The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Focus on human issues, media urged

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Sunday, Jun 29, 2008
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Focus on human issues, media urged

Special Correspondent

Ananthamurthy criticises TV channels for coverage of crime-related issues

BANGALORE: Jnanpith Award-winner writer U. R. Ananthamurthy has said that media focus should be on the sensitive human issues and not on murky aspects while covering crime related events.

He was releasing the book Shabdadolagana Nishhabda, a collection of detective stories, authored by D. Palakshaiah, a police officer here on Saturday. The electronic channels had been competing with each other in “making sound” on humanly and socially consequential crime-related issues. Crime-related programmes on the television channels would make the regular viewers fearless and aspire for something more in the course of viewing. Such issues should be covered in the larger interest of humanity and not with vested interests.

When a person committed suicide in a conspiring situation at a faraway place, the media focus should have been on the human pains and predicament, Dr. Murthy said.

Quoting incidents from the Russian author Fyodor Dostovsky’s epoch-making novel Crime and Punishment, Dr. Murthy said that in the context of the unfathomable depth of the human constitution, both crime and detection had their ethical problems as detection of crime or designs of crime would demand an identical thinking pattern.

Balakrishna Kakatkar, journalist and television programme producer, said the book could be prescribed as a text for police courses as there was dearth of texts on criminology in Kannada.

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