Biased media is a real threat to Indian democracy.

When the Watchdog Takes Sides

In 1994 a radio station in Rwanda spent months telling its listeners that their Tutsi neighbours were "cockroaches". When the genocide began that April, Radio Mille Collines read out names and locations, and around eight hundred thousand people were killed in about a hundred days. That is the extreme end of a spectrum whose milder forms are familiar everywhere: the channel that shouts down one side, the newspaper that buries inconvenient facts, the feed that shows each citizen only what confirms his anger. India, the world's largest democracy, with thousands of registered newspapers, hundreds of news channels and hundreds of millions of internet users, is not Rwanda. But a democracy runs on informed consent, and when the media that informs citizens takes sides systematically, it does not merely misreport democracy; it slowly hollows it out from within.

It helps first to be clear about what bias means. Every journalist chooses which stories to cover and how to frame them, and no newspaper can be perfectly neutral. An open editorial position, declared honestly, is legitimate and even healthy. Bias becomes a threat when it is hidden, systematic and driven by interests other than the truth: when ownership, advertising, political patronage, caste or communal prejudice decide what citizens are allowed to know. Walter Lippmann observed in Public Opinion (1922) that people act not on the world itself but on "the pictures in their heads", and the media paints those pictures. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, in Manufacturing Consent (1988), showed how ownership, advertising and dependence on official sources filter the news long before any editor consciously censors it.

The Indian Constitution recognises how central this is. The Supreme Court read freedom of the press into Article 19(1)(a) in Romesh Thapar (1950) and Sakal Papers (1962), and in Indian Express Newspapers (1985) described the press as the guardian of the public's right to know. The press earned the title of the fourth estate in India's freedom struggle: Tilak's Kesari, Gandhi's Young India and Ambedkar's Mooknayak informed and organised a subject people. After independence, investigative reporting exposed scams, and Amartya Sen argued that no substantial famine has occurred in a functioning democracy with a free press, because a free press forces governments to respond to distress. The media's democratic value lies precisely in its independence.

The first threat of biased media is to the integrity of elections. Democracy assumes that voters choose between competing claims on the basis of reasonably accurate information. The practice of paid news, which P. Sainath exposed in the 2009 Maharashtra elections, sold news space to candidates disguised as independent reporting. The Election Commission has since tracked paid news cases in every major election, and the Law Commission's 255th Report (2015) recommended making it an electoral offence. When advertisement poses as journalism, the voter is deceived at the very moment of choice, and the level playing field on which free and fair elections depend tilts quietly in favour of money.

Moreover, biased media corrodes the deliberation that democracy needs between elections. Television debates that cast every question as a war between patriots and traitors leave no room for evidence or compromise. The TRP manipulation case uncovered by the Mumbai Police in 2020 showed how ratings themselves could be gamed, rewarding the loudest rather than the most accurate coverage. When the media becomes a megaphone for one side, it also stops asking hard questions of those in power, and accountability, the core function of the fourth estate, gives way to cheerleading or to blind hostility. Either way, citizens lose the sober information they need to judge their government.

Building upon this, bias in a diverse society can turn deadly. Rumours circulated through doctored videos helped inflame the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013, and in 2018 rumours of child-lifters on messaging apps led to lynchings in several states. In Tehseen Poonawalla v Union of India (2018) the Supreme Court directed preventive measures against such mob violence. In 2020 it restrained a television channel from airing a series that portrayed Muslims joining the civil services as a conspiracy, observing that the media cannot target a community. Biased reporting of caste atrocities and of conflict also deepens polarisation, because communities begin to live in separate information worlds where the other side is always the villain.

A quieter bias lies in who is missing from the news. Studies of Indian newsrooms, including Oxfam India's report with Newslaundry in 2019, found that leadership positions were overwhelmingly held by upper-caste journalists, with few Dalits or Adivasis. Rural distress, tribal displacement and the concerns of the poor receive a sliver of coverage compared with celebrity and urban politics. When a large part of the citizenry is invisible in the national conversation, its problems are not debated, and democracy becomes formally universal but substantively selective.

Yet the threat should not be overstated, and the counter-argument deserves a fair hearing. John Stuart Mill argued that truth emerges from the collision of opinions, and in a plural market of ideas, outlets with opposite biases can balance one another. India's media is vast and multilingual, and regional newspapers, independent digital outlets and fact-checking platforms such as Alt News and BOOM, along with the government's own PIB Fact Check unit, regularly correct falsehoods. Voters have repeatedly defied the predictions of dominant media narratives, which suggests that citizens are not passive receptacles. Moreover, the cure must not be worse than the disease: if the state appoints itself the judge of bias, it may silence dissent in the name of fairness, which is itself a grave threat to democracy.

The real danger, then, lies not in the existence of bias but in its concentration and concealment. When a few owners with political or business interests control large parts of the news, as TRAI noted in its 2014 recommendations on media ownership, plurality shrinks. When algorithms on social media feed each user only agreeable content, and when, as the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018 revealed, harvested personal data can be used to micro-target voters with tailored messages, the collision of opinions that Mill relied upon never happens. And India's rank of 157 out of 180 countries in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders indicates that pressures on independent journalism remain serious.

The response must strengthen independence without inviting censorship. Self-regulation through the Press Council of India and the News Broadcasting and Digital Standards Authority needs real teeth and transparent decisions. Disclosure of cross-media ownership and political affiliations, as TRAI recommended, would let readers judge sources for themselves. Making paid news an electoral offence would protect the ballot. Public broadcasting must be insulated from the government of the day, and newsrooms must become more socially diverse. Above all, citizens need media literacy: Finland, which teaches pupils to evaluate sources from school onwards, has consistently topped European rankings of resilience to misinformation.

Gandhi, himself an editor, wrote that the sole aim of journalism should be service, and that an uncontrolled pen serves only to destroy. The Rwandan radio station showed what a captured media can do, and India's own free press during the freedom struggle showed what an honest one can achieve. Biased media is a real threat to Indian democracy, not because Indians cannot think for themselves, but because no citizen can reason well on poisoned information. A democracy that protects the independence, diversity and honesty of its press, and that teaches its citizens to read critically, will find that the watchdog once again barks at power rather than at the people.