Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in India's television landscape, this article works with two terms – ‘interpretational authority’ and ‘star-anchor’ – so as to elucidate the ambivalence of empowerment in what Arvind Rajagopal has called her postcolonial ‘split public’. I understand interpretational authority, in the ambiguous context of the ‘democratic nation-state’, as professional journalism's filtering function of both direct democracy and popular majoritarianism. Along four genealogical variants of empowerment, I relate democratisation and anti-elitism in and through evolving Indian news television to Walter Benjamin's deliberations on the aesthetics of fascist communication, and argue that, in a swiftly ‘entertainmentised’ TV journalism, interpretational authority was rendered somewhat dysfunctional before it could actually establish itself both in vernacular and English-language channels. The ‘star-anchor’, in order to still reach a public, becomes the embodiment of ultimately compromised interpretational authority and a reified, socio-economic hierarchisation in a TV journalism that competes with the immediacy of popular power.
This article follows a comparative perspective on media narratives and practices pertaining to India’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi, previously Chief Minister of the Indian State of Gujarat, and Turkey’s former Prime Minister and current President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. I argue that both have attained a current position of nearly opposition-free leadership by buttressing a “people’s unity” of those who believe in the reliability of particular information. Modi has achieved this by successfully avoiding journalistic and legal investigation into his actions and politics ever since the mass-mediated, anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat 2002, supporting, instead, the people’s confidence in their own capacity to identify the “truth.” Modi, thus, democratically procured his own intangibility. Erdoğan, in contrast, is more vulnerable to democratic opposition, even though he successfully claims to provide his supporters legal and moral guidance against the historically adversarial and nationalist-secular media system and against critical information about himself.
This article questions the assumption that the increase in visibility of religion in mass-mediated content is indicative of greater impact of religion in the public and state sphere and of a process of de-secularization. It argues that expressions of Hinduism and Islam have become inseparable from secularist histories in the respective countries. The analysis emphasizes a necessary distinction between piety, public popular culture and political activism in the name of a national religious majority, and shows that in its appropriation and redefinition of secularism and employment of religious symbolism, Hindu nationalist mobilization and governance in India are related more closely to sacralization of secularism in historical Turkish nationalism than to the Islamic movement. In both countries, we can observe a retreat rather than a greater media presence of the pious and sacred in the face of neonationalism and commercialization, which in each case produces a democratically precarious public popular culture.
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