12. Ethnography of Digital News Production: Unending Mediathon of Otherisation

The phenomenal impact of technology has prompted a new narratology in media content production including news. The continued affection of ethno cross-currents in conventional media is well-identified in the Western world and India as well. Concepts like cultural hierarchy, cultural hegemony and cultural distance are liberally used to refer to the never-ending ethnosubalterisation. The conflict between domineering and resisting sections of society is as old as civilisation. Cultural resistances are newsworthy, but also lead to what has been described as cultural politics. The ethnoequations were predicted to disappear in the corporate age of conditioned equity. However, it has not happened. The subtleties of ethnic relegation can be found in the contents produced by the national media. On the other, it is true that ethnoidentity has strong flavours of religiosity, language and cultural mores that attempt to amplify and strengthen the representational frame. The geographical and cultural segmentation in a multiethnic country like India is natural, but demands a balance of harmony. This is the real issue in digital media production. Overtly or covertly, the distantiation between us and them occurs even in digital media production, especially in news and entertainment. Again these are the facets of hegemony and otherisation. The individuals and their collectives have been contributing to a universal cultural disorder, further marginalising the already marginalised ethnic groups. The imposition of common universals of media production and also in news narration has not spared even the digital media, plausibly due to corporate mainstreaming. For a safe and sound ethnicryption, we have to move from the clichéd pluriversal values to a multiversal prism that reflects ethnic realities. The traditional parameters of objectivity and impartiality have been slowly replaced by advocacy and ideological tilt. More than these the power of corporatisation has encompassed the omnes—every individual and every sector. Added to this is the factor of institutional ethnography, because digital news is not bereft of ethnic affiliations. That makes the idea of cosmopolitanism in digital news production an object of analysis. This chapter intends analysing the character of digital news production as social production also along with the issue of cosmopolitanism which is a Western prescription as against its own ethnocentric practices in news production, digital and otherwise.