Bangladeshi mediascape: Political and corporate power

Media as the fourth pillar of the state plays a watchdog role over the work of the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. With that in mind, this chapter presents a brief analysis of the media landscape in Bangladesh by providing an overview of the evolution of news media in the country. It moves on to discuss the ‘politico-commercial nexus’, a nexus that goes to the heart of the viability of media, not just in Bangladesh, but, as has been seen recently, elsewhere in the world. We analyse this nexus with regard to media ownership and policymaking. This chapter analyses television media ownership, in particular, and the National Broadcasting Policy 2014. Despite the emergence of social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, television continues to dominate the media landscape in Bangladesh, certainly insofar as its ability to set a news agenda. It remains the principal source of news and entertainment with 80% viewership among a 165 million population in Bangladesh (Azad, 2019), although these numbers have to be offset against an understanding that the vast majority of the population does not have personal access to a television set: instead televisions in public settings such as tea shops are the access point. Nevertheless, television media presents a complex case study of Bangladesh’s neoliberal transformation, capital integration, wealth concentration and class inequality (Muhammad, 2015; Rahman, 2020). This chapter concludes by highlighting the importance of institution building in the media landscape, and, perhaps not surprisingly, concludes by arguing that the Bangladeshi media landscape is dominated by the political and economic powers (Rahman, 2020) rather than the other way around.