Sensationalist Media, Social Media & Govt Ad Propaganda in India

The Noise That Ate the Nation: How Sensationalist Media, Social Media Brain Rot, and Weaponised Government Advertising Are Destroying Democratic Discourse in India

There is a sentence you have seen many times. It floats across your screen in bold red letters, usually above a thumbnail of a face twisted in fury or grief. It reads something like: Words are bleeding. Democracy is in danger. The nation stands at the edge of an abyss. You have read it. You have perhaps even shared it. But you have almost certainly not stopped to ask what it actually means.

This is the central problem with contemporary media, particularly its digital and social incarnations. Rhetoric has replaced reasoning. The dramatic has displaced the documented. A headline that screams is not a piece of journalism. A thumbnail engineered to trigger fear is not a news photograph. And a video that opens with apocalyptic music and a presenter pointing at the camera as though accusing the viewer of personal treason is not political analysis. It is theatre, and poor theatre at that.

Journalism, in its classical sense, is the disciplined verification of facts and their honest communication to the public. It is, by definition, a restrained craft. It requires the journalist to subordinate personal emotion to evidence, personal allegiance to accuracy, and personal ambition to public interest. The moment a media organisation abandons this discipline in favour of emotional spectacle, it ceases to be a journalistic enterprise. It becomes an entertainment business wearing a journalist's coat.

The Architecture of Outrage

The economics of digital media have been catastrophic for journalistic integrity. Attention is the currency. Outrage is the engine. A calm, well-sourced report on the state of groundwater in rural districts will receive a fraction of the engagement that a screaming anchor receives when declaring that the Constitution is under assault. The algorithm does not reward accuracy. It rewards arousal.

This has produced a media ecosystem that is structurally incentivised to generate panic. Every election is the most important election in history. Every political disagreement is an existential civilisational conflict. Every policy decision is either salvation or catastrophe. The vocabulary of nuance — gradual, complex, uncertain, debatable — has been evicted from prime time and replaced with the vocabulary of emergency: crisis, threat, collapse, betrayal.

Provocative thumbnails are not an aesthetic choice. They are a deliberate manipulation of the human nervous system. Researchers in cognitive psychology have documented that images of threat, anger, and disgust activate the amygdala more powerfully than images of joy or calm. A media organisation that selects thumbnails for their capacity to trigger anxiety is not informing its audience. It is exploiting the audience's biology to extract clicks, and clicks translate into advertising revenue. The viewer is not the consumer. The viewer is the product.

Social Media and the Manufacture of Identity

The consequences of this environment extend far beyond bad television. Social media, amplifying these tendencies a thousandfold, is conducting an unprecedented experiment in mass identity fabrication. People are being given identities that do not correspond to any coherent philosophical, cultural, or political tradition. These identities are assembled from outrage, tribal membership, and the dopamine reward of communal validation.

A young person who spends four hours a day consuming politically charged content on short-form video platforms does not emerge better informed. They emerge deeply certain. Certainty without knowledge is among the most dangerous psychological conditions a democracy can produce. It breeds contempt for opposing views, hostility to complexity, and an almost religious intolerance of ambiguity.

What is particularly insidious is that social media does not merely reflect existing identities. It creates them. The algorithm identifies your inclinations and feeds you progressively more extreme versions of content aligned with those inclinations, until the moderate concern you once had about, say, immigration policy has been transformed into a consuming ideological identity that defines your friendships, your media consumption, your moral framework, and your sense of self. You have been given an identity. You did not choose it. You were shepherded into it, one autoplay at a time.

This manufactured identity is, in the most literal sense, unreal. It does not exist outside the screen. It cannot be tested against the friction of lived experience, because it is designed never to encounter friction. The algorithm is a closed room with mirrors on every wall. Everything you see confirms what you already believe, and the reflection grows more extreme with every passing month. The person who emerges from this room is not a better citizen. They are a brain-rotted participant in a system that profits from their confusion.

When the State Joins the Performance

There is, however, a dimension of this problem that goes beyond private media failure. It concerns the state itself. Government advertising in a democracy has a legitimate and necessary function. Citizens have a right to know about public schemes, policy changes, health initiatives, and civic opportunities. The state has an obligation to communicate clearly and honestly with the people it serves. This is not propaganda. This is basic governance.

However, sovereign advertising has, across administrations and political traditions, increasingly drifted from information toward self-promotion. This drift is not unique to India, but in the era of the Narendra Modi government, it has acquired a scale, sophistication, and ideological intensity that warrants serious and honest criticism.

The sheer volume of government advertising in this period has been extraordinary. Every scheme acquires a memorable name and a branded visual identity. Every infrastructure project is announced with full-page advertisements in national newspapers. Every government initiative is accompanied by a coordinated social media campaign. The line between informing the public about a policy and advertising the political brand of a leader has not merely blurred. It has effectively disappeared.

Weaponising the Public Purse

The consequences of this development are multiple and serious. The first is financial. Government advertising budgets, funded by the taxpayer, have become the primary means by which media organisations sustain themselves in an era of declining print circulation and volatile digital revenues. This creates a structural dependency that is deeply corrosive to editorial independence. A newspaper that receives substantial government advertising revenue is not a free press. It is a press that must calculate, consciously or unconsciously, how every editorial decision affects its relationship with its largest client.

This dynamic has a silencing effect that does not require a single phone call from a minister. The journalist does not need to be threatened. The editor does not need to be bribed. The economics speak for themselves. Organisations that are critical lose access and eventually revenue. Organisations that are accommodating receive continued patronage. The market does the censorship that would once have required a court order.

The second consequence is conceptual. When the government conflates its own image with national identity, it transforms political criticism into cultural disloyalty. When an advertisement for a welfare scheme prominently features the Prime Minister's photograph and name, the scheme is no longer a policy. It is a personal gift from a leader to a population. Criticism of the scheme is positioned, subliminally, as ingratitude toward the benefactor. This is a deeply authoritarian logic, and it does not become less authoritarian simply because it is executed through advertisements rather than coercion.

Sovereignty belongs to the people. Public funds are held in trust by the government on behalf of the people. When those funds are used to construct and perpetuate a personal political brand, the government is spending the people's money to manipulate the people's perceptions for the government's own electoral benefit. This is not governance. It is a conflict of interest on a national scale.

The Rogue Advertisement and the Infantilised Citizen

What makes this particularly tiresome, to borrow a word that is considerably more polite than the reality deserves, is the relentlessness of it. Citizens are now subjected to branded government communication at every point of contact with the state. The hospital waiting room has an advertisement. The metro station has a mural. The school scholarship letter carries a photograph. The welfare credit arrives in an account named after a scheme that is named after a slogan that is associated with a leader.

This omnipresence is not accidental. It is a deliberate strategy of saturation, designed to make the state and its current leadership feel synonymous. In this environment, elections are subtly transformed from choices between competing visions into referenda on gratitude. The citizen is no longer a sovereign actor exercising a political right. They are a recipient evaluating whether to renew their contract with a benefactor. This is the infantilisation of democracy through the language of generosity.

When sovereign advertising goes rogue, it does not merely waste public money. It corrupts the epistemic environment in which democratic deliberation must occur. Citizens who cannot distinguish between a government achievement and a government claim, between a public service and a political gift, between national progress and party propaganda, are citizens who have been systematically disarmed as democratic actors.

Reclaiming the Real

The media that screams democracy is in danger while producing content that corrodes democratic capacity is not protecting democracy. It is monetising its appearance. The government that saturates every surface with its leader's image while claiming to serve the public is not governing. It is campaigning, permanently, at public expense.

Both phenomena share a common logic: the subordination of truth to performance. Both treat the citizen not as an intelligent adult capable of forming considered judgements, but as an audience to be managed, aroused, grateful, or afraid, depending on what the moment requires. Both are, in their own way, forms of contempt for the people they claim to serve.

The antidote is neither naive nor complicated. It is the stubborn insistence on evidence over spectacle, on accountability over loyalty, on the public interest over the private brand. It requires citizens who are willing to be bored by the truth rather than entertained by the lie. It requires journalists who remember what journalism is. And it requires a political culture that understands that sovereignty is not a brand. It is a responsibility.

The noise will not stop on its own. It is too profitable. But it can be named. And naming it, clearly and without apology, is where the work of recovery must begin.

© 2026 Anant Kumar. All Rights Reserved.