Keynote Address by Chintamani Rao

right here in Delhi have brought into focus the role and responsibilities of the news media. I'm not going to go into what happened these day in these few days in these few weeks but it does make a relevant topical backdrop >> for discussions like can happen today. By the time you get to be my age, you see a lot of change. When I began my career, the news media were newspapers or handful of news magazines and all India radio. When you went to see a movie which was once maybe twice in a month you saw per force the news re made by the films division of the government of India. That is it. Duration was a single channel that went on air in the evening. It was a general content channel uh with news bulletans. cori came to India 1982 with games. In fact to give you a pretty good idea of what it was like many of you many people here present today wouldn't uh have lived that time have experienced that time in 1991 at some around 10:00 in the night after 10:00 in the night Rajiv Gandhi was shot right uh I was traveling. I was in Madras. My wife was at her home in Bangalore. I got a call from her. She used to write for the Hindu and somebody called her from the Hindu to tell her this had happened at that time 10:00 in the night. There was no news medium available in this country. Can you believe that? Dudan close at 10:00. If he if he got shot at 10:10, Dud will come back tomorrow morning. That's how news was. As well, to me, as recently as 1991, sometime in the late 1980s, we heard of a crazy plan by a Hong Kong businessman. He was going to broadcast TV via satellite >> with simultaneous telegraph across all of Asia so that at one time you could see the same thing in Karachi or in Kolumpur in Hyderabad in Hong Kong you see the exact same thing how crazy is that sounded like science fiction and that of the birth of star TV I don't know if people even anybody even recalls the star is actually an acronym Star was satellite television Asian region. S E A R. The whole idea of satellite television was something so totally new. And here we are today with 24/7 TV news and nearly 400 Indian news channels across all languages and access to my international channels in a variety of languages. Online, the distinction between TV and print has blurred with all news outlets putting our content in both video and text. And of course, all of us have 24/7 access to it all right here in our pockets. At the same time, the mainstream media, traditional print and broadcast models are losing ad revenue to the to the digital space. But it is not that digital platforms are making money. The so-called Sang companies now called now the NANG companies Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google earn 70% of all digital ad revenue worldwide leaving 30% for tens of thousands hundreds I don't know how many hundred tens or hundreds of thousands of other uh uh digital companies and platforms And when it comes to news, which platforms are those? Well, Institute of Media Studies publishes an annual report called the digital news report. It's now in its 10th year. The latest report published earlier this year says 2026 represents a significant milestone. For the first time, social media and video network consumption is now ahead of other news sources as the most widely used source of news globally. Social media and video consumption is the most is the most widely used source of news. The use of both TV news and news organiz organizations websites and apps has followed not only on the TV but even on the web news organizations apps and websites are coming down. The relative decline of television as a source of news is better recognized across industry. What is perhaps less well acknowledged is that people's use of news websites and apps has declined at a similar rate in recent years. So it is not broadcasters websites, broadcasters apps, it is social media that is the biggest purveyor of news in the world today. That is a change quite incredible change if you stop to think of it that is in the dissemination and availability of news in my own professional lifetime. Today the biggest issue in the news space is trust. Trust. Simple as that. Back in the day, if you saw or heard it on the news or read it in the newspaper, you believed it. Even the government owned media, Dur Dashan and Polar Radio may have over reported some things or ignored or underreported some things. You could accuse them of that. Of course, you could. The government own media, right? But they did not misreport, did not knowingly mislead. Now, we have hundreds of news sources that are committed 24 hours a day, but we're not sure which ones we can trust. The term mainstream media has become almost a porative, hasn't it? Don't all of us get WhatsApp forwards telling us something that mainstream media will not tell you. Don't we all every what do you expect of the bloody mainstream media? Right? That's that's test that's the attitude towards mainstream media today. I'm sure all of us feel the insecurity around us. The social polarization lack of trust. What we feel is apparently true not only of India that's universal. I turn to the edman trust barometer. Anybody familiar with that edman trust barometer? It's a annual publication, annual report. Uh it is now in its 25th or 26th year. This year it was done among 34,000 respondents in 28 countries. And here is what the 2026 report says. 70% [clears throat] 70% of respondents across 28 nations now are hesitant or unwilling to trust someone who has different values, information sources, approach to societal problems or backgrounds than them 70%. This majority holds like this majority holds across income levels, genders, age groups and developing or developed markets. So across age, gender, income, developed or developing countries. Essentially everyone says the world is becoming increasingly insular. Quiet as writers and losers. Trust in news is at a low. Some of the worldwide drop in trust reflects wider anxieties beyond the news industry. Trust in institutions and leaders is widely declining and journalism is also often under direct attack from high-profile politicians. But all is not gloom and doom. Here's the good news. You may wondering all this, how can there be good news? But there is. If you look, you know where to look for it. Despite these pressures, despite these pressures, trust in the most widely used individual news brands is holding up better than trust in news overall. Right? Trust in the most widely used individual news brands is holding up better than trust in news overall. We see a range of responses, anxiety, disengagement, and cynicism, but also openness to new sources and formats and continued belief in what news at its best can offer. Against the backdrop of disruptive political, economic and social change, core news values remain relevant. While opinions are fragmenting in many countries, support for principles such as impartiality ex persists even if audiences express dissatisfaction with other aspects of their current news experience. So [clears throat] for all the anxiety and insecurity, despite the overall decline in trust in institutions in general, despite the doubt and dissatisfaction with the news experience, people have not entirely lost their faith in individual news brands or they believe in what news at best can be. That surely is a good starting point as we look at the future and consider where to go from here. Let's go back to the insight Reuters offers us that people have not entirely lost their faith in individual news brands or the belief in what news at best can be to build maintain and strengthen that faith. It is and must be the mission of those who manage news brands. It would be presumptuous of me to stand here and tell you who are steeped in the world of news media today every day as I was at one time but I'm not anymore what you should do. What I will do is share some thoughts. To my mind, at the heart of news TV is immediiacy. Powerful news TV takes me to where the action is. I get to see for myself what is happening and to hear directly from people on the spot. It's like being there. I don't know how many are here are old enough to remember the Gulf War of 1991. I'm back in 1991. That was in effect the coming out party of a littleknown news channel called CNN. CNN's live coverage of the war changed TV news forever. Realtime reporting by Bernard Shaw, John Halman, and Peter Arnet turned CNN from a minor news channel to a world news leader. Where is that immediacy in our TV channels today? In our TV news channels, when I watch the news, I wonder where are the reporters? Where are the reporters? All I see most of the time is a bunch of talking heads most of the time shouting at each other. If there's no immediacy, why do we need 24 hours of stands? To be clear, I don't mean news shows must only be reporters in the field. What I am saying is please, please give me the news before you debate it. I don't even know what you're debating. Beyond that, what differentiates one channel from another, one news outlet from another is the people who make it what it is. The quality of journalism, the integrity of editorial judgment and the trust earns over time. Technology can be bought, studios can be built. graphics and redesign. AI will make many things faster and cheaper. But credibility cannot be manufactured. It has to be earned one story at a time and protected and nurtured every single day. The challenge of news media therefore is not merely to adapt to new technology or new business models. It has to rediscover the values that define journalistic integrity. Accuracy before speed, verification before application, before amplification. Reporting before opinion, and fairness before partisanship. The audience has changed and the platforms have changed, but human nature has not. People still want to know and need to know all the more in these short times what is happening, why it matters, how it affects them and whom they can believe. In an age of limitless information, trust has become the scarcest commodity of all. The future of news will be decided not by algorithms, not by who starts the loudest. It will be decided by those organizations that convince their audiences day after day that they deserve to be believed. That is a demanding standard, but it is also an extraordinary opportunity for those who can build and maintain trust will not merely survive this period of disruption. We will emerge stronger and more valuable than ever before. Thank you.