HuffPost India is history, thanks to new FDI norms
newslaundry.com
newslaundry.com
To provide some contrast, the same govt amended a law originally designed to prohibit foreign funding of political parties and changed it to allow funding from local companies which have more than 50% foreign ownership.
So basically political parties can indirectly accept foreign funds through above loophole which the ruling party itself created but news organizations cannot.
“ the controlling Bharatiya Janata Party government passed a retroactive amendment through a 2016 Finance Bill that excludes from the definition of “foreign sourced” contributions from local companies even though a foreign company owns more than half their shares, provided certain direct investment requirements are met”
Source: https://www.loc.gov/law/help/elections/foreign-involvement/i...
It is central, if they were popular and making money or if they were popular and have a wonderful future prospects, they wouldn't have to be propped up.
And whoever is funding it could be motivated by not so charitable reasons.
Either I am a philanthropist or more likely have a sinister motive. Several foreign dictatorships are heavily invested in controlling the media narrative in India.
This was perhaps triggered by the war with China. India's liberal foreign ownership gives China a one way strategic advantage.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/29/amnesty-to-hal...
Huff Post and Amnesty Intl tend to lean liberal, which means butting heads with the current Hindu nationalist government and its agenda. As a very recent example, the Netflix kissing scene between a Muslim boy and a Hindu girl generated great outrage within the ruling party, and was covered with great disdain (or not covered) by most local media, and once things got dicey, international media began covering it, albeit by taking a stance opposite to the government.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amnesty_Internati...
What's their political side?
If this is your solution to fight against stuff like that, then GoI has brought a knife to a missile fight.
(BTW, its not like they don't understand this playbook, BJP uses it itself.)
Several comments are implying that HuffPo is an influence operation or conspiracy... ???
There’s a clear boogeyman (the Chinese) and a grand arching conspiracy stopping the country from being great. This is fascism 101
E: I should mention that I am Indian.
This won’t end well.
It’s not surprising that they turned on him. If he had bothered to read history, he’d have read what happens to most supporters and collaborators of such regimes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives
Fascists are an ouroboros of hate. They all eat themselves.
This also makes them partially blind to the kind of hardship most poor Indians have to face and live with for the entirety of their lives.
Income inequality has been diminishing in India, but it still a major force as it tends to drive the kind of demographic that would end up in certain type of jobs or positions within bureaucracy.
I know business owners that will vote for lower taxes as a single issue. They could not care less that their own nieces and nephews were being screwed by the labor laws their “low tax” politicians were supporting.
What is most important is enhancing the relative position of themselves and their children in society.
Take your propaganda to somewhere else.
Before I am name called I would say I am not a BJP supporter.
Where in my comment did I deny it. I agree it exists. Should I list my every other belief in this comment. So you do not accuse me of something which I did not say?
I just makes me angry when people say all uppercaste are rich and powerful. It belittles the experiences my father had during my childhood.
I usually ignore threads like this, But this is HN turning into twitter threads. I would not comment in this anymore.
Also this is not about supporting any political party. This is a problem embedded in our social culture. Income equality is a menace that hurts all those who are not well-off, irrespective of their caste or religion.
People usually labelled "Hindu right wing" by the english media have nothing in common with the western idea of conservative.
They are strongly pluralistic, believe in smaller communities and tribes preserving their identity, nature loving, sympathetic to vegetarianism, not homophobic, not against abortion, strong believers in climate change and eco friendly policies.
All political movements take the shape of the territory they occupy. When fascism arises it uses symbols of its host society. Indians won't use a phyrgian cap they'll use saffron
Indians are pluralistic and have preserved their unique pluralistic identities for 1000s of years against all odds. The world has seen the erasure of almost all the ancient civilisations and cultures.
How "liberal" of people who claim to stand with the rights of "red Indians" to preserve their identity and turning around to tell the "brown Indians" that they do not deserve an identity.
I am truly shocked by the hypocrisy/shallowness/ignorance of the self appointed "liberal elite".
> They(Gawker) have no moral high ground, noble principles, or higher purpose. They're scum, and it's pure karma that they're being destroyed by someone they outed.[1^]
Playing a devil's advocate here, would you think there's another side to the debate? India is no binary system like US and is a thriving and functioning democracy. I understand the penchant for people to downvote dissent, but could there be another side to the argument rather than "Indian's are Hindu Nationalists"?
And I normally see a lot of the 'caste, cow & curry' crowd commenting quite "liberally".
Not by adding a retroactive FDI cap and destroying foreign future investment.
Of course, the fact that the government didn’t do the correct thing indicates that Huffpost is hardly an influence operation, but that this government wouldn’t survive too long with independent media dominating the airwaves and Whatsapp as opposed to their lackeys.
HuffPo closed operations on it's own, the India Govt didn't force them to do so.
It is not like these comments are supporting the beheading or stoning to death of journalists or trying to protect grooming gangs or institutions involved in child sex scandals.
The broader plot involves the identification of an outsider, in India's case it is muslims. The Other is identified as the source of the problem and is highlighted as being a part of the plot against the majority. The classical example is the "they're raping our women and planting demon babies" plot https://www.economist.com/asia/2020/11/19/indias-ruling-part...
The outsiders are Muslims' who are simultaneously the root of the problem and weak degenerates. https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2020/02/04/...
It is assumed that mixing with the untermenschen will dilute the superior ethnic group. There's a desire to "purify" the country. The majority forms paramilitary groups to enact the process. All disagreement towards this is taken as treason. Dissent is forbidden. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/who-is-an-urban-naxal... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlawful_Activities_(Preventio...
A xenophobic movement with a paramilitary organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashtriya_Swayamsevak_Sangh that is obsessed with a plot to undermine the majority that has heavily implied racial/ethnic subtext. The movement implies that they will take the country back to an unspecified time when it was greater. They identify the minority as the obstacle. They clamp down on all dissent and attempt to induct children and the young into their cults through a focus on service and death in the service of the nation.
If the shoe fits
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. HuffPo is no saints and in the world of global info warfare, I wouldn't be so quick to give them a clean chit. See how Al Jazeera etc operate with a state backed agenda for an example.
> A xenophobic movement with a...
This is such an incoherent rant riddled with falsehoods without any evidence. RSS is no xenophobic movement even if the biased wikipedia page paints it that way. If you have grassroots Indian experience, you'll know that they want to revive Hindu right, while preserving Dharmic values. I don't agree with all their attempts, but it's laughable how brown sepoys quickly jump to it's criticism without substantial data.
You seem to have a fixed agenda and reiterating the same unsubstantiated claims against imaginary bogeymen. The economist links you've mentioned can be easily summarized as an opinion piece and I can provide several more similar links from SwarajyaMag that say otherwise.
First it introduced the FDI regulations for foreign media as mentioned in the article.
Second they have recently proposed to bring Digital news organizations and streaming platforms under regulation of the central government https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/11/india-to-regul...
They brought FCRA for NGOs and civil societies which is considered a death kneel for civil societies in India. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/fcra-bill-virtually-m...
and have been harassing Amnesty International India for years now, which recently concluded to AII shutting down India operations https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/29/amnesty-to-hal...
And? Why would you not be pro your own government? Should the media be against the government that people elect and which protects people's rights? Should the media be pro foreign governments and agencies?
The powers that be protects people's rights, until they don't, and you don't want to be the proverbial frog in the pot coming to a boil.
However, I don't think we have a choice. At this point, the only two choices seem to be either to be governed by a tyrannical government fueled by national interests or a tyrannical government controlled by foreign interests.
I believe in decentralization of power, a structure where the governed are closer to those who govern them. I think this leads to people in power having more skin in the game.
The same freedom that allows the media to criticize legitimate concerns when it comes to the government also allows hostile foreign interests to amplify minor issues or manufacture fake ones to take down the government and install one that they can control from the outside, often to the detriment of the country and the citizens. So, my theory is that the countries that will succeed over the next decades are the ones which can protect themselves from foreign influence, by kicking out foreign interest groups, "aid" agencies, investments, apps, "news" sites etc. which India is doing. The obvious side effect will be that legitimate concerns and legitimate organizations which are detrimental to the establishment will also be suppressed. But I don't think there is a way to not do that.
You put scare quotes around both aid and news. Neither of these things are inherently bad.
Misinformation is the threat, not simply foreign information.
Government control of media is not a remedy to misinformation. In fact it is frequently a source.
You seem to be espousing an isolationist strategy but the genie is out of the bottle. Any country that tries to pull back from the rest of the world will suffer in comparison.
Well, China has greatly benefited from doing exactly that. They greatly regulate and control foreign influence while they exert their influence every where they can. India is a big rival and they have been funding everything from the Naxalites (the underground Indian communist organization) to mainstream parties, organizations, media, universities... whatever they can which gives them political advantage.
For example, like Yuval Noah Harari mentions in Sapiens, agriculture was not necessarily good for individuals. But since it allowed long term storage of food (in the form of grains), it allowed for stable habitats which grew into cities and nation states. There were still tribal people for a long time (there still are) who didn't adopt the technology but they were increasingly at the mercy of those on the other side.
We've seen the same with other technologies, like powerful weapons in the last centuries.
I think, in the new information age, we're headed to a similar trajectory with this new set of propaganda methods and defenses. Those who don't incorporate these new technologies into their systems will be at the mercy of those who do.
1. Just because they did it and were successful doesn't mean everyone who does it will be successful. They did a thousand other things which will never happen in India. Like being a technocratic society which punishes corruption quite publicly.
2. Just because they were successful doesn't mean that is the only way to do it.
Israel( issues related to Palestine) China( I dont think I need to mention anything) US( Guantánamo Bay ) Russia (again, authoritarian)
Foreign funding of political parties is equally if not more dangerous than foreign funding of news media.
For the record, I read somewhere that the current Indian ruling party is the wealthiest ruling party in the world with an AUM of $3B (this is an outdated number btw). Meanwhile the opposition has barely enough money to fund the construction of its own headquarters.
India is just late to the dictatorship club - as little as I understand Indian politics, it was pretty democratic before the latest nationalist government.
We don't know, and what's significant? Return on investment regardless of size of investment is significant when running any business.
> At some point, fundamentals of the business matter.
I think the fundamental outlined in the article is "Narendra Modi government’s new foreign direct investment norms for digital media," and not described in relation to revenue.
> I think the fundamental outlined in the article is "Narendra Modi government’s new foreign direct investment norms for digital media," and not described in relation to revenue.
That's an opinion piece. The fact is they shut down operations. And if the reason is lack of foreign investment, then it's imminently obvious that they made no profits.
Jio, swiggy, Zomato, Tata motors, Amazon, flipkart, ola, big basket, oyo, Paytm, and the list goes on. Maybe we should shut them all down.
Meanwhile many popular TV news channels in India are busy shouting from top of their lungs to seek attention. It's hard not to damage your ears and logical thinking when listening to some Indian news channels. Ref - https://www.thequint.com/news/politics/trp-scap-indian-news-..., https://www.vice.com/en/article/nn9yjw/the-newshour-arnab-go...
Didn't take long for the racist colonialists to crawl out of the woodworks, did it?
If yoga, turmeric latte and vegetarianism is not progressive enough.
Perhaps one can add a healthy helping of goddess worships, nature worship and animal worship.
Why can't HuffPost India just not simply operate from the US?
Local journalists are still free to write for foreign publications. What stops them now?
From what I see, this rule is trivially bypassed.
Imagine BBC UK having a India section, and buying stories from Indian journalists(which they already do).
I don't know about India specifically, but in many countries working for the press gives you some special status. You are not supposed to be attacked by the police during protests, government officials owe some basic comment to you etc. Basically rights that allow you to do journalist's job legally and relatively safely. Foreign media probably don't enjoy the same privileges.
Also, when your freedom is being taken from you, finding loopholes doesn't really work in middle/long term. The regime has all the possibilities to close them one by one.
Why would that be a problem?