Fighting shy of the issue
HYPE Abhishek and Aishwarya
The detailed television and print media coverage of the engagement of Abhishek Bachchan-Aishwarya Rai has saddened many who still believe media to be a powerful tool of social change. It won't be wrong to say that Indian media is one of the most free worldwide. Over the years, it has grown, giving us many investigative reports, breaking news and human interest stories, often becoming a bridge between the people and the system. Most times, a platform for redressal too.
Forked out
But lately, the Indian media seems to have stopped growing. Or it is rather appropriate to say that it has forked from an issue-based, people-centric journalism to tabloid reportage where news needs entertainment value, where words like development, agrarian crisis, tradition, customs and culture are expressions without much meaning.
Instead, bedroom manners, office romances, photographs of semi-nude models are the norm. And with the entry of news channels often at war with each other for ratings, the trend is getting murkier. In the hunt for breaking news every hour, the most mundane thing has entered the category of `breaking news'. Apart from truth being the first casualty, the disturbing trend includes subjectivity, inaccuracy and convenient forgetfulness. Not to mention that the television studios often become courtrooms, methods get mixed up with morals during innumerable sting operations.
The media is always after personalities, leaving aside issues affecting the common man.
A case in point was the Pramod Mahajan murder. Recently, it is obsessed with the marriage of Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai and Liz Hurley and Arun Nayar. In a democracy, freedom of the press is an institution for public good.
Guidelines ignored
The Press Council of India was set up as a watchdog. But there are a number of instances when the council issued guidelines which were treated with contempt by media houses.
In this era of super capitalism, the lever of control has been transferred from the hands of the editors to the marketing gurus for whom all that matters is competition and more and more business. Means don't matter, only the end does.
So in the process of profit making, no wonder it is becoming increasingly insensitive.
It is high time Parliament gave punitive powers to the Press Council of India to deal with media irresponsibility. The Indian media must introspect and rediscover the past. Remember the glorious role it played during the pre-independence era. And stay away from battles in television studios.
HASHIM KIDWAI
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