CHAITANYA KALBAG - Has the media lost the plot?
It was a year bracketed by the Delhi gangrape and the Tehelka train wreck, and you would be hard put to find another period since our colonial masters departed when journalism was in worse odour in India. It is not just the mediocrity of information assaulting us that is of concern; it is also the titillation, ignorance and bias to which our attention-deficit audiences are subjected. Every sensation is momentary and can obliterate objectivity, balance, common sense before we move to the next bit of Broken News. Sober inquiry is rare, and rarer still is level-headed follow-up.
Even when our media “adopts” a seemingly just cause, as in the Nirbhaya case, the embrace is overpowering and even menacing. As much in that story as in the hysteria over the Tarun Tejpal episode, or the Aarushi murder verdict, or at year’s end the Khobragade ‘humiliation’ in New York, we have been assailed by the certitude of media judgement. Woe betide the person who comes under attack via Twitter and Facebook—the explosion of vitriol is so frightening that it obscures temperate discussion, demolishes privacy and destroys reputations.
Social media is now anti-social blunderbuss, and the hash-tag is a marker for slander and defamation. Well-written and edited reportage backed by facts and solid research is the exception. Instead, we have opinion and commentary masquerading as journalism on the front pages of our most powerful newspapers and on our most-watched TV news programmes. India’s millions teem in silence; we are told what is worth knowing by the shouting, bullying “anchor” or the front-page editor who delights in tabloid puns and crass wit. There is good news, but it has to be teased out. At one media group, editors had to be ordered to play up at least one good news story a day.
India’s media economics is topsy-turvy. The tyranny of TRPs and carriage fees and the hanging sword of a cap on advertising of 12 minutes an hour have made our television stations uneconomical. On the print side, the Indian Readership Survey is reinventing itself under fire from angry publishers. At the same time, recession-hit businesses have slashed ad budgets and caused thinner newspapers and magazines. Across the spectrum, newsgathering budgets have shrunk, with little or no travel in search of better stories. We boast that India is a major player on the world stage, but our journalism is extremely parochial and our worldview uninformed and half-baked. The Hindu is the only newspaper with a respectable network of overseas correspondents. But its owners recently carried out a putsch against its editor. Indeed, several professional editors bit the dust in 2013. They had few mourners.
Three major trends stand out from this bleak landscape—media ownership, government regulation and the abysmal state of journalism training. Some of the nation’s most powerful media conglomerates are now controlled by powerful business conglomerates. It’s no longer blasphemous to talk about the business of journalism. The profit imperative means that these conglomerates, with formidable print, television and digital footprints, censor or distort what you read, view or click on. “Private treaties”, the practice of bartering ad space for equity in a company, are now common in major media companies. Meanwhile, the besieged government is flailing at its media tormentors with a vigour that may not stop with the general election. It has squeezed its advertising, putting a chokehold in particular on the vernacular and small-town media. The information minister even suggested that journalists be licensed through a qualifying examination like lawyers or accountants. And the government is proposing amendments to the Press and Registration of Books Act which among other things lays down that media titles pronounced guilty of disseminating paid news three times by the Press Council be closed. Journalists nationwide are a sorry lot..
read more:
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?288986
Even when our media “adopts” a seemingly just cause, as in the Nirbhaya case, the embrace is overpowering and even menacing. As much in that story as in the hysteria over the Tarun Tejpal episode, or the Aarushi murder verdict, or at year’s end the Khobragade ‘humiliation’ in New York, we have been assailed by the certitude of media judgement. Woe betide the person who comes under attack via Twitter and Facebook—the explosion of vitriol is so frightening that it obscures temperate discussion, demolishes privacy and destroys reputations.
Social media is now anti-social blunderbuss, and the hash-tag is a marker for slander and defamation. Well-written and edited reportage backed by facts and solid research is the exception. Instead, we have opinion and commentary masquerading as journalism on the front pages of our most powerful newspapers and on our most-watched TV news programmes. India’s millions teem in silence; we are told what is worth knowing by the shouting, bullying “anchor” or the front-page editor who delights in tabloid puns and crass wit. There is good news, but it has to be teased out. At one media group, editors had to be ordered to play up at least one good news story a day.
India’s media economics is topsy-turvy. The tyranny of TRPs and carriage fees and the hanging sword of a cap on advertising of 12 minutes an hour have made our television stations uneconomical. On the print side, the Indian Readership Survey is reinventing itself under fire from angry publishers. At the same time, recession-hit businesses have slashed ad budgets and caused thinner newspapers and magazines. Across the spectrum, newsgathering budgets have shrunk, with little or no travel in search of better stories. We boast that India is a major player on the world stage, but our journalism is extremely parochial and our worldview uninformed and half-baked. The Hindu is the only newspaper with a respectable network of overseas correspondents. But its owners recently carried out a putsch against its editor. Indeed, several professional editors bit the dust in 2013. They had few mourners.
Three major trends stand out from this bleak landscape—media ownership, government regulation and the abysmal state of journalism training. Some of the nation’s most powerful media conglomerates are now controlled by powerful business conglomerates. It’s no longer blasphemous to talk about the business of journalism. The profit imperative means that these conglomerates, with formidable print, television and digital footprints, censor or distort what you read, view or click on. “Private treaties”, the practice of bartering ad space for equity in a company, are now common in major media companies. Meanwhile, the besieged government is flailing at its media tormentors with a vigour that may not stop with the general election. It has squeezed its advertising, putting a chokehold in particular on the vernacular and small-town media. The information minister even suggested that journalists be licensed through a qualifying examination like lawyers or accountants. And the government is proposing amendments to the Press and Registration of Books Act which among other things lays down that media titles pronounced guilty of disseminating paid news three times by the Press Council be closed. Journalists nationwide are a sorry lot..
read more:
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?288986
