POLITICAL COMMUNICATION IN ODISHA: A STUDY OF ODIA TELEVISION NEWS CHANNELS

Abstract

Politics, political system and politicians always depend on media to reach out to the masses and gain a political score. While few channels work as the mouth piece of certain political parties, some of the media houses do not fall prey to the parties in power and their agenda. That leads to a tussle between the people in power and media houses and takes an ugly turn. Like any other part of the world, use of media for political score can be easily observed in Odisha, a state in the eastern part of India. The researcher in this study tries to assess how the news channels in the state are used by various political parties and the way of their content design for them. For this the researcher has done a questionnaire based survey of common television viewers and also adopted discussion method and discussed with Editors of different news channels, political leaders and spokes persons of different political parties of Odisha.