Prologue
This was not an academic effort to understand the Indian television news landscape, but an effort nevertheless to view it through the lens of a framework based on logic and measured response, that has been long abandoned by the 24x7 news media. I began by looking at the last 50 debate shows of the top 7 english news channels of India, but soon realized that aggregate statistics fail to highlight the real issue with these shows. Republic TV has had a debate on Pakistan/Terrorism/Religion/Kashmir in 64% of the last 50 debates, while Mirror Now has had a mere 4% debates on the subject. On the contrary, Mirror now has had 28% debates on the economy where as Republic has had 4%. We can see that the two channels are clearly focussing on different things, but we do not have anchors and metrics to comprehend what these numbers mean. We need to look at the content, and more importantly, the method. But going beyond simple sentiment analysis or distribution of topics, however, is limited simply by the fact that we do not have data. So, we set about creating it. Arpit wrote a chrome extention to annotate speaker times in youtube videos. But we soon realized that any meaningful aggregation (and the resulting conslusion) needs to be operated on a large amount of data - data we could simply not generate, as two individuals. Here's where you could help. If you want to annotate debates, or know some org that has man hours to spare, pliss to help.
Future Plans