Marginal Freedoms: Journalism, Participation and Moral Multiplicity in Odisha, India.

Abstract

This dissertation is an ethnography of the moral worlds of journalists and newspaper workers in Odisha, India. It portrays the ethical dilemmas that media producers confront in daily life as marginalized citizens of the world’s largest democracy. Located on India’s eastern coast, Odisha is an infamously poor state now experiencing rapid but uneven economic growth, out of which have arisen violent conflicts over religious conversion and mining in indigenous territories. The dissertation is based on fourteen months of qualitative research in Odisha’s capital, Bhubaneswar, including newsroom participant-observation, long-form interviews, and the analysis of local newspapers and internet-based news. I argue that Odisha’s journalists live with moral multiplicity, or the coexistence of diverse, often incommensurable evaluations of what counts as ethical action, and that such multiplicity produces double binds in Odisha's civic participation. For example, publications in the local language, Odia, are accessible to the growing literate class and can serve as potent metonyms of “the people,” yet local understandings of language devalue Odia journalism as corrupt in comparison with journalism in English. Such moral conflicts arise from frictions between liberal ideals like free speech and local modes of activism and patronage that have origins in the nineteenth century. This dissertation uses micro-level analyses of how journalists manage moral multiplicity in writing techniques, legal complaints, employee interactions, and social networking to illustrate how Indian media producers live with the macro-level historical transformations of globalization. This research reinvigorates the study of South Asian public life outside of major metropolises and contributes to the descriptive study of communication ethics cross-culturally.