London (PTI): Television news channels in India are obsessed with celebrity culture which centres on Bollywood while the three Cs - cinema, crime and cricket encapsulate most of their content, according to new book.

News content on Indian television channels has become hostage to the global spectre of infotainment as reflected in the "Bollywoodization" of the news culture, says Daya K Thussu, professor at the University of Westminster.

In his book titled "News as Entertainment: The Rise of Global Infotainment", Thussu looks at the rise of infotainment - the merging of information and entertainment - across the globe.

"The three Cs - cinema, crime and cricket - encapsulate most of the content on Indian television news programmes. The three Cs are indicative of a television news culture that is increasingly becoming hostage to infotainment," he writes.

Thussu adds that the growing tabloidization of television news reflected the influence of the Rupert Murdoch effect on news and current affairs television in India.

It can be argued, he writes, that the ideological imperatives of infotainment were debasing the quality of public deliberations in the world's largest democracy.

In a separate chapter titled "Indian infotainment: the Bollywoodization of TV news," Thussu traces the history of the growth of television in India, and notes that Indian television news now demonstrated a global trend towards infotainment.