Complementary and competitive logics of mediatization: political, commercial, and professional logics in Indian media

The concept of mediatization has received considerable scholarly attention in recent years in communication research aimed at analyzing the extent to which media influence politics or the political process (Esser 2013; Landerer 2013; Lilleker 2006; Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999; Stromback 2008). Mediatization has intensified alongside technological innovation since the 1990s that has afforded new types of mediatized political experience beyond newspapers, radio and television. During the same timescale, traditional media have become the most important source of political information in many less developed countries where television, for example, now with a mass audience is considered 'new' to many, soon to be followed by the growth of the internet. Mediatization is not confined to politics, but has permeated all aspects of human lives, which has led Deuze (2011: 138) to proclaim that "our life is lived in, rather than with, media" although the spatial, class and gendered limits of our media immersion remain to be seen. Despite the importance of the process of mediatization in a large number of societies and the growing literature on the topic, the study of mediatization in developing countries such as India has been almost non-existent.