When James Murdoch, the son of the media baron, Rupert Murdoch, sounded a cautionary note about what he termed the “cable newsification of everything”, he was diagnosing a civilisational malaise.
His observation that the incentives of cable news — conflict, outrage and spectacle — have “colonised the wider information ecosystem” resonates far beyond the United States of America. In India, this dynamic has taken an especially theatrical, and
troubling, form.
In India, television debates, once imagined as spaces for informed deliberation, have devolved into performative contests. The anchor is no longer a moderator but a ringmaster; panellists are not interlocutors but pugilists, trading blows for effect rather than exchanging ideas. Choreographed indignation has become the dominant grammar of prime-time news. Substance has thus been displaced by spectacle.
This transformation did not occur overnight. Liberalisation in the 1990s expanded India’s television universe, breaking the monopoly of State broadcasting and unleashing a vibrant, competitive news market. For a time, this pluralism enriched public discourse. But as channels multiplied and advertising revenues became tightly linked to ratings, a brutal incentive structure took hold. Attention became currency, outrage became strategy, and speed eclipsed verification.
Television debates thrive on conflict because conflict retains viewers. It rewards sharp binaries — nationalist versus anti-national, believer versus traitor, victim versus villain — because complexity does not translate well into television drama. In India, they have also weaponised identity, turning religion, region, caste and ideology into combustible props for nightly performances. The Indian television debate format illustrates this pathology. Multiple panellists, often speaking simultaneously, are pitted against one another under artificial time pressure. Interruptions are not discouraged; they are engineered. The goal is not illumination but escalation.
The damage inflicted by this format is subtle but cumulative. It produces a leak in the mind through which trust drains away and outrage quietly settles in. When such confrontational logic saturates the information ecosystem, it shapes how citizens perceive reality itself. Politics begins to resemble permanent warfare rather than democratic negotiation.
Social media has amplified this effect. Clips from television debates, stripped of context and sharpened for virality, circulate. The outrage economy feeds on itself: television borrows the aggression of social media, while social media borrows the authority of television.
A democracy cannot function when its citizens suspect that information is merely performance. In an age of manufactured outrage, the task of journalism is not to inflame but to ensure that the public mind remains a Cartesian compass, guided by reason rather than reflex.
The deeper problem is structural. Prime time news, driven by advertising and TRPs, operates under relentless pressure to grab eye-balls. Regulation, where it exists, focuses narrowly on obscenity or defamation, not on the quality of discourse.
Yet this trajectory is not
inevitable. India has a rich
tradition of serious journalism — print publications, long-form reporting, public broadcasters, and digital platforms that privilege depth over decibel levels. These spaces demonstrate that audiences do respond to clarity, credibility and calm.
Reversing ‘cable newsification’ demands a rethinking of incentives: how success is measured, how anchors are trained, and how viewers are respected. It also requires media consumers to recognise their own complicity. Outrage is addictive, but it is also optional.