Newslaundry Podcast

This week on NL Hafta, the usual team of Abhinandan Sekhri, Manisha Pande, Raman Kirpal and Anand Vardhan are joined by Newslaundry’s Jayashree Arunachalam and author Chetan Bhagat.The discussion starts off with the economic slowdown in India. Chetan says, “India attempted one of the strictest lockdowns. It’s expected that we will also have the biggest contraction.” He points out that fiscal measures are needed to distribute wealth while also liberalising the economy for businesses with moves that are more than just media headlines. It needs to be globally noticeable, he adds.The panel moves on to discussing the current state of the media in India, given the ongoing “SSR frenzy”. The Indian audience’s obsession with entertainment, even while watching the news, is what Chetan believes is driving the media to focus on sensationalism. On the media in Tamil Nadu, Jayashree believes it’s an “outlier” compared to Delhi media, and Anand makes the same point with regional media outlets, print or otherwise. In both Ta