The politico-commercial nexus and its implications for television industries in Bangladesh and South Asia

Abstract

Over the past decade, television has proven its political, economic, and cultural worth as the most influential mass media in South Asia. Taking Bangladesh as a vantage point, the article shows how informal political and economic affiliations have become crucial factors for media development in South Asia. Particularly, the article dissects the ownership structures and the formal and informal politics of licensing private television by Bangladeshi governments between 1995 and 2019 in contesting India’s regional media hegemony with harnessing a powerful indigenous ‘politico-commercial nexus’. Based on field-based research, this study reveals multiple areas of political struggle, regional contestation, and democratic deficits in the television industry. The findings widen our understanding beyond the bureaucratic processes of media regulation, revealing the deeper problem of unipolar political preconditioning and the increasingly authoritarian nature of the state vis-à-vis the ownership of media and its diminishing prospects for voicing plural and contending political perspectives.

The Political Economy of Emergence and Transformation of Private Television Channels in Bangladesh: A Critique

“…The members of the same families control many businesses and media outlets. Anis Rahman (2020) found that competition between two rival political parties is one of the main factors in Bangladesh's abnormal growth of private television channels. The two major political parties, BNP and AL, use political power to issue private television licenses to their party men in an informal way to cement their political power.…”

(Re)Visiting Private Television Research in Bangladesh: Call for New Research Agenda in News Media Study

“…Also, , private television is a lucrative business sector. For the last two decades both the business class and power elites are keen to own television stations considering it profit-generating as well as opinion-mobiliser resulting politicians and business magnates the television owners mostly (Anis Rahman, 2020). Market price of leading television houses like Ntv, ATN Bangla or Channel i was, at least, ten times higher than initial investment in the mid of the last decade (Atiqur Rahman, 2017).…”

“…Relationship between power, politics and private television is a popular topic among local media scholars. Anis Rahman (2012Rahman ( , 2020, Atiqur Rahman (2017), Khan (2013Khan ( , 2020, Mamun (2012) and Shoesmith et al (2013) are the pioneers of this tradition. Influenced by the Critical School, especially the political economy school, these scholars rigorously investigated governmental influence on television ownership, its historical roots, and beneficiaries of the process.…”

“…In addition, Anis Rahman (2020) observed that formal and informal governmental influence on license allocation is standard since the industry's inception resulting in a business-politics nexus where the owners are the prime beneficiaries. Democracy deficit and a lack of political struggle of the industry insiders have intensified this nexus.…”

Televisual Drag: Reimagining South Asian Film and Media Studies

“…In foregrounding television, therefore, our goal is not simply to renew a plea to “make room for television” or to ignore and push past established and emergent paradigms in film studies or digital studies. As we outline below, the academic study of television in India and increasingly in other national and regional contexts in South Asia is a thriving inter-disciplinary affair (Akhtar 2019; Cheema 2018; Hashmi 2012; Osman 2020; Rahman 2020; Sen and Roy 2014; Vasudevan et al 2019). In developing the concept of televisual drag , our goal is to envision a more expansive intermedial framework that can open new sites and analytic frames for the study of global screen practices and cultural dynamics.…”