The Narendra Modi government is spending high on advertisements in states not governed by the BJP, and a lot of these funds are going to newspapers which publish content aligned with the party.
Consider the example of poll-bound Rajasthan, where the centre has spent Rs 180 crore on ad money between April 2015 and July this year, as per data from the Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity, the nodal agency for central government ads. And the five newspapers which received the lion’s share of these funds – about Rs 44.24 crore during this period – either carry plagiarised or pro-BJP content, or have marginal circulation.
