Markandey Katju inspires me to write this... Quite a cumbersome issue that has been rinsed, washed and dried too many times already, so instead of pulling out the dried aspects of the whole idea of socially responsible journalism, I'am going to share three stories, three little random events that provoked me to think.
The first one is an incident i happened to witness few days back. It was around 5pm on Monday and i was travelling from the university to my residence at koyambedu on a rickety public transport. It was a normal boring day, one which people associate with being a typical Monday, riddled with heavy traffic and over the top pollution. It was near NSK nagar stop that i noticed a lot of people craning their necks to get a good view of some event. What can possibly interest people grumbling their way back home from work? The sight i saw made my intestines curl into a tight knot. A man was being hacked to death by about 6 people in the middle of the road with about hundred people watching. As the bus moved on, i made a checklist in my mind to lookout for an article related to this gruesome event in the next day's newspaper, and on Tuesday to my disappointment, there was no account of the story in any of the leading publications. With a personal sense of guilt, one that comes with belonging to a community that has failed, i quizzed my HOD about this.His answer only sunk me deeper into the ocean of guilt. He said most journalists today only summarise stuff that they get out of the crime journals from the commissioner's office. This statement left me gaping at a huge hole in the system. A Fatal flaw. How can we be so insensitive and irresponsible about the way we cover news. After all the talk about journalism being a 'noble profession' and all the social good cliches we throw out to people, this kind of cubby hole journalism is unacceptable. It doesn't even make commercial sense. News is breaking and its breaking faster all around us. Social media has given the power to the end users to report, to break news faster than ever. That smoothly brings us to the second story. Osama Bin Laden was killed in a US air raid on May 2nd. Now, that's not the story. The story is how the news got viral. The first accounts were first posted by a Pakistani man residing in the area on twitter. within minutes it was re-tweeted several times and the media eventually picked it up. The lesson here is, we really need to embrace technology. We are no longer the sole content creators in the world. There is an army of Internet savvy people out there who can deliver the so called breaking news. Do we sit around and watch while new and disruptive media enters or do we embrace it and generate content faster, better and more social than ever before. It would be a grave injustice to our work, community and to the Indian public at large if we do not embrace these technologies.
The third story relates to the latest remarks made by Mr. Markandey Katju, the new chairman of the Press Council Of India. Without going into detail, he pointed out 4 key problems with the Indian media.
- Twisting facts. The journalists today are so monotonous in their work, they often dont do their basic duty of carrying out a research before the write something. they are careless and end up with vague worthless facts.
- Paid news. This seems to be continuing for generations. They make news with their pockets being filled. The social responsibility of a journalist is burnt alive with fire in the form of currency. We are here to protect the interests of the public and not to work as the puppets of big shots.
- Creating hype over Non-issues as Real issues. This has become a trend with Page3 parties on a hype. In a country like India we have a million things to worry about, our Government is sloppy, there is corruption everywhere, thousands of farmers commit suicide and various other socio-political issues which need to be looked into and make people aware of it, but we rather tend to project the kind of life the upper class is enjoying and more of the celebrity talks than the real issues.
- Tendency to brand. The media often tends to brand one particular community for all the misery that happens in our country. They do not look deep into any aspect of it, all they want is to create a hype, every news channel wants to break the news first and therefore they don't even look at the after effects of it they blindly believe all kinds of rumours and publicly announce that such an such party or person belonging to a particular religion has been the source behind such brutality. and there starts the next conflict between people belonging to various religions and so on.
To summarize , ours is a developing nation of around 1.2 billion people. It is mathematically impossible to have a news scarcity. But filtering through the hay stack, delivering the right facts and telling a compelling story is our duty. The duty to the nation, to our profession and to our community. If you have noticed, I have left all three stories without a conclusion. Let us together script the conclusions to the problems plaguing our profession. I'm hoping that the future generation of journalists will ponder over these problems and arrive at a sustainable solution for our future and to give these stories a happy ending or is it a happy renaissance!!
