Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes how incidents of gender violence become highly publicized in Indian news media, incite exclusive narratives of public mobilization and outrage, and the relationship between news media, caste, and class inequality in the continuation of gender violence with impunity.

Paper long abstract:

Gender violence has consistently pockmarked the Indian mediascape since the 1970s. The mass-mediation of gender violence, particularly through news reporting, is connected to the political economy of Indian media, the politicization of gender violence by Indian women's rights movements, and the construction of moral panics and sensationalism. This study uses both computer-assisted content and ethnographically informed textual analyses of the headlines of The Times of India (TOI), India's oldest English newspaper, between 1970 and 2020 to ascertain how news media reporting of gender violence has changed alongside sociopolitical contexts and in relation to social inequality, namely class and caste. I argue that TOI's reporting is catered to an urban, upper-class reader-subject through case labeling practices around geography, use (or not) of victim and perpetrator names, as well as consistent use of sensational reportage which obscures the intersectional reality of gender violence in India as consistently presenting the violence as exceptional. These changes and consistencies across the time frame reveal not only TOI's prioritization of elite readers but construct an upper-class and upper-class reader-subject and ideology which constructs an elite urban sensibility of gender violence that is removed from its actuality at the crux of gender, class, and caste inequality. These reportage practices sustain class and caste inequalities and are barriers to mitigating the continual victimization of minority women in India with impunity.