India Today Group, one of the largest media houses in news media business, has continuously flourished since December 1975, when it established as a fortnightly magazine by Madhu Trehan, daughter of Vidya Vilas Purie, who was the owner of Thomson Press. Trehan, who is married to celebrity medical professional Naresh Trehan, handed over the reigns of the group to brother Aroon Purie.
For more than four decades, Aroon Purie controlled the group and under his leadership it became one of the largest news media houses with stakes in print, television, and digital. In October 2017, Aroon Purie handed over the control of the group to Kallie Purie but remains the chairman and editor-in-chief of the group.
The group survived and prospered in all these years in news media, which is a low margin high investment and highly competitive, because the group has maintained flexibility in its ideological orientation. The core ideology which drives the group is to generate maximum profit. And therefore, it has been able to deal with primary issue in news media- the ideological orientation.
One can easily analyze the governments of the day favouring the media houses with aligning ideology and targeting those on the opposite side of the political spectrum. If the Congress or UPA government is in power, leftist media houses like The Hindu will be favoured in government ads and similarly when BJP or NDA is in power, India TV will profit from government ads.
But India Today Group grows and prosper irrespective of the ideological alignment of the government of the day, because it changes the face of the group or the ideology of the content as per the change in the government. For 10 years when Congress was in power, leftist anchors like Punya Prasun Vajpayee, Abhishar Sharma and so on used to host shows and became the face of the group. As the BJP came to power in 2014, the face the group changed from Vajpayee to Anjana Om Kashyap and Rohit Sardana. Similarly in India Today, Rahul Kanwal, who stands for ‘radical centrism’ became the face of the English news channel and Rajdeep Sardesai is there to balance the rest of the left wingers.
In the last few years, when the BJP was completely dominant in centre as well as in various states, the India Today Group became ardently pro-Hindutva and the people with right wing views were either promoted to top posts or hired from other media organizations. But as evident in the last few months, BJP lost power in many states including Maharashtra and Jharkhand, and the media house started changing its ideological narrative.
The much talked graph, which showed that BJP controls the governments in less than 50 percent of area and population of the country, was prepared by India Today’s Data Intelligence Unit. And the party has started changing the ideological stance accordingly; a few days ago, Anjana Om Kashyap- who used to support every decision taken by BJP blindly- criticized the CAA and NRC and opined that the amendment in Citizenship Act, coupled with NRC, is dangerous.
Similarly, the Group’s editor in chief and promoter- Aroon Purie- criticized the Modi government on economic performance. Rahul Kanwal, the radical centrist, has waged a war against ABVP, the student wing of RSS. These all examples show that as the electoral fortunes of BJP registered a decline, the India Today Group has started changing its ideological stance with the same flexibility as it had done since 1970s.