Majumdar, Aritra   <br/><br/>
Reading press freedom through constitutional and legal history 

 - Economic and Political Weekly   
 - 58(43), Oct 28, 2023: p.25-26 
<br/><br/> Historians of the press face a central question—do they focus on the influence of business interests on the press reportage, or should the relations of the state with the Fourth Estate take precedence? Between the histories of censorship (Barrier 1974) on the one hand and favourable biographies of the press barons on the other (Verghese 2005), the interaction of various interests and the ever-extended arm of the state becomes blurred. Hence, when an ex-journalist and current teacher of history attempts to write the history of the press in independent India, he steps into an already crowded field (the latest being Devika Sethi’s work on censorship in 2019). He tasks himself with re-examining the decades since India’s independence with a Habermasian lens on the influences that may colonise the press and through it, the lifeworld of rational discourse (Habermas 1984).- Reproduced<br/><br/>https://www.epw.in/journal/2023/43/book-reviews/reading-press-freedom-through-constitutional-and.html<br/>