Between media capture and journalistic autonomy: The lived experience of Indian journalists

Abstract

This study examines how journalistic autonomy is experienced and negotiated within conditions of accelerating media capture in contemporary India. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with journalists across organizational tiers, linguistic regions, and media formats, the study analyses how political pressure, economic dependence, and organizational hierarchies coalesce into a structurally embedded regime of influence. Using Bourdieu’s field theory as a conceptual framework, the paper argues that capture is internalized through everyday newsroom practices and professional doxa, influencing epistemic boundaries, risk evaluations, and the moral economy of journalism. Yet, the findings indicate that autonomy remains as a contingent and stratified resource, sustained through professional ethics, symbolic capital, peer networks, and the distinct institutional cultures of digital-first platforms. Autonomy emerges here not as a binary condition but as a negotiated practice manifested through selective compliance, strategic framing, and context-specific maneuvering. These negotiations are disproportionately distributed, with early-career, regional, and precariously employed journalists encountering sharper structural constraints than their metropolitan or symbolically empowered peers. By emphasizing negotiation as a primary form of agency, the study presents a relational perspective of autonomy under capture and contributes to broader debates on press freedom, field heteronomy, and the resilience of democratic communication.