Note: This chapter is not part of the CBSE Class 12 Sociology syllabus for 2026-27 (CBSE has deleted it). Students of other boards should check their board’s latest syllabus.
Exam-useful questions from this chapter, grouped by marks, each with a full model answer. Try writing the answer yourself first, then check it against this one.
1 1-Mark Questions
Q. What is mass media?
Answer: Forms of communication: such as television, newspapers, films, magazines, radio, advertisements, video games and CDs: that reach very large numbers of people at once.
Q. Who developed the modern printing technique, and when?
Answer: Johann Gutenberg, in 1440.
Q. What is an “imagined community”, per Benedict Anderson?
Answer: A nation whose members feel connected to, and part of, one large family of people they will never actually meet.
Q. Name India’s first long-running soap opera.
Answer: Hum Log (1984-85).
Q. In which year did privately owned FM radio stations arrive in India?
Answer: 2002.
Q. What is “infotainment”?
Answer: A combination of information and entertainment in news content, used by newspapers to hold the interest of readers with varied interests.
2 2-Mark Questions
Q. Why did newspapers under British rule have influence far beyond their circulation numbers?
Answer: Literacy was limited, so circulation itself was small. But news and information spread by word of mouth from commercial and administrative hubs such as markets, trading centres, courts and towns, so their real influence reached far more people than the number of copies actually sold.
Q. Name any four early Indian newspapers, with their language and year, as given in Box 7.1.
Answer: Any four of: Sambad-Kaumudi (Bengali, 1821); Mirat-Ul-Akbar (Persian, 1822); Bombay Samachar (Gujarati, 1822); Shome Prakash (Bengali, 1858); The Times of India (English, Bombay, 1861); The Pioneer (English, Allahabad, 1865); The Statesman (English, Calcutta, 1875).
Q. What role did the Films Division play in independent India’s media approach?
Answer: The government’s Films Division produced newsreels and documentaries that were shown before every film in every movie theatre, documenting the state-directed development process for audiences across the country.
Q. Give two social evils the media was encouraged to fight in the early years of independence.
Answer: Any two of: untouchability, child marriage, ostracism of widows, or beliefs in witchcraft and faith healing: all aimed at building a rational, scientific ethos for a modern industrial society.
Q. Why did entertainment programming grow on Indian television once programmes were commercialised?
Answer: As programmes became commercialised and were allowed to carry sponsors’ advertisements, the target audience shifted toward the urban consuming class, so entertainment programming grew to attract this audience.
Q. What is a “soap opera”, according to Box 7.13?
Answer: A serialised, continuous story that has no ending until it is taken off air completely; individual storylines and characters may end or disappear, but regular viewers build familiarity with the characters, their personalities and their life experiences.
Q. Why does the book say private FM channels in India specialise in particular kinds of popular music?
Answer: Because private FM channels are not permitted to broadcast any political news bulletins, so to retain their audiences they instead specialise in particular kinds of popular music.
Q. How does the book describe the reading habits of older versus younger newspaper readers?
Answer: Older readers tend to read the newspaper in its entirety, while younger readers often have specific interests such as sports, entertainment or society gossip, and go straight to the pages covering those interests.
3 4-Mark Questions
Q. Explain, with two of the book’s own reasons, why sociology students find the growth of mass media interesting to study.
Answer: Any two of the following four, explained: (1) Historical growth: media’s structure and content are shaped by economic, political and socio-cultural change, e.g. the state’s dominant role after Independence versus the market’s growing role after 1990s globalisation. (2) A dialectical relationship: media and society influence each other in both directions. (3) A formal organisation: mass communication needs large-scale capital, production and management, so the state and/or market always play a major role. (4) Unequal access: different sections of people can use media with very different ease, connecting to the idea of the digital divide.
Q. Describe the state of mass media in India under British colonial rule.
Answer: Newspapers, magazines, films and radio made up the range of mass media. Radio was wholly state-owned, so no nationalist views could be broadcast on it. Newspapers and films were autonomous of the state but were strictly monitored by the colonial Raj. Circulation of English and vernacular papers was limited by low literacy, though their real influence was much wider because news spread by word of mouth from markets, trading centres, courts and towns. The print media carried a range of opinions about a ‘free India,’ and these differences carried over into independent India.
Q. Trace the growth of All India Radio’s infrastructure from Independence to the present, using the book’s own figures.
Answer: At Independence (1947), AIR had only 6 radio stations, located in metropolitan cities, with 280,000 radio receiver sets for a population of 350 million. By 1950 there were 5,46,200 radio licences. Post-independence, the government prioritised expanding radio, especially to state capitals and border areas, and developed a three-tiered national/regional/local structure to match India’s diversity. Today, AIR has grown to 480 stations and 681 transmitters, covering 99% of the population over 92% of the country’s area.
Q. Describe the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) and Doordarshan’s early expansion.
Answer: SITE broadcast directly to community viewers in the rural areas of six states between August 1975 and July 1976, reaching 2,400 TV sets directly for four hours daily. Meanwhile, Doordarshan set up TV stations in four cities: Delhi, Mumbai, Srinagar and Amritsar: by 1975, adding three more (Kolkata, Chennai, Jalandhar) within a year. Each centre broadcast its own mix of news, children’s and women’s programmes, farmers’ programmes and entertainment.
Q. Why did the book say print media did not decline in India despite the growth of television and the Internet? Give the two reasons.
Answer: Many feared television and the Internet would sideline print media, but in India circulation actually grew. Two reasons the book gives: (1) a rise in the number of literate people migrating to cities, who needed newspapers; (2) readers in small towns and villages had different needs from city readers, and Indian-language newspapers met these through district and block editions, as Malayala Manorama, Eenadu and the Dainik Bhaskar group all did.
Q. How did technology change newspaper production and the work of a reporter, as described in Box 7.10?
Answer: From the late 1980s/early 1990s, newspapers became fully automatic, from a reporter’s desk to the final page-proof, eliminating the use of paper: enabled by PCs networked over LANs and newsmaking software. A reporter’s older tools (shorthand notebook, pen, typewriter, plain telephone) were replaced by a mini digital recorder, laptop or PC, mobile or satellite phone, modem, dish and antenna. This let newspapers push deadlines to dawn and plan more editions, as shown by Amar Ujala’s network of about 100 reporters and photographers serving 13 editions across Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand.
Q. Describe how STAR TV localised its programming for the Indian market.
Answer: STAR Plus, originally an all-English general entertainment channel from Hong Kong, began broadcasting a Hindi-language belt of programmes between 7 and 9 PM from October 1996. By February 1999, it converted fully to a Hindi channel, moving all its English serials to STAR World, the network’s English international channel. The change was promoted with the Hinglish slogan ‘Aapki Boli. Aapka Plus Point’ (Butcher, 2003). STAR Sports and ESPN similarly offered a Hindi audio track, and larger players launched regional channels in Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi and Gujarati.
Q. What potential does the book see for FM radio’s future growth in India, and why?
Answer: The book sees enormous potential for using FM channels. Further privatisation of radio stations and the emergence of community-owned radio stations are expected to drive growth. Demand for local news is growing, and India’s trend of homes listening to FM reinforces a worldwide trend of local radio replacing large networks: a trend the story of Raghav FM Mansoorpur 1 (Box 7.14) illustrates in practice.
4 6-Mark Questions
Q. The chapter gives four reasons why the growth of mass media is of great interest to students of sociology. Explain all four.
Answer: Historical growth: Media’s structure and content are shaped by changes in the economic, political and socio-cultural context; the state dominated media in the early decades after Independence, while the market became central after 1990s globalisation.
A dialectical relationship: Media and society influence each other; the nature and role of media is shaped by the society it is located in, while media’s influence on society is equally far-reaching.
A formal organisation: Unlike ordinary communication, mass communication needs a formal structural organisation to meet large-scale capital, production and management demands, so the state and/or market always play a major role, and mass media functions through very large organisations with major investment and employees.
Unequal access: Different sections of people can use mass media with very different ease, connecting to the idea of the ‘digital divide.’
Q. Discuss the role of print media in India both during the freedom struggle and after Independence, until the declaration of Emergency.
Answer: During the freedom struggle: 19th century social reformers used newspapers and journals to write and debate; the nationalist press nurtured and channelised anti-colonial opinion, provoking colonial censorship (e.g. after the Ilbert Bill agitation, 1883). Papers like Kesari, Mathrubhumi and Amrita Bazar Patrika were persecuted by the colonial state for supporting the national movement but continued advocating for it.
After Independence: Print media continued as a partner in nation-building, taking up developmental issues and giving voice to the widest sections of people; journalism, once an underpaid ‘calling,’ gradually became a business enterprise (Box 7.6, on The Hindu’s own transformation).
The Emergency (1975-77): The gravest challenge the media faced was the declaration of Emergency in 1975 and the censorship that followed; the period ended and democracy, along with a free media, was restored in 1977.
Q. Describe the growth and expansion of Indian-language newspapers under globalisation, using the book’s own statistics.
Answer: Overall circulation growth: Average daily circulation grew from 39.1 million copies (2006) to 62.8 million copies (2016), a compound annual growth rate of 4.87%; the north zone grew fastest, at 7.83%, ahead of the south (4.95%), west (2.81%) and east (2.63%).
Leading dailies: By average qualifying sales (July-December 2016), Dainik Jagran (3.92 million) and Dainik Bhaskar (3.81 million) led the Hindi dailies (Source: Audit Bureau of Circulation, 2016-17).
The Eenadu example: Founder Ramoji Rao ran a chit-fund before launching the Telugu paper in 1974; associating with the anti-arrack movement in the mid-1980s helped it reach rural areas, and its 1989 ‘district dailies’ carried local news and classified ads; by 1998, it published from 10 towns in Andhra Pradesh, holding 70% of audited Telugu daily circulation.
Reasons for growth: A rise in literate rural-to-urban migrants (e.g. Delhi’s Hindustan edition, which grew from 64,000 to 425,000 copies between 2003 and 2005), and Indian-language papers’ district/block editions meeting local readers’ needs differently from national English dailies.
Q. “Television in India has changed enormously from Doordarshan’s early years to the age of globalisation.” Discuss with reference to both periods.
Answer: Doordarshan’s early years: TV began experimentally in 1959 for rural development; SITE (1975-76) reached rural viewers in six states; Doordarshan set up stations in four cities by 1975, adding three more within a year; colour broadcasting began during the 1982 Asian Games; hit soap operas Hum Log and Buniyaad, and epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, drew huge audiences and advertising revenue through the mid-to-late 1980s.
The age of globalisation: India went from 1 state-controlled channel (1991) to about 70 channels (1998); the 1991 Gulf War (popularising CNN) and the launch of Star-TV the same year, followed by Zee TV (1992), signalled the arrival of private satellite television; by 2000, 40 private cable/satellite channels existed, including regional ones; cable operators grew from 100 (1984) to about 60,000 (1999).
Localisation and today: Foreign channels localised content (e.g. STAR Plus’s Hindi conversion, 1996-99); by the book’s account (TRAI, 2015-16), India became the world’s second largest TV market after China, with entertainment TV producing a new class of superstars and formats like reality shows and 24×7 news.
5 Case Studies
(A) 1 mark In which state did this rescue operation take place?
Answer: Haryana.
(B) 2 marks Why does the book raise the idea of “voyeurism” in connection with this coverage?
Answer: Because two news channels ran continuous, exclusive live coverage of a child’s private ordeal for two days, including footage of him in distress and interviews of onlookers about their feelings: behaviour the book invites us to examine as a kind of peeping into someone else’s private, intimate moments, done to gain higher viewership.
(C) 3 marks What does this incident show about the relationship between television and public life in India?
Answer: It shows television’s power to create instant, nationwide emotional involvement: thousands gathered at the site, free community kitchens ran, and people were shown praying across different faiths: while also showing how competition among channels for exclusive coverage can turn a private family’s crisis into entertainment, raising real questions about where television’s positive role in highlighting events ends and intrusion into personal lives begins.