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Book Review: Truth in Advertising? Lies in Political Advertising and How They Affect the Electorate

employment of women, but does not discuss the (lack of) presence of Muslims, India’s largest and largely marginalized religious minority, from these arenas. Chapter 5 provides a nuanced analysis of the political economy of newspapers where Neyazi tries to demonstrate that a for-profit orientation of their owning companies does not necessarily compromise editorial freedom and their ability to influence grassroots politics. In chapters 6 and 7, which appear to be afterthoughts, Neyazi expands the focus from newspapers to examine the television news and the role of mobile communication as well as social media. While the inclusion of these aspects is noteworthy, and any contemporary book examining political communication in India must take into account of what Neyazi calls the “hybrid media environment,” the reader will be quick to realize that Neyazi’s dive into these sites is not as deep as his inquiry into newspapers. Television news, which arguably since early 2000s has dominated the news hole in India (including in Hindi), for example, has been given a somewhat marginal treatment with just a content analysis of a news program to assess the extent to which political parties could influence prime-time news agendas. The book subtitle “Hindi Media in India” is somewhat misleading. To be precise, the book is about Hindi “News” Media, which is a significant but nevertheless a small slice of all Hindi media. This tendency to label the study of the news media as a study of (all) media reflects a normative bias that subfields of journalism studies and political communication routinely harbor. For most media conglomerates, news is one of their minority assets with relatively low production costs, and the audience share of news is generally minor. Therefore, studies of “news media,” whether focusing on the structure, conduct, and performance of media organizations or their audiences, rarely present findings that can be generalized to “media.” These quibbles apart, Neyazi’s monograph is a timely contribution which expands the ambit of political communication research beyond western democracies. Furthermore, its sole focus on studying “Hindi news media” is a welcome reinforcement of the idea that India cannot and should not be meaningfully studied as one media market (Nair and Taneja 2018).