The extant scholarship of media ownership, largely drawn from Anglo-Saxon studies, focuses on how corporate excesses translate to abuses of the public interest goal of journalism, paying less attention to ‘political instrumentalism’. This research aims to study how the complex interplay of business and political instrumentalism influences editorial policies in diversely owned, regional and national news media through a case study of commercially run newspapers’ coverage of anti-industrialization protests in the East Indian city of Kolkata. Through political–economic critiques and thematic analysis of newspaper articles and qualitative interviews, this research asserts the importance of the role of the ‘proprietor-editor’ and the binaries of regional/ national newspaper markets in the interplay of business and political instrumentalism in diversely owned news media.