Opinion - Letters to the Editor   

Meaning of news

The article “The meaning of news and getting it right” (March 18) has discussed a very pertinent issue — whether media professionals have the licence to invade the privacy of individuals in the name of detailed inquiry. We in India seem to be headed the Western way with the media jostling for viewer/reader attention through sensationalism. It is important for us to assert that people are not commodities to be marketed. The media should draw the line and decide where the public interest ends and private space begins.

Zehra Naqvi,

Aligarh

The points raised in the article are as relevant in the electronic media-saturated India as in Britain. The media justify intrusion into privacy by advancing the objectivity argument. However, as many studies have revealed, news is only a construct, a discourse that is shaped as much by context as point of view from which the context is observed. News is never objective; all that credible journalists can do is to report it objectively.

K. Parameswaran,

Coimbatore

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