Engaging with News: Print Media and Literacy Practices in Kerala, India

A field theory approach to international journalism: The case of Indian journalists in the middle east

“…For example, in the case of the Kannadalanguage news media, Udupa (2015) located a set of practices and cultural imaginations of news that "index claims to cultural richness and distinctness" carried out through particular sets of meanings conveyed through regional languages' position as "vehicles of nearness, intimacy, and familiarity" (p. 132). These language-specific sensibilities sometimes run counter to dominant journalistic notions, which are largely hinged on rationality that was formed in Europe during the Enlightenment and on the Habermasian ideal of the public sphere (Paul, 2017;Paul and Alex, 2022). The constitution of transregional journalistic fields therefore needs to be scrutinized, as Udupa explained in the context of the Indian language press: "The abstraction of news publics solely as rational-critical publics effaces the distinct histories of colonial encounter, postcolonial developmentalism and linguistically shaped and caste-inflected debates around modernity, and notions of journalism in particular," adding that, "Equally, to conceive of the news media as embracing the already-existing rational choices of the public in a pure act of representation will obscure the multifarious social and cultural conditions within which print-mediated subjects get constituted" (Udupa, p. 12).…”