The `communicative architecture' routinely organizing and delivering television news in India, as with television news internationally, exhibits far more complexity than conventional discourse and framing approaches to news study have thus far acknowledged or explored. The article argues that these communicative structures have direct bearing on debates about `democracy' in India's diverse and fractious polity. Drawing on wider positions of contemporary social and political theory, it is demonstrated how the `communicative frames' deployed by Indian broadcasters are consequential for the public deliberation and display of conflicts and cultures and we systematically compare these with the communicative frames deployed by television news in five other countries. The article identifies, maps and pursues into the production domain the repertoire of `communicative frames' characterizing Indian television news today and reveals important differences between the public broadcaster Doordarshan and the private network NDTV 24 7 as well as between Indian television news and television news internationally. On this basis, the study considers how the structures of television news communicatively and differentially embed `democracy