BENGALURU: Star TV was a foreign company with a capital F; it wasn’t just some nondescript, docile foreign outfit operating in a non-intrusive category. Star TV was owned by the despised, feared and ruthless Rupert Murdoch, who had an almost mythological reputation for gobbling up his competitors and changing the political complexion of countries in which he had major business stakes. His persona, or at least the way it was perceived, made life considerably more difficult for those of us who were having to deal with the naturally aggressive media—I was operating now from a position of weakness relative to our competitor.
We had no viewership ratings and little mass appeal, as we were an English-language service. The much larger print media companies were all well-set organisations that partly wanted to befriend Rupert and partly wanted to run him out of business in India. Some people even went as far as to file PILs, or public interest litigations, against the company. Legal notices were issued but couldn’t physically be served, as Rupert was neither listed as the owner of Star TV nor did he live in the country where the notices were to be served, though they did have the effect of preventing him from visiting India. Not that Rupert would have been much put out.
He once said, as reported by the Observer in January 1978, that ‘The third world never sold a newspaper’. I wonder if he still believes that. Maybe he does, though I doubt it.In 1993, the programming on the Star TV-owned and Star TV-distributed channels was all in English and of no help; rather, they were somewhat of a handicap. Star Plus screened the likes of The Bold and the Beautiful, Santa Barbara and Baywatch, which alongside MTV’s ‘racy’ music videos and young Westernised video jockeys, or VJs, were ‘proof ’ of Rupert Murdoch’s cultural invasion of India, of his intent to destroy Indian cultural values and corrupt the youth.
The media was seemingly terrified of Rupert for a whole host of reasons, but mostly because they knew he could move into a position of considerable strength with politicians and, through hat, manoeuvre political positions in the country. Fears that were not entirely unfounded as, in my opinion, given half an opportunity Rupert would have loved to get his hands on an Indian newspaper. Given the restrictions on foreign direct investment in the print and newspaper business in India though, he has never openly expressed such an interest.
BBC Worldwide, the BBC’s international news channel, was also distributed by Star TV. Everyone who is anybody knew fully well that the BBC was independent, but to muddy the waters and arouse public sentiment there was a lot of noise implying that Rupert was ‘controlling’ the BBC and its editorial content. This relentless barrage from the Indian media, in the form of negative newspaper headlines and opinion pieces, had a profound effect on the thinking within Star TV.
I believe it was one of the major reasons why the Indian market continued to remain on the fringes of the overall business model for Star TV in Asia. The expectations were always modest, and whenever anything went well, it came as a big surprise to the senior executives in Hong Kong and New York. Whenever anything went wrong, or not as well as they would have liked, it was always a case of ‘Well, it’s India; what else would you expect? It’s a tough marketplace, after all.’(Excerpted with permission from Star Struck: Confessions of a TV Executive by Peter Mukerjea, Published byWestl and Business)