwined with the decisions of the government of the day, the media ceases to be the fourth pillar of democracy and becomes, instead, its first servant.

Justice Joseph watched his television every day with the hope that things would change. So do millions of Indians. That hope, however, will not survive much longer on hope alone. It requires action — legal, legislative, and regulatory — before the damage to democratic discourse becomes irreversible.

(The writer is with the Cholleti BlackRobe Chambers, Hyderabad, and writes on economy, politics and law.)