The most revealing feature of The most revealing feature of India’s latest student mobilisation was not simply its scale or persistence. It was the striking mismatch between where public attention was focused and where much of television news chose to look. For years, television has claimed the authority to decide which events deserve national prominence. That authority now appears increasingly contested. The protests over unemployment, competitive examinations and the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan demonstrated that political communication has entered a new phase. The movement did not wait for prime-time validation.

It organised through social media, sustained itself through memes, livestreams, independent videos and peer-to-peer networks, and created a sense of participation that traditional broadcasting struggled to match. By the time television channels turned their cameras towards the agitation, the public conversation had already moved elsewhere. This is not merely a technological transition from television to smartphones. It reflects a deeper crisis of credibility. News organisations derive influence not from transmission towers or studio budgets but from public trust. When audiences begin to believe that coverage is selective, delayed or excessively shaped by official narratives, they seek alternative sources of information. Digital platforms are hardly immune to misinformation or manipulation, but they have significantly weakened television’s monopoly over agenda-setting.

The coverage of the student protests illustrated this dilemma. Instead of consistently examining the economic anxieties that brought thousands of young people onto the streets, much of the debate shifted towards clashes with the police, security concerns around Parliament and questions about the protesters’ legitimacy. Some anchors made their bias so obvious that the search for a wider narrative became widespread. Such framing may generate dramatic television, but it risks obscuring the underlying policy failures that produced the unrest. Democracies function best when journalism interrogates........

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