Media of late............

When I was a child I used to maintain a list of people whom I could term 'good'. The major factor that determined this classification was the movies I watched at that time. Guess who was on the top of the list...editor of any newspaper. It hardly mattered who. After 15 years of input from this world, my idea of editors and massmedia in general took a u-turn, heroes no longer remained heroes, 'good' were not even 'normal'. Ironically, even now it doesn't matter 'who'.

"Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the US media "
-- Noam Chomsky.

The startling point is that in Indian context these words had begun to take shape even before anyone realized. What is more startling is the rate at which the Indian media has started to assimilate the 'tricks' of the west and the sincerity with which these have been applied. A typical metropolitan Indian roughly leads the life of a Newyorker,thirty years before his time. The gap is closing in at a pretty handsome rate but it is nowhere comparable to that between the western and Indian media. Long live globalization.

When chomsky speaks of 'obedience' he was largely referring to the obedience to the government and its men. Trying to draw an analogy, we soon realize that there is a very complex machinery in place, logistics of which are really hard to understand. The word uniformity has a different meaning here. Its not the uniformity of action but the uniformity of the purpose. The purpose being, benefit of an individual,organisation or sect. There is no common benefactor except a common victim, the people. The point of conern is not that Media as a responsible constituent of the society has seized to exist but that it has transformed itself into a monster that eats its own kin when its hungry. The sad part of this transformation is that the media monster's apetite is never satisfied.

How else would someone justify the criticism of the president of India on the office of profit bill, the opposition to the striking doctors against reservation, the front page coverage of raakhi sawanth's cleavage show, the undue importance to the page three parties, the crime serials with actors enacting the crime as if oral description would fall short of providing support for a fresh plan, the callousness with which opinions are sought from families affected by crime,accident etc...,the making and breaking of celebrities and intervention in their personal space,the portrayal of obscenity in the name of despising it, the craving for sensationalism, the misinterpretation of facts and history, the liberty with which news is manufactured and dumped over people...the list only goes on.

Whether each of the above mentioned issues is bad is a matter of opinion and many might have reservations against calling a few or most of them faults, yet I will. Every rational indian knows the real motive behind the office of profit bill. In this context 'honouring the cabinet and parliament' which nolonger command any 'honour' so important that the editor of a leading newspaper was willing to criticise a perfectly sincere, constitution-compliant action by a respected man to restore faith of the commonman in democracy. It seems even the court has taken for granted the politicians of this country to be callous,obdurate swindlers that it does not expect anything from them. Thus providing the opportunity for the media ( puppet in the hands of political parties) to lay the onus on the doctors fighting for their rights. Is public health not as much a responsibility of the government as it is of the doctors? Why hasn't any newspaper questioned the double-game (no written assurance and no fresh caste census) and caste politics in staright terms? There might be a few instances where some direct questions have been fired at the government but these have been washed away in the current of criticism and analysis. Isn't truth above everything else?

Newspaper was born out of the man's urge to know about the world arround him. With passage of time the purpose for which it was meant also took different meanings. People started seeing it as food to both their knowledge and intellect. As the options increased, the second factor gained significance in determining their choice. The first few generations of media-men were men of honour who held social responsibility above personal interest. They were men, who fought and won freedom of press, who championed the people's rights and their own, who made media a saviour ( true, media's role in any revolution in the world cannot be undermined) . Sadly now a days, this popular belief is working against the people.By blindly believing the stuff he reads the commonman is falling prey to the politicians' and other organisations' trap. Already most of the population of this country is oblivious to others' problems and if this trend continues they will turn oblivious to their own problems (many of them not even knowing that they have been deprived of their rights). It is high time the media realise that, by poisoning their minds with mis-interpreted facts and cooked-up stories, by killing their intellect with steady feed of useless information, by mis-directing people's energy they are destroying the very base on which they stand.

P.S: Though I have added the quote by Noam Chomsky I haven't yet read his popular book about media- "Manufacturing Consent". Hopefully I can add more to this and to my own knowledge when I read the book.