India's NDTV raid a 'defining moment' for press freedom - The Listening Post (Lead)

Summary: India's media market is often described as diverse - but is diversity synonymous with pluralism? On June 5th, India's Central Bureau of Investigations conducted a series of raids targeting NDTV, one of the country's relatively liberal-leaning TV networks that has been critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government. The CBI says the raids were part of an investigation into the repayment of bank loans taken out by the network's owners. However, NDTV's co-founder, Prannoy Roy, calls it a thinly-disguised witch hunt orchestrated by Modi's Bharatiya Junata party, the BJP. In a country which has 900 television channels, just a handful major corporate owners dominate a market increasingly aligned to the BJP and Modi, creating what many are calling a deficit of critical voices on the airwaves and a surplus of pro-government ones. Editors and journalists around India call the NDTV raid a 'defining moment' - a political attack on the network and on press freedom in times that have proven difficult for the media across the country. Over the years, Indian news channels have grown more opinionated, more nationalistic - with some pledging to combat what they call 'anti-national' reporting with 'patriotic' journalism, as if patriotism and journalism should happily coexist. More from The Listening Post on: YouTube - http://aje.io/listeningpostYT Facebook - http://facebook.com/AJListeningPost Twitter - http://twitter.com/AJListeningPost Website - http://aljazeera.com/listeningpost