The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Speakers: media must regulate itself

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Sunday, Aug 26, 2007
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Karnataka - Bangalore

Speakers: media must regulate itself

Staff Reporter

Bangalore: The media should impose self-censorship before the Government decides to bring in restrictions in the name of regulations, said speakers at a seminar on Saturday on Media and Terror: A critical look.

The seminar was held at the Indian Institute of Journalism and New Media (IIJNM). The speakers included personalities from television and print media, and a rights activist lawyer.

In the effort to catch up with competition, television tends to lay less emphasis on facts and more on drama, according to Vidya Shankar Aiyar, Senior Editor, CNN-IBN.

Media organisations were to blame for the fact that the Government wanted to introduce the Broadcast Bill, he said. Whether it was the Haneef case, or Sanjay Dutt, the media hyped what was popular without much research, he added, primarily because television had no time for research.

The media, he pointed out, needed to give credibility to its audience, and needed to maintain a sense of integrity. The temptation to bow to TRP ratings was great, he added, but the editorial and the marketing departments needed to work together to ensure credibility.

Vivek Narayan, Output Editor, Times Now, agreed that the media should impose self-censorship. The worldview of terrorism had changed since September 11, 2001, he said, adding that defining a terrorist was a difficult job because one man’s patriot was the other’s terrorist.

R. Shankar, Resident Editor, Indian Express, Karnataka and Kerala, explained how television was driving newspaper headlines today. Newspapers were under pressure to publish news shown on television, even if it did not merit space, and was simply differently packaged. The concerns for print today were lack of research, television exclusives and one-sided information from only one kind of sources, he said.

Human rights lawyer B.T. Venkatesh explained how the media carried stories from “informed” sources when they got no information at all from credible sources. Using the Haneef and Kafeel cases as examples, he said that the families had stories to tell, but no media organisation was willing to tell them. Media, he added, only wanted to tell stories they wanted to.

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